List of top Verbal Reasoning Questions on Fill in the Blanks

Select the option that best completes the sentence below.
____ Buddhist beliefs and traditions, Gautam Buddha had been born as animals and humans in many previous births.

There has been much hand-wringing about how unprepared American students are for college. Graff reverses this perspective, suggesting that colleges are unprepared for students. In his analysis, the university culture is largely BLANK entering students because academic culture fails to make connections to the kinds of arguments and cultural references the students grasp. Understandably, many students view academic life as BLANK ritual.
BLANK 1 Options: (A) primed for, (B) opaque to, (C) essential for
BLANK 2 Options: (D) an arcane, (E) a laudable, (F) a painstaking

New technologies often begin by BLANK what has gone before, and they change the world later. Think how long it took power-using companies to recognize that with electricity they did not need to cluster their machinery around the power source, as in the days of steam. Instead, power could be BLANK their processes. In that sense, many of today's computer networks are still in the steam age. Their full potential remains unrealized.
BLANK 1 Options: (A) uprooting, (B) dismissing, (C) mimicking
BLANK 2 Options: (D) transmitted to, (E) consolidated around, (F) incorporated into

The BLANK nature of classical tragedy in Athens belies the modern image of tragedy: in the modern view tragedy is austere and stripped down, its representations of ideological and emotional conflicts so superbly compressed that there's nothing BLANK for time to erode.
BLANK 1 Options: (A) unadorned, (B) harmonious, (C) multifaceted
BLANK 2 Options: (D) inalienable, (E) exigent, (F) extraneous

Far from viewing Jefferson as a skeptical but enlightened intellectual, historians of the 1960's portrayed him as BLANK thinker, eager to fill the young with his political orthodoxy while censoring ideas he did not like.

Murray, whose show of recent paintings and drawings is her best in many years, has been eminent hereabouts for a quarter century, although often regarded with BLANK, but the most BLANK of these paintings BLANK all doubts.
BLANK 1 Options: (A) partiality, (B) credulity, (C) ambivalence
BLANK 2 Options: (D) problematic, (E) successful, (F) disparaged
BLANK 3 Options: (G) exculpate, (H) assuage, (I) whet

Dramatic literature often BLANK the history of a culture in that it takes as its subject matter the important events that have shaped and guided the culture.

International financial issues are typically BLANK by the United States media because they are too technical to make snappy headlines and too inaccessible to people who lack a background in economics. Select the two answer choices that, when substituted for the BLANK, fit the context and produce the two sentences most nearly alike in meaning.
(A) neglected
(B) slighted
(C) overrated
(D) hidden
(E) criticized
(F) repudiated

In the long run, high-technology communications cannot BLANK more tradi tional face-to-face family togetherness, in Aspinall’s view. Select the two answer choices that, when substituted for the BLANK, fit the context and produce the two sentences most nearly alike in meaning.
(A) ameliorate
(B) compromise
(C) supersede
(D) approximate
(E) enervate
(F) supplant

Early critics of Emily Dickinson's poetry mistook for simple-mindedness the surface of artlessness that in fact she constructed with such BLANK. Select the two answer choices that, when substituted for the BLANK, fit the context and produce the two sentences most nearly alike in meaning.
(A) astonishment
(B) craft
(C) cunning
(D) innocence
(E) na¨ıvet´e
(F) vexation

A restaurant's menu is generally reflected in its decor; however despite this restaurant's BLANK appearance it is pedestrian in the menu it offers. Select the two answer choices that, when substituted for the BLANK, fit the context and produce the two sentences most nearly alike in meaning.
(A) elegant
(B) tawdry
(C) modern
(D) traditional
(E) conventional
(F) chic

While in many ways their personalities could not have been more different—she was ebullient where he was glum, relaxed where he was awkward, garrulous where he was BLANK — they were surprisingly well suited. Select the two answer choices that, when substituted for the BLANK, fit the context and produce the two sentences most nearly alike in meaning.
(A) solicitous
(B) munificent
(C) irresolute
(D) laconic
(E) fastidious
(F) taciturn

The macromolecule RNA is common to all living beings, and DNA, which is found in all organisms except some bacteria, is almost as BLANK. Select the two answer choices that, when substituted for the BLANK, fit the context and produce the two sentences most nearly alike in meaning.
(A) comprehensive
(B) fundamental
(C) inclusive
(D) universal
(E) significant
(F) ubiquitous

Even in this business, where BLANK is part of everyday life, a talent for lying is not something usually found on one's resume. Select the two answer choices that, when substituted for the BLANK, fit the context and produce the two sentences most nearly alike in meaning.
(A) aspiration
(B) mendacity
(C) prevarication
(D) insensitivity
(E) baseness
(F) avarice

Scientists are not the only persons who examine the world about them by the use of rational processes, although they sometimes BLANK this impression by extending the definition of "scientist" to include anyone who is BLANK in his or her investigational practices.
BLANK 1 Options: (A) conceal, (B) create, (C) undermine
BLANK 2 Options: (D) intuitive, (E) haphazard, (F) logical

Dreams are BLANK in and of themselves, but, when combined with other data, they can tell us much about the dreamer. Select the two answer choices that, when substituted for the BLANK, fit the context and produce the two sentences most nearly alike in meaning.
(A) astonishing
(B) disordered
(C) harmless
(D) inscrutable
(E) revealing
(F) uninformative

Linguistic science confirms what experienced users of ASL—American Sign Language—have always implicitly known: ASL is a grammatically BLANK language, as capable of expressing a full range of syntactic relations as any natural spoken language. Select the two answer choices that, when substituted for the BLANK, fit the context and produce the two sentences most nearly alike in meaning.
(A) complete
(B) economical
(C) redundant
(D) spare
(E) unique
(F) unlimited

Given how BLANK the shortcomings of the standard economic model are in its portrayal of human behavior, the failure of many economists to respond to them is astonishing. They continue to fill the journals with yet more proofs of yet more BLANK theorems.
BLANK 1 Options: (A) overlooked, (B) occasional, (C) patent
BLANK 2 Options: (D) comprehensive, (E) improbable, (F) pervasive

The playwright's approach is BLANK in that her works BLANK the theatrical devices normally used to create drama on the stage.
BLANK 1 Options: (A) pedestrian, (B) startling, (C) celebrated
BLANK 2 Options: (D) jettison, (E) experiment with, (F) distill

I've long anticipated this retrospective of the artist's work, hoping that it would make BLANK judgments about him possible, but greater familiarity with his paintings highlights their inherent BLANK and actually makes one's assessment BLANK.
BLANK 1 Options: (A) modish, (B) settled, (C) detached
BLANK 2 Options: (D) gloom, (E) ambiguity, (F) delicacy
BLANK 3 Options: (G) similarly equivocal, (H) less sanguine, (I) more cynical

Stories are a haunted genre; hardly BLANK kind of story, the ghost story is almost the paradigm of the form, and BLANK was undoubtedly one effect that Poe had in mind when he wrote about how stories work.
BLANK 1 Options: (A) a debased, (B) a normative, (C) a meticulous
BLANK 2 Options: (D) pessimism, (E) goose bumps, (F) curiosity

Since she believed him to be both candid and trustworthy, she refused to consider the possibility that his statement had been BLANK.