Practice test 5

Language Proficiency 3
Identification of Errors. In each sentence are four underlined words or phrases. On your answer sheet, shade
the letter that corresponds to the word or phrase that is incorrect. If there is no error, shade E.

1. My parents went to Japan for a business trip, so I had to look over my younger sister while they were
A B C
gone. No error.
D E
2. According to one survey, the majority of voters in this year's election is unlikely to support the Senator's
A B C D
reelection. No error.
E
3. The commencement speaker's inspirational words could not have rang truer for the graduates. No error.
A B C D E

4. Everyone in the audience was reminded to switch their mobile phone to silent mode. No error.
A B C D E

5. The chef insists that we visit Kawa Sushi, a quaint Japanese restaurant located in the corner of
A B C
Piccadilly Street and Richmond Street in London. No error.
D E

Verbal Reasoning. Find the word that names a necessary part of the underlined word.

6. silt 8. vogue 10. agility

A. mountain A. exemplary A. dexterity
B. room B. manner B. operation
C. storage C. popular C. state
D. vehicle D. vintage D. stiffness
E. pothole E. clothing E. gaucheness

7. transition 9. dearth
A. direction A. abundance
B. point B. chamber
C. shift C. scarcity
D. stagnation D. soil
E. phase E. drought

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 Practice test 5

Critical Analysis
Read each selection carefully. Encircle the letter of the best answer to each question that follows.

Passage 1

“Then even you don't believe in God?” said Ivan, with a smile of hatred.
“What can I say?
—that is, if you are in earnest—”
“Is there a God or not?” Ivan cried with the same savage intensity.
“Ah, then you are in earnest! My dear fellow, upon my word I don't know. There! I've said it now!”
“You don't know, but you see God? No, you are not someone apart, you are myself, you are I and nothing more!
You are rubbish, you are my fancy!”
“Well, if you like, I have the same philosophy as you, that would be true. Je pense, donc je suis, I know that for a
fact; all the rest, all these worlds, God and even Satan—all that is not proved, to my mind. Does all that exist of
itself, or is it only an emanation of myself, a logical development of my ego which alone has existed for ever: but I
make haste to stop, for I believe you will be jumping up to beat me directly.”
“You'd better tell me some anecdote!” said Ivan miserably.
“There is an anecdote precisely on our subject, or rather a legend, not an anecdote. You reproach me with unbelief,
you see, you say, yet you don't believe. But, my dear fellow, I am not the only one like that. We are all in a muddle
over there now and all through your science. Once there used to be atoms, five senses, four elements, and then
everything hung together somehow. There were atoms in the ancient world even, but since we've learned that
you've discovered the chemical molecule and protoplasm and the devil knows what, we had to lower our crest.
There's a regular muddle, and, above all, superstition, scandal; there's as much scandal among us as among you,
you know; a little more in fact, and spying, indeed, for we have our secret police department where private
information is received. Well, this wild legend belongs to our middle ages—not yours, but ours—and no one believes
it even among us, except the old ladies of eighteen stone, not your old ladies I mean, but ours. We've everything
you have, I am revealing one of our secrets out of friendship for you; though it's forbidden. This legend is about
Paradise. There was, they say, here on earth a thinker and philosopher. He rejected everything, ‘laws, conscience,
faith,’ and, above all, the future life. He died; he expected to go straight to darkness and death and he found a future
life before him. He was astounded and indignant. ‘This is against my principles!’ he said. And he was punished for
that ... that is, you must excuse me, I am just repeating what I heard myself, it's only a legend ... he was sentenced
to walk a quadrillion kilometers in the dark (we've adopted the metric system, you know) and when he has finished
that quadrillion, the gates of heaven would be opened to him and he'll be forgiven—”
“And what tortures have you in the other world besides the quadrillion kilometers?” asked Ivan, with a strange
eagerness.
“What tortures? Ah, don't ask. In old days we had all sorts, but now they have taken chiefly to moral punishments—
‘the stings of conscience’ and all that nonsense. We got that, too, from you, from the softening of your manners.
And who's the better for it? Only those who have got no conscience, for how can they be tortured by conscience
when they have none? But decent people who have conscience and a sense of honor suffer for it. Reforms, when
the ground has not been prepared for them, especially if they are institutions copied from abroad, do nothing but
mischief! The ancient fire was better. Well, this man, who was condemned to the quadrillion kilometers, stood still,
looked round and lay down across the road. ‘I won't go, I refuse on principle!’ Take the soul of an enlightened
Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked for three days and nights in the belly of
the whale, and you get the character of that thinker who lay across the road.”
“What did he lie on there?”
“Well, I suppose there was something to lie on. You are not laughing?”
“Bravo!” cried Ivan, still with the same strange eagerness. Now he was listening with an unexpected curiosity.

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 Practice test 5
“Well, is he lying there now?”
“That's the point, that he isn't. He lay there almost a thousand years and then he got up and went on.”
“What an ass!” cried Ivan, laughing nervously and still seeming to be pondering something intently.
“Does it make any difference whether he lies there for ever or walks the quadrillion kilometers? It would take a billion
years to walk it?”
“Much more than that. I haven't got a pencil and paper or I could work it out. But he got there long ago, and that's
where the story begins.”
“What, he got there? But how did he get the billion years to do it?”
“Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why,
it's become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again ‘the water above the
firmament,’ then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth—and the same sequence may
have been repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably tedious—”
“Well, well, what happened when he arrived?”
“Why, the moment the gates of Paradise were open and he walked in, before he had been there two seconds, by
his watch (though to my thinking his watch must have long dissolved into its elements on the way), he cried out that
those two seconds were worth walking not a quadrillion kilometers but a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to the
quadrillionth power! In fact, he sang ‘hosannah’ and overdid it so, that some persons there of lofty ideas wouldn't
shake hands with him at first—he'd become too rapidly reactionary, they said. The Russian temperament. I repeat,
it's a legend. I give it for what it's worth. So that's the sort of ideas we have on such subjects even now.”
“I've caught you!” Ivan cried, with an almost childish delight, as though he had succeeded in remembering
something at last. “That anecdote about the quadrillion years, I made up myself! I was seventeen then, I was at
the high school. I made up that anecdote and told it to a schoolfellow called Korovkin, it was at Moscow.... The
anecdote is so characteristic that I couldn't have taken it from anywhere. I thought I'd forgotten it ... but I've
unconsciously recalled it—I recalled it myself—it was not you telling it! Thousands of things are unconsciously
remembered like that even when people are being taken to execution ... it's come back to me in a dream. You are
that dream! You are a dream, not a living creature!”
Source: Excerpt from The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky

1. The following statements about Ivan can be 4. Which of the following statements about the final
inferred from the passage EXCEPT _____. paragraph of the passage is accurate?
A. He is interested in philosophy A. Ivan and his companion are hallucinating
B. He is hounded by a secret guilt simultaneously.
C. He is losing his sense of reality B. Ivan is making up memories in order to
D. He is fond of legends and stories irritate his companion.
E. He is suffering from religious doubts C. Ivan is relieved to discover that he once
knew a boy named Korovkin.
2. Ivan’s attitude towards his companion is one of
D. Ivan and his companion succeeded in their
_____.
experiment in hypnosis.
A. admiration
E. Ivan is delighted to recall the anecdote
B. contempt
because it means he is still sane.
C. indifference
D. pomposity
5. The anecdote of the man who walked a
E. resignation
quadrillion kilometers is meant to illustrate the
3. Ivan is most likely a __________. nature of ___________.
A. carpenter A. God’s love
B. farmer B. ethereal joy
C. fisherman C. life in purgatory
D. writer D. sinners everywhere
E. tax collector E. useless repentance
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 Practice test 5
Passage 2

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help himself with his hands and his head.
With him is no miracle and no magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in
money and in troops, and a very consistent and wise master-workman. He is never weak and literary, but acts
with the solidity and the precision of natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with things.
Men give way before such a man, as before natural events. To be sure there are men enough who are immersed
in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors, and mechanics generally; and we know how real and solid such men appear
in the presence of scholars and grammarians: but these men ordinarily lack the power of arrangement, and are
like hands without a head.
But Bonaparte superadded to this mineral and animal force, insight and generalization, so that men saw in him
combined the natural and the intellectual power, as if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher.
Therefore the land and sea seem to presuppose him. He came unto his own and they received him. This
ciphering operative knows what he is working with and what is the product. He knew the properties of gold and
iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and diplomatists, and required that each should do after its kind.
The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arithmetic. It consisted, according to him, in having always
more forces than the enemy, on the point where the enemy is attacked, or where he attacks: and his whole talent
is strained by endless manoeuvre and evolution, to march always on the enemy at an angle, and destroy his
forces in detail. It is obvious that a very small force, skilfully and rapidly manoeuvring so as always to bring two
men against one at the point of engagement, will be an overmatch for a much larger body of men.
The times, his constitution and his early circumstances combined to develop this pattern democrat. He had the
virtues of his class and the conditions for their activity. That common-sense which no sooner respects any end
than it finds the means to effect it; the delight in the use of means; in the choice, simplification and combining of
means; the directness and thoroughness of his work; the prudence with which all was seen and the energy with
which all was done, make him the natural organ and head of what I may almost call, from its extent, the modern
party.
Nature must have far the greatest share in every success, and so in his. Such a man was wanted, and such a
man was born; a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, of going
many days together without rest or food except by snatches, and with the speed and spring of a tiger in action; a
man not embarrassed by any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer
itself to be baulked or misled by any pretences of others, or any superstition or any heat or haste of his own. "My
hand of iron," he said, "was not at the extremity of my arm, it was immediately connected with my head."
Source: Excerpt from Napoleon: Man of the World in Representative Men
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

6. The next paragraph of the passage would most 8. By pretence, the author means ________.
likely be about how Napoleon Bonaparte _____. A. conspiracy
A. spent his youth in Corsica B. deceit
B. won the battle of Austerlitz C. mischief
C. conquered the Third Coalition D. verbal attack
D. seduced many French women E. secret grievance
E. saw himself as a child of destiny 9. The passage is most likely lifted from a ______.
7. The purpose of the passage is to ______. A. news journal
A. compare Napoleon Bonaparte to other B. political essay
despots C. rhetorical textbook
B. warn future generations of ambitious people D. collection of poetry
in general E. biographical sketch
C. explain the true character of Napoleon 10. The attitude of the author towards the subject of
Bonaparte his passage is __________.
D. illustrate the different vices of Napoleon A. bewildered
Bonaparte B. cheerful
E. prove that military leaders are useless in C. critical
times of peace D. disconsolate
E. exuberant

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 Practice test 5

Life Skills
There are no correct answers to the following questions. These questions test your decision-making skills when
faced with out-of-ordinary but possible situations in your life.

1. What would you do in case your professor in college gave an assigned reading that you honestly could not
understand no matter how hard you tried?

2. You have just graduated and are offered a job at a prestigious company, with high pay and great benefits; at
the same time, you are accepted to the university of your dreams on a full scholarship. Which would you
choose?
A. The job
B. The scholarship
C. Whatever my parents want
D. Whatever my best friend/most of my friends will be doing

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