Thomas Eakins’s powerful style and his choices of subject–the advances in modern surgery, the discipline of sport, the strains of individuals in tension with society or even with themselves–was as disturbing to his own time as it is compelling for ours.

Capuchin monkeys in Venezuela often rub a certain type of millipede into their fur.  Secretions of these millipedes have been shown to contain two chemicals that are potent mosquito repellents, and mosquitoes carry parasites that debilitate the capuchins.  The rubbing behavior is rare except during the rainy season, when mosquito populations are at their peak.  Therefore, the monkeys probably rub the millipedes into their fur because doing so helps protect them against mosquitoes.

Which of the following would it be most useful to determine in order to evaluate the argument?

Which of the following most logically completes the argument below?

When interest rates are high, insurance companies reduce the premiums they charge for many kinds of insurance policies.  The reason is that insurance companies want to take in as much money as possible in premiums so that they can invest the money at high rates of interest.  And premium reductions help achieve this objective, since __________.

After its customers complained about being pressured to buy unneeded insurance, an insurance agency stopped rewarding its agents for high sales volume and instead gave them bonuses for high levels of customer satisfaction.  Under this new plan, both customer satisfaction and the insurance agency’s sales increased.

Each of the following, if true, helps to explain how the change in incentives for agents could have resulted in increased sales EXCEPT:

One report concludes that many schools do not have, or likely to have, enough computers to use them effectively.

Like Rousseau, Tolstoi rebelled against the unnatural complexity of human relations in modern society.

The Sports Medicine Programs of the Olympic Training Center, a complex where final tryouts are held for athletes representing the United States in the Olympics, is geared toward enhancing athletes’ performance and toward their preparation for international competition.

Columnist:  People should avoid using a certain artificial fat that has been touted as a resource for those whose medical advisers have advised them to reduce their fat intake.  Although the artificial fat, which can be used in place of fat in food preparation, has none of the negative health effects of fat, it does have a serious drawback:  it absorbs certain essential vitamins, thereby preventing them from being used by the body.

In evaluating the columnist’s position, it would be most useful to determine which of the following?

In the two years following the unification of Germany in 1989, the number of cars owned by residents of East Germany and the total distance traveled by cars in East Germany both increased by about 40 percent.  In those two years, however, the number of East German residents killed each year as car occupants in traffic accidents increased by about 300 percent.

Which of the following, if true, most helps to explain the disproportionate increase in traffic fatalities?

With an awareness that there are connotations associated with the numbers 1 and 2 and the letters A and B, companies conducting consumer taste tests of foods or beverages typically choose numbers such as 697 or 483 to label the products.

The budget for education reflects the administration’s demand that the money is controlled by local school districts, but it can only be spent on teachers, not on books, computers, or other materials or activities.

Editorial:

Regulations recently imposed by the government of Risemia call for unprecedented reductions in the amounts of pollutants manufacturers are allowed to discharge into the environment.  It will take costly new pollution control equipment requiring expensive maintenance to comply with these regulations.  Resultant price increases for Risemian manufactured goods will lead to the loss of some export markets.  Clearly, therefore, annual exports of Risemian manufactured goods will in the future occur at diminished levels.

Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument in the editorial?

Paint on a new airliner is usually applied in two stages:  first, a coat of primer, and then a top coat.  A new process requires no primer, but instead uses two layers of the same newly developed coating, with each layer of the new coating having the same thickness and weight as a traditional top coat.  Using the new process instead of the old process increases the price of a new aircraft considerably.

Which of the following, if true, most strongly indicates that it is in an airline’s long-term economic interest to purchase new airliners painted using the new process rather than the old process?

As a result of a supernova explosion, every human being on Earth was bombarded on February 23, 1987, by about 100 billion neutrinos; fortunately, neutrinos are harmless elementary particles that are produced in nuclear reactions and that interact very weakly with matter.