GMAT Sample Questions

GMAT Verbal Section : GMAT Sample Critical Reasoning Questions

26. Stronger patent laws are needed to protect inventions from being pirated. With that protection, manufacturers would be encouraged to invest in the development of new products and technologies. Such investment frequently results in an increase in a manufacturer's productivity.

    Which of the following conclusions can most properly be drawn from the information above?

    1. Stronger patent laws tend to benefit financial institutions as well as manufacturers.
    2. Increased productivity in manufacturing is likely to be accompanied by the creation of more manufacturing jobs.
    3. Manufacturers will decrease investment in the development of new products and technologies unless there are stronger patent laws.
    4. The weakness of current patent laws has been a cause of economic recession.
    5. Stronger patent laws would stimulate improvements in productivity for many manufacturers.

    Answer : E

27. Which of the following best completes the passage below?

    At large amusement parks, live shows are used very deliberately to influence crowd movements. Lunchtime performances relieve the pressure on a park's restaurants. Evening performances have a rather different purpose: to encourage visitors to stay for supper. Behind this surface divergence in immediate purpose there is the unified underlying goal of

    1. keeping the lines at the various rides short by drawing off part of the crowd
    2. enhancing revenue by attracting people who come only for the live shows and then leave the park
    3. avoiding as far as possible traffic jams caused by visitors entering or leaving the park
    4. encouraging as many people as possible to come to the park in order to eat at the restaurants
    5. utilizing the restaurants at optimal levels for as much of the day as possible

    Answer : E

28. • James weighs more than Kelly.
    • Luis weighs more than Mark.
    • Mark weighs less than Ned.
    • Kelly and Ned are exactly the same weight.
    
    If the information above is true, which of the following must also be true?
    1. Luis weighs more than Ned.
    2. Luis weighs more than James.
    3. Kelly weighs less than Luis
    4. James weighs more than Mark
    5. Kelly weighs less than Mark.

    Answer : D

    Questions 29-30 are based on the following.

    Partly because of bad weather, but also partly because some major pepper growers have switched to high-priced cocoa, world production of pepper has been running well below worldwide sales for three years. Pepper is consequently in relatively short supply. The price of pepper has soared in response: it now equals that of cocoa.

29. Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
    1. Pepper is a profitable crop only if it is grown on a large scale.
    2. World consumption of pepper has been unusually high for three years.
    3. World production of pepper will return to previous levels once normal weather returns
    4. Surplus stocks of pepper have been reduced in the past three years.
    5. The profits that the growers of pepper have made in the past three years have been unprecedented.

    Answer : D

30. Some observers have concluded that the rise in the price of pepper means that the switch by some growers from pepper to cocoa left those growers no better off than if none of them had switched; this conclusion, however, is unwarranted because it can be inferred to be likely that
    1. those growers could not have foreseen how high the price of pepper would go
    2. the initial cost involved in switching from pepper to cocoa is substantial
    3. supplies of pepper would not be as low as they are if those growers had not switched crops
    4. cocoa crops are as susceptible to being reduced by bad weather as are pepper crops
    5. as more growers turn to growing cocoa, cocoa supplies will increase and the price of cocoa will fall precipitously.

    Answer : C