In my (totally subjective) opinion, this is a terrible,
terrible passage, and very unlike what you might see on the GMAT. It's filled with a lot of mumbo-jumbo and is unusually in the first-person. I don't want to insult whomever wrote it (too late now, I guess!), but this isn't a good passage to study IMO for the GMAT, as an academic abstractly philosophizing in the first-person isn't really what the GMAT's passages tend to be like or focus on.
Also, the GMAT is not going to ask you to understand words such as "nominalistic", "disjunctions," "substrate," and "concatenation." And especially not all from one passage. Not that there isn't the occasional challenging vocab word on the exam, but the GMAT is not a vocabulary test, and the RC isn't designed only for people with expansive vocabularies. It's like whomever wrote this feels like harder passages = pulling out a thesaurus.
Another reason I think this is a poor passage is Question #1, the Main Idea problem. Let's look at the structure of this passage:
Function of Paragraph #1 - to state objective and define power
Function of Paragraph #2 - to continue to wax on about power
Function of Paragraph #3 - to describe how best to understand power (this paragraph is just...ugh)
Function of Paragraph #4 - to sum up what power is
It's clear this is an Informational passage about what power is or isn't. There's a slight tone of opinion, especially since it is all first-person, but the author doesn't really give any sentences that have an extremely strong POV. I would say the only one with some real "charge" is the first sentence of paragraph 3.
The first sentence of the passage says it all: "my objective is to
analyze." This is a dry, dull passage about analyzing "power."
Let's look at the question:
The author’s primary purpose in defining power is to
REPHRASE: Why is he defining power?
Well, how the heck should we know "why" he's doing it? He says he's doing it to "analyze certain forms of knowledge," so I guess we will believe him.
PREDICTION: To analyze certain forms of knowledge.
On to the answer choices:
(A) counteract self-serving and confusing uses of the term
("counteract" is way too Persuasive and doesn't match the Informational tone)(B) establish a compromise among those who have defined the term in different ways
(nothing remotely like a "compromise" is discussed)(C) increase comprehension of the term by providing concrete examples
(nothing to support he's interested in increasing general comprehension.)(D) demonstrate how the meaning of the term has evolved
("evolve" implies change over time; but he never discusses "power" as an evolving entity.) (E) avoid possible misinterpretations resulting from the more common uses of the term
(at no point does he indicate he wants to "avoid possible misinterpretations"). The author says the word can lead to "misunderstandings" but this is one sentence in the first paragraph. A main idea on the GMAT is something that encompasses ALL the paragraphs. ALL the paragraphs here are not being driven by the desire to "avoid misunderstandings" --- they simply are musing on what power is. Where are the specific misinterpretations? Or the consequences of "if you interpret power in X way, it is bad because...." If the author truly wanted to avoid misinterpretations, then this idea needed to be present in at least 3-4 other places in the passage.
IMO -- the stated answer of (E) does not do what correct Main Idea answers for an actual GMAT passage do -- match the Tone and encapsulate the underlying driving structure of the ENTIRE passage. The Main Idea has to include all the paragraphs somehow. It can't be based on 1-2 sentences only.
I would REALLY caution students against studying RC passages such as this one. There are plenty of official passages and passages from high-quality sources such as Veritas,
Magoosh, Manhattan, etc. When you look at weaker material, there's a lot less to learn from it.