GRE Verbal Practice Test 17 (with Answers)

Text Completion

Questions 1–5.

1 Wegener's theory of continental drift was initially greeted with , largely because he could not explain what force might move entire continents.

2 The canyon's layered walls provide an unusually record of geological history, preserving nearly two billion years of sediment.

3 Geological change is usually (i) , occurring over millions of years, but some events, such as volcanic eruptions, can reshape a landscape (ii) .

4 Because the mineral is so , it is used in industrial cutting tools that must slice through steel.

5 The earthquake's timing was not entirely ; seismologists had warned for years that stress was accumulating along the fault.

Sentence Equivalence

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

Reading Comprehension — Passage 1

Questions 11–15 are based on the passage below.

The theory of plate tectonics, which holds that the Earth's outer shell is divided into moving plates, became accepted only in the 1960s, half a century after Alfred Wegener first proposed that continents drift. Wegener had assembled impressive evidence: the coastlines of South America and Africa fit together like puzzle pieces, and identical fossils and rock formations appear on continents now separated by oceans. His critics, however, pointed out that solid continents could not plough through the solid ocean floor.

The breakthrough came from the ocean floor itself. Mapping in the 1950s revealed enormous underwater mountain ranges, and magnetic surveys showed symmetrical stripes of rock on either side of them, recording reversals of the Earth's magnetic field. These stripes indicated that new crust was forming at the ridges and spreading outward. The continents, it turned out, did not plough through the ocean floor; they rode along with it.

📚 Glossary · কঠিন শব্দের অর্থ

Word	বাংলা অর্থ	English meaning
plough	চাষ করে ঠেলে যাওয়া	push forcefully through
symmetrical	প্রতিসম	the same on both sides
reversals	উল্টে যাওয়া	changes to the opposite direction

Reading Comprehension — Passage 2

Questions 16–20 are based on the passage below.

The term "Anthropocene" has been proposed for a new geological epoch defined by human influence on the planet. Advocates point to signals that future geologists could detect in rock layers: a spike in radioactive isotopes from nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s, widespread particles of plastic and concrete, and a sharp rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Such markers, they argue, are as distinctive as those used to define earlier epochs.

Opponents raise both scientific and conceptual objections. Geological epochs usually span tens of thousands to millions of years, and some geologists question whether a few decades of change can be meaningfully compared with them. Others worry that the term has become more political than scientific, used to draw attention to environmental damage rather than to describe rock strata. In 2024, a committee of geologists voted against formally adding the Anthropocene to the geological time scale, although the term remains widely used in other disciplines.

📚 Glossary · কঠিন শব্দের অর্থ

Word	বাংলা অর্থ	English meaning
epoch	যুগ	a long division of geological time
isotopes	আইসোটোপ	forms of an element with different masses
strata	স্তরসমূহ	layers of rock