GRE Reading Comprehension: Logical Structure

Historians long held that the textile cooperatives of early-twentieth-century Catalonia owed their survival to robust regional banking networks. Recent archival work by Fei Liu has complicated this picture. Liu shows that several cooperatives in the Vallès region survived not because of banking access but because of an informal credit system among member families that predated the cooperatives themselves. Skeptics object that Liu's sample is small — only eleven cooperatives — and that the Vallès region was atypical in its density of kinship ties. Liu concedes the sample's limits but argues that the kinship-credit pattern she documents appears, in attenuated form, in cooperatives elsewhere in Catalonia. The traditional banking-centric account, she suggests, was not so much wrong as incomplete.

The author refers to the size of Liu's sample ("only eleven cooperatives") primarily in order to

• A demonstrate that Liu's conclusions cannot be accepted by historians of Catalan cooperatives
• B present an objection to Liu's argument that the passage will go on to address ✓ Correct
• C explain why the traditional banking-centric account remained dominant for so long
• D establish the methodological framework Liu used to select her cases
• E support the author's view that informal credit systems were limited to the Vallès region

Marine biologist Anders Holm has proposed that the foraging precision of the bluestripe wrasse depends on a previously overlooked sensory channel: detection of weak electric fields generated by buried prey. Holm's laboratory experiments showed that wrasses deprived of visual and chemical cues still located buried shrimp at rates well above chance. Critics have noted, reasonably, that laboratory tanks compress distances in ways that may exaggerate the apparent role of electroreception. Holm's more recent fieldwork in the Sulawesi shallows, however, finds the same above-chance success in open water — though admittedly with effect sizes roughly half those observed in the tank. Whether this attenuation reflects a genuine weakening of the electroreceptive signal in open water or merely the difficulty of running controlled trials at sea remains, for now, an open question.

The function of the final sentence of the passage is to

• A concede that Holm's hypothesis has been decisively refuted by the field data
• B propose a new experimental method for resolving the dispute about electroreception
• C acknowledge an unresolved ambiguity in the interpretation of Holm's field results ✓ Correct
• D summarize the central disagreement between Holm and his critics
• E introduce a third hypothesis the author will go on to defend

The standard view of nineteenth-century New England town meetings emphasizes their participatory egalitarianism. Drawing on tax rolls and meeting minutes from four Worcester County towns, the political historian Pia Vaszary has argued that this picture obscures a more troubling reality: a small group of propertied men set most agendas before meetings even convened. Vaszary is careful to note that her sample, while detailed, covers only a single county over two decades. She does not claim that her conclusions extend automatically to other regions or periods. Yet the agenda-setting mechanism she identifies — informal pre-meeting consultations among major landholders — is documented in scattered sources from Vermont and New Hampshire as well, suggesting that the pattern, if not its precise scale, may have been widespread.

The third sentence ("Vaszary is careful to note...two decades") functions in the passage primarily to

• A qualify the scope of Vaszary's claim before the passage extends it more broadly ✓ Correct
• B raise a methodological objection that undermines Vaszary's central conclusion
• C explain why the standard view of town meetings has persisted
• D introduce evidence from Vermont and New Hampshire into the analysis
• E concede that participatory egalitarianism was, after all, the dominant feature of these meetings