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Magoosh
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It can be inferred from the passage that which of the following would be most immune to the “structural check”?
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The 'trophic contamination hypothesis' posits that shorebirds accumulate industrial and urban pollution at stopover sites, toxins that are subsequently released in sudden high doses as fat is burned during migratory flights, disrupting the bird's ability to make migratory decisions. For example, large contaminant doses might hamper refueling by altering the satiation signal in shorebirds so that they do not accumulate sufficient fat for migration. A recent study found that, out of those shorebirds that were unable to migrate, some weighed as much as 20% less than the average migrating bird of their species. Whether such findings are a result of shorebirds suffering from trophic contamination, or whether such birds simply cut their migrations short by landing in a foreign ecosystem, is unlikely to be resolved until further studies are conducted. One promising line of research involves organochlorines, toxins deposited on mudflats in the 1970s and 1980s, now buried by sediments but finally close enough to the surface to be of issue to foraging shorebirds. Organochlorines should be more accessible to long-billed shorebirds that probe deeply for prey than to short-billed species that forage at or near the surface. We predict that an increased number of long-billed shorebirds will either be unable to migrate or will be found along an aberrant flight path.
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Magoosh
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According to the passage, the author implies that foreign ecosystems have which potential effect on shorebirds?
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The efficacy of standard clinical trials in medicine has recently become the subject of contentious debate between those practitioners who maintain that such trials, despite admitted shortcomings, still represent the best means we have for learning about the effects of pharmaceutical drugs on the human body, and those who maintain that the current system of collecting knowledge of such effects is but one possibility and most likely not the most efficacious one. Gimley and Lebsmith, in their recent work, fall into the latter camp and indeed go further by challenging the idea that the standard medical trials can yield meaningful information on pharmacogenetics, or how a drug interacts with the human body.
Gimley and Lebsmith's foremost criticism is that the effect of a drug differs depending on a person's physiology. To be sure, there are cohorts, or groups, that react to a drug in a specific manner, but clinical trials are unequipped to identify such groupings. The main reason is that clinical trials are allied to the notion that the larger the number of subjects in a study, the greater the validity of a drug, should it show any promise. Therefore, even if a drug can exercise a marked effect on a subset of subjects within a trial, this information will be lost in the statistical noise.
Another criticism of Gimley and Lebsmith concerns the very idea of validity. Pharmaceutical companies will run hundreds of trials on hundreds of different medications. Given the sheer number of trials a few are likely to yield positive results, even if there is no demonstrable effect. Gimley and Lebsmith cite the fact that most pharmaceuticals that have exerted a positive effect in the first round of testing are likely to fail in the second round of testing.
Gimley and Lebsmith argue that a more effective approach is to identify groups who exhibit similar genetic subtypes. This very approach is currently in use in groups possessing a particular molecular subtype of breast cancer. Furthermore, these groups are not only trying one specific drug, but also a combination of such drugs , subbing them in and out to measure the effects on a subject, a procedure Gimley and Lebsmith endorse. Nonetheless, such an approach is often both time- consuming and costly. However, given the constraints of current medical trials, trials that target subtypes—even if they do not yield any significant advances—will encourage a culture of experimentation on how clinical trials are conducted in the first place.
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Magoosh
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Which of the following best describes the primary contrast between the work of Malley and Jemson and that of Camden and Greely?
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Magoosh
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Which of the following can be inferred regarding those who only focus on the role of women in countries under colonial rule?
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In the mid-1970's, Walter Alvarez, a geologist, was studying Earth's polarity. It had recently been learned that the orientation of the planet's magnetic field reverses, so that every so often, in effect, south becomes north and vice versa. Alvarez and some colleagues had found that a certain formation of pinkish limestone in Italy, known as the scaglia rossa, recorded these occasional reversals. The limestone also contained the fossilized remains of millions of tiny sea creatures called foraminifera. Alvarez became interested in a thin layer of clay in the limestone that seemed to have been laid down around the end of the Cretaceous Period. Below the layer, certain species of foraminifera—or forams, for short—were preserved. In the clay layer, there were no forams. Above the layer, the earlier species disappeared and new forams appeared. Having been taught the uniformitarian view, which held that any apparent extinctions throughout geological time resulted from 'the incompleteness of the fossil record' rather than an actual extinction, Alvarez was not sure what to make of the lacuna in geological time corresponding to the missing foraminifera, because the change looked very abrupt.
Had Walter Alvarez not asked his father, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, how long the clay had taken to deposit, the younger Alvarez may not have thought to use iridium, an element rarely found on earth but more plentiful in meteorites, to answer this question. Iridium, in the form of microscopic grains of cosmic dust, is constantly raining down on the planet. The Alvarezes reasoned that if the clay layer had taken a significant amount of time to deposit, it would contain detectable levels of iridium. The results were startling: far too much iridium had shown up. The Alvarez hypothesis, as it became known, was that everything—not just the clay layer—could be explained by a single event: a six-mile-wide asteroid had slammed into Earth, killing off not only the forams but also the dinosaurs and all the other organisms that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period.
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Magoosh
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It can be inferred from the passage that had the scaglia rossa not exhibited a certain geological property then which of the following would most likely have been true?
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Magoosh
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The first paragraph of the passage implies which of the following concerning sound and communication?
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Demotic Greek (language of the people) is the modern vernacular form of the Greek language, and refers particularly to the form of the language that evolved naturally from ancient Greek, in opposition to the artificially archaic Katharevousa, which was the official standard until 1976. The two complemented each other in a typical example of diglossia, or the existence of two forms of a language (usually a “high” and a “low”) employed by the same speaker depending on the social context, until the resolution of the Greek language question in favor of Demotic. Demotic is often thought to be the same as the modern Greek language, but these two terms are not completely synonymous. While Demotic is a term applied to the naturally evolved colloquial language of the Greeks, the modern Greek language of today is more like a fusion of Demotic and Katharevousa; it can be viewed as a variety of Demotic which has been enriched by "educated" elements. Therefore, it is not wrong to call the spoken language of today Demotic, though such a terminology ignores the fact that modern Greek contains - especially in a written or official form - numerous words, grammatical forms and phonetical features that did not exist in colloquial speech and only entered the language through its archaic variety. Additionally, even the most archaic forms of Katharevousa were never thought of as ancient Greek, but were always called "modern Greek," so that the phrase "modern Greek" applies to Demotic, Standard Modern Greek and even Katharevousa.
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Magoosh
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The passage supports which of the following regarding Demotic Greek?
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In the 1860s, the German philologist Lazarus Geiger proposed that the subdivision of color always follows the same hierarchy. The simplest color lexicons (such as the DugermDani language of New Guinea) distinguish only black/dark and white/light. The next color to be given a separate word by cultures is always centered on the red part of the visible spectrum. Then, according to Geiger, societies will adopt a word corresponding to yellow, then green, then blue. Lazarus's color hierarchy was forgotten until restated in almost the same form in 1969 by Brent Berlin, an anthropologist, and Paul Kay, a linguist, when it was hailed as a major discovery in modern linguistics. It showed a universal regularity underlying the apparently arbitrary way language is used to describe the world. Berlin and Kay's hypothesis has since fallen in and out of favor, and certainly there are exceptions to the scheme they proposed. But the fundamental color hierarchy, at least in the early stages (black/white, red, yellow/green, blue) remains generally accepted. The problem is that no one could explain why this ordering of color exists. Why, for example, does the blue of sky and sea, or the green of foliage, not occur as a word before the far less common red? There are several schools of thought about how colors get named. “Nativists,” who include Berlin and Kay argue that the way in which we attach words to concepts is innately determined by how we perceive the world. In this view our perceptual apparatus has evolved to ensure that we make “sensible”—that is, useful—choices of what to label with distinct words: we are hardwired for practical forms of language. “Empiricists,” in contrast, argue that we don't need this innate programming, just the capacity to learn the conventional (but arbitrary) labels for things we can perceive. In both cases, the categories of things to name are deemed “obvious”: language just labels them. But the conclusions of Loreto and colleagues fit with a third possibility: the “culturist” view, which says that shared communication is needed to help organize category formation, so that categories and language co-evolve in an interaction between biological predisposition and culture. In other words, the starting point for color terms is not some inevitably distinct block of the spectrum, but neither do we just divide up the spectrum in some arbitrary fashion, because the human eye has different sensitivity to different parts of the spectrum. Given this, we have to arrive at some consensus, not just on which label to use, but on what is being labeled.
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Magoosh
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There are 10 employees in an office, not counting the office manager. The table shows how many employees have 0, 1, 2 or 3 pets. If the office manager also were included in the table, the average (arithmetic mean) number of pets per person would equal the median number of pets per person. How many pets does the office manager have?
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Magoosh
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The primary purpose of this passage is
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Magoosh
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If an object travels 100 feet in 2 seconds, what is the object's approximate speed in miles per hour? (Note: 1 mile = 5280 feet)
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Magoosh
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Six children—A, B, C, D, E, and F—are going to sit in six chairs in a row. Child E must be somewhere to the left of child F. How many possible configurations are there for the children?
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The historical basis for the King Arthur legend has long been debated by scholars. One school of thought, citing entries in the History of the Britons and Welsh Annals, sees Arthur as a genuine historical figure, a Romano-British leader who fought against the invading Anglo-Saxons sometime in the late 5th to early 6th century. The other text that seems to support the case for Arthur's historical existence is the 10th-century Annales Cambriae. The latest research shows that the Annales Cambriae was based on a chronicle begun in the late 8th century in Wales. Additionally, the complex textual history of the Annales Cambriae precludes any certainty that the Arthurian annals were added to it even that early. They were more likely added at some point in the 10th century and may never have existed in any earlier set of annals. This lack of convincing early evidence is the reason many recent historians exclude Arthur from their accounts of post-Roman Britain. In the view of historian Thomas Charles-Edwards there may well have been an historical Arthur, but that a historian can as yet say nothing of value about him. These modern admissions of ignorance are a relatively recent trend; earlier generations of historians were less skeptical. Historian John Morris made the putative reign of Arthur the organizing principle of his history of post-Roman Britain and Ireland. Even so, he found little to say about a historical Arthur. Partly in reaction to such theories, another school of thought emerged which argued that Arthur had no historical existence at all. Morris's Age of Arthur prompted archaeologist Nowell Myres to observe that no figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian's time. Arthur is not mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or named in any surviving manuscript written between 400 and 820. He is absent from Bede's early-8th-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People, another major early source for post-Roman history.br/] Some scholars argue that Arthur was originally a fictional hero of folklore—or even a half-forgotten Celtic deity—who became credited with real deeds in the distant past. They cite parallels with figures such as the Kentish totemic horse-gods Hengest and Horsa, who later became historicized. Bede ascribed to these legendary figures a historical role in the 5th-century Anglo-Saxon conquest of eastern Britain.
Historical documents for the post-Roman period are scarce. Of the many post-Roman archeological sites and places, only a handful have been identified as "Arthurian," and these date from the 12th century or later. Archaeology can confidently reveal names only through inscriptions found in reliably dated sites. In the absence of new compelling information about post-Roman England, a definitive answer to the question of Arthur's historical existence is unlikely.
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Magoosh
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The contention that Arthur was a mythological figure who had been historicized by being included in accounts of real events is most consistent with which of the following?
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Magoosh
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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Magoosh
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According to the author of the passage, John Morris, while expressing little to no skepticism towards the historical Arthur, lends little support to the case of a historical Arthur because he
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