Qualitative Analysis

Select the two answer choices that, when used to complete the sentence, produce complete sentences that are alike in meaning.

Graduate school is a fantastic and unique opportunity to dedicate yourself wholly to the pursuit of knowledge, even if you often find yourself panicking from __________ attacks of terror about what the future holds.

A: obsequious

B: limpid

C: sudden

D: impecunious

E: precipitous

F: infelicitous

For each blank, select an answer choice from the corresponding list.

Trish Hammerstein's acclaimed début novel, "Unicorns," tells the ____ tale of two sisters trapped in a cave on a Pacific island. You went to school with Trish and find her writing to be ________ and overwrought. Yet at the forthcoming ten-year reunion, when everyone is congratulating her on her success (while you still have not even finished your Ph.D. in American literature), you will _______ happiness for her success while contemplating your own inadequacy. She doesn't even have a graduate degree—not even an M.F.A.

Blank I: harrowing, grandiloquent, indolent

Blank II: sedulous, turgid, laconic

Blank III: genuflect, dissemble, fulminate

Quantitative Analysis

One tenure-track position in American literature is opening up at Pleasantville University next year. Some 2,875 assistant professors, 1,204 postdoctoral candidates, and 978 brand-new Ph.D.s will apply. Pleasantville is equally likely to hire an assistant professor as a postdoctoral candidate, and three times as likely to hire an assistant professor as a new Ph.D. Pleasantville is located a hundred and seventeen miles from the nearest restaurant that is not a Denny's. What is the probability that you will get the job at Pleasantville University?

You use ten per cent of your salary each month to pay off your graduate-student loans from your master's in international-security studies. You currently earn twenty-four thousand dollars per year as the receptionist at Smiles! Dental. If you cannot repay in full, the government will forgive the remaining balance after twenty years. You just graduated and have thirty-four thousand dollars in debt, and are not likely to get a raise or new job in the foreseeable future.

Quantity A: Amount that will be forgiven by the government

Quantity B: Amount that you have paid off after twenty years

A) Quantity A is greater. B) Quantity B is greater. C) The two quantities are equal. D) The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.

The son of your mother's wealthy neighbor, Mrs. Stanton, is studying for the G.R.E. Mrs. Stanton hires you to be his part-time tutor for twelve dollars an hour, to supplement your dental-office income. The snot-nosed brat is very confused about how triangles work and asks you the following question: X and Y are two sides of a triangle. What is the minimum length of the third side, in terms of X and Y?

Analytical Writing: The Argument Essay

Write an essay in which you take a position on the statement below.

"There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Emerson and the transcendentalist literary movement, more than any other literary or political development in the nineteenth century, are responsible for shaping the American ethos of individualism that has become inseparable from the idea of an American identity.

Remember, you will not have time to write this until you retire, which will likely be as late as physically possible because neither the dental office nor Mrs. Stanton provides retirement benefits. If you are lucky, you may be able to publish it online in a literary review for fifty dollars (before tax). You have forty-seven years to complete this section. Time begins now.