GRE Verbal Practice Test 14 (with Answers)

Text Completion

Questions 1–5.

1 Semmelweis's insistence that doctors wash their hands was by many of his colleagues, who resented the suggestion that they themselves spread disease.

2 Early anaesthetics were far from ; doses that sedated one patient might prove fatal to another.

3 The discovery of penicillin was partly (i) : Fleming noticed that mould had (ii) contaminated a culture dish he had left uncovered.

4 Although the remedy had no proven benefit, its popularity proved remarkably , persisting for more than two centuries.

5 The physician's notes were so that historians have been able to reconstruct the course of the epidemic almost day by day.

Sentence Equivalence

Questions 6–10. Select the TWO correct answer choices.

Reading Comprehension — Passage 1

Questions 11–15 are based on the passage below.

For centuries, European physicians explained disease through the theory of the four humours, according to which health depended on a balance between blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Illness was interpreted as an excess or deficiency of one humour, and treatments such as bloodletting and purging were designed to restore equilibrium. Modern readers often dismiss humoral medicine as mere superstition, but historians caution against this judgement.

Within its own framework, humoral theory was systematic and internally consistent, and it encouraged physicians to observe patients closely, record changes in symptoms and consider diet, sleep and environment. Its decline in the nineteenth century resulted less from any single discovery than from an accumulation of evidence — from anatomy, from statistics showing that bloodletting increased mortality, and ultimately from the germ theory of disease, which offered a more powerful explanation of infection.

📚 Glossary · কঠিন শব্দের অর্থ

Word	বাংলা অর্থ	English meaning
humours	দেহরস	four bodily fluids once thought to control health
equilibrium	ভারসাম্য	a state of balance
mortality	মৃত্যুহার	the rate of death

Reading Comprehension — Passage 2

Questions 16–20 are based on the passage below.

The randomised controlled trial, now regarded as the gold standard of medical evidence, is a surprisingly recent invention. Although physicians had occasionally compared treatments before, the 1948 trial of streptomycin for tuberculosis is widely cited as the first modern example, because patients were assigned to treatment or control groups by chance rather than by the doctors' judgement. Random assignment matters because doctors, however well-intentioned, may unconsciously give a promising new treatment to patients who seem more likely to recover, making the treatment appear more effective than it is.

Randomised trials are not without limitations. They are expensive and slow, and they often exclude elderly patients or those with several conditions, so their results may not apply to the people who most need treatment. For some questions, such as the long-term effects of smoking, deliberately assigning people to a harmful exposure would be unethical, and researchers must rely instead on observational studies.

📚 Glossary · কঠিন শব্দের অর্থ

Word	বাংলা অর্থ	English meaning
randomised	দৈবচয়িত	assigned by chance
streptomycin	স্ট্রেপটোমাইসিন	an early antibiotic
observational	পর্যবেক্ষণমূলক	based on watching rather than intervening