Free GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Test

Directions: Answer the question after reading through the passage. Base your answers on information that is either stated or implied in the passage.

Passage

The Longyearbyen cemetery is at the base of a steep hill, just beyond the town limits. If one looks up from the cemetery, one can see the gray wooden skeleton of the coal mine that used to burrow into the side of the hill, and if one look to the left one can see the icy fringes of a glacier. Farther down the mountain are a shallow stream, a broad shale plain, and then, half a mile or so across the valley, Longyearbyen itself: a small cluster of red-roofed, brightly painted frame buildings. There are no trees, because Longyearbyen is many miles above the tree line, and from almost anywhere in the valley the cemetery is in plain view. Each grave site is slightly elevated and surrounded by rocks, and there are well-worn pathways among the rows of crosses. A chain-link fence rings the periphery. When I was there in late August, the ground had been warmed by the Arctic summer sun and was soft and spongy, carpeted with orange and red and white lichen. In the last row I found the miners’ graves—seven deaths separated by six days.

It is possible to go to almost any cemetery in the world and find a similar cluster of graves from the fall of 1918. Between September and November of that year, as the First World War came to an end, an extraordinarily lethal strain of influenza swept the globe, killing between twenty million and forty million people. More Americans died of the flu over the next few months than were killed during the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. The Spanish flu, as it came to be known, reached every continent and virtually every country on the map, going wherever ships sailed, or cars or trucks or trains travelled, killing so many so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses, and others buried their dead in mass graves because they ran out of coffins. Of all those millions of graves, though, the seven in Longyearbyen stand apart. There, less than eight hundred miles from the North Pole, the ground beneath the lichen is hard-frozen permafrost. The bodies of the seven miners may well be intact, cryogenically preserved in the tundra, and, if so, the flu virus they caught on board the Forsete—the deadliest virus that the world has ever known—may still be down there with them.

What is the purpose of the author writing this passage:

Directions: Answer the question after reading through the passage. Base your answers on information that is either stated or implied in the passage.

Passage

The Longyearbyen cemetery is at the base of a steep hill, just beyond the town limits. If one looks up from the cemetery, one can see the gray wooden skeleton of the coal mine that used to burrow into the side of the hill, and if one look to the left one can see the icy fringes of a glacier. Farther down the mountain are a shallow stream, a broad shale plain, and then, half a mile or so across the valley, Longyearbyen itself: a small cluster of red-roofed, brightly painted frame buildings. There are no trees, because Longyearbyen is many miles above the tree line, and from almost anywhere in the valley the cemetery is in plain view. Each grave site is slightly elevated and surrounded by rocks, and there are well-worn pathways among the rows of crosses. A chain-link fence rings the periphery. When I was there in late August, the ground had been warmed by the Arctic summer sun and was soft and spongy, carpeted with orange and red and white lichen. In the last row I found the miners’ graves—seven deaths separated by six days.

It is possible to go to almost any cemetery in the world and find a similar cluster of graves from the fall of 1918. Between September and November of that year, as the First World War came to an end, an extraordinarily lethal strain of influenza swept the globe, killing between twenty million and forty million people. More Americans died of the flu over the next few months than were killed during the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. The Spanish flu, as it came to be known, reached every continent and virtually every country on the map, going wherever ships sailed, or cars or trucks or trains travelled, killing so many so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses, and others buried their dead in mass graves because they ran out of coffins. Of all those millions of graves, though, the seven in Longyearbyen stand apart. There, less than eight hundred miles from the North Pole, the ground beneath the lichen is hard-frozen permafrost. The bodies of the seven miners may well be intact, cryogenically preserved in the tundra, and, if so, the flu virus they caught on board the Forsete—the deadliest virus that the world has ever known—may still be down there with them.

The Longyearbyen cemetery is in plain view from almost anywhere in the valley because:

Directions: Answer the question after reading through the passage. Base your answers on information that is either stated or implied in the passage.

Passage

The Longyearbyen cemetery is at the base of a steep hill, just beyond the town limits. If one looks up from the cemetery, one can see the gray wooden skeleton of the coal mine that used to burrow into the side of the hill, and if one look to the left one can see the icy fringes of a glacier. Farther down the mountain are a shallow stream, a broad shale plain, and then, half a mile or so across the valley, Longyearbyen itself: a small cluster of red-roofed, brightly painted frame buildings. There are no trees, because Longyearbyen is many miles above the tree line, and from almost anywhere in the valley the cemetery is in plain view. Each grave site is slightly elevated and surrounded by rocks, and there are well-worn pathways among the rows of crosses. A chain-link fence rings the periphery. When I was there in late August, the ground had been warmed by the Arctic summer sun and was soft and spongy, carpeted with orange and red and white lichen. In the last row I found the miners’ graves—seven deaths separated by six days.

It is possible to go to almost any cemetery in the world and find a similar cluster of graves from the fall of 1918. Between September and November of that year, as the First World War came to an end, an extraordinarily lethal strain of influenza swept the globe, killing between twenty million and forty million people. More Americans died of the flu over the next few months than were killed during the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. The Spanish flu, as it came to be known, reached every continent and virtually every country on the map, going wherever ships sailed, or cars or trucks or trains travelled, killing so many so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses, and others buried their dead in mass graves because they ran out of coffins. Of all those millions of graves, though, the seven in Longyearbyen stand apart. There, less than eight hundred miles from the North Pole, the ground beneath the lichen is hard-frozen permafrost. The bodies of the seven miners may well be intact, cryogenically preserved in the tundra, and, if so, the flu virus they caught on board the Forsete—the deadliest virus that the world has ever known—may still be down there with them.

Why do all cemeteries in the world have similar clusters of graves from the fall of 1918?

Directions: Answer the question after reading through the passage. Base your answers on information that is either stated or implied in the passage.

Passage

The Longyearbyen cemetery is at the base of a steep hill, just beyond the town limits. If one looks up from the cemetery, one can see the gray wooden skeleton of the coal mine that used to burrow into the side of the hill, and if one look to the left one can see the icy fringes of a glacier. Farther down the mountain are a shallow stream, a broad shale plain, and then, half a mile or so across the valley, Longyearbyen itself: a small cluster of red-roofed, brightly painted frame buildings. There are no trees, because Longyearbyen is many miles above the tree line, and from almost anywhere in the valley the cemetery is in plain view. Each grave site is slightly elevated and surrounded by rocks, and there are well-worn pathways among the rows of crosses. A chain-link fence rings the periphery. When I was there in late August, the ground had been warmed by the Arctic summer sun and was soft and spongy, carpeted with orange and red and white lichen. In the last row I found the miners’ graves—seven deaths separated by six days.

It is possible to go to almost any cemetery in the world and find a similar cluster of graves from the fall of 1918. Between September and November of that year, as the First World War came to an end, an extraordinarily lethal strain of influenza swept the globe, killing between twenty million and forty million people. More Americans died of the flu over the next few months than were killed during the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. The Spanish flu, as it came to be known, reached every continent and virtually every country on the map, going wherever ships sailed, or cars or trucks or trains travelled, killing so many so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses, and others buried their dead in mass graves because they ran out of coffins. Of all those millions of graves, though, the seven in Longyearbyen stand apart. There, less than eight hundred miles from the North Pole, the ground beneath the lichen is hard-frozen permafrost. The bodies of the seven miners may well be intact, cryogenically preserved in the tundra, and, if so, the flu virus they caught on board the Forsete—the deadliest virus that the world has ever known—may still be down there with them.

Why does the author think that the bodies of the miners might still be intact at the Longyearbyen cemetery?

Directions: Answer the question after reading through the passage. Base your answers on information that is either stated or implied in the passage.

Passage

Consumers are increasingly making purchases of products that possess ecolabels or are labeled as locally grown/produced. Ecolabels are a voluntary labeling system that identifies a good or service as having a reduced environmental impact relative to comparable goods and services. The growth of eco-labeling is closely tied to sales of local and organic foods, which, despite a small market share, increased sevenfold between 2008 and 2013 (Greene, 2016).

Ecolabels and locally grown labels provide a clear signal to consumers that the product should be considered as being more environmentally friendly—whether true or not—than the alternative. Consumers demonstrate a willingness to pay (WTP) a premium for such products. Some goods and services attract consumers via an inferred attribute without the benefit of such explicit labeling. In such instances, the consumer perceives a product to be environmentally friendly, but there are no observable identifiers that distinguish the product as being environmentally friendly.

Previous studies (Bajari and Benkard, 2001; Toro-Gonz' alez et al., 2013) have discussed the idea of an unobservable or inferred product attribute. These studies define an unobservable product attribute as it relates to flavor quality. Although the previous literature discusses matters of quality, the current study proposes a differentiating product attribute that is not based on personal quality measurements, but rather on consumer inclinations toward environmental impacts.

At times, a producer of a product is also a consumer of intermediate products that are vital to the production process; thus, producers also have preferences regarding the characteristics of the products that they purchase. In their study, Gallardo and Wang (2013) address this issue of WTP for pesticides’ environmental features and social desirability bias. The central concern of the study was to determine if producers were willing to pay for pesticides that decrease the probability of pesticide toxicity to natural enemies along with determining if there was social pressure on pesticide choice. Their study evaluates unobservable product attributes resulting from the potential environmental attributes that are not guaranteed and, therefore, only perceived on the part of the consumer—or in this case, the producer purchasing the pesticide.

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The main objective of the passage is to highlight that: