There is no complete life of Alexandre Dumas. The age has not produced

although i was able to answers all the questions correctly through POE but i am not satisfied by OA esp for question 1,

if possible kindly share OE of all the questions.

SajjadAhmad
From where can we see the official explanation for all questions of a RC?

Your question is probably incomplete, generally official explanations are available within the official sources.

Which of the following statements would the author of the passage not agree with except?

I assume the question means we have to find a statement that the author eithor agree or not mentioned(not agree with except).

this could lead us to B & D, though I don't think the author would agree that "Dumas could animate and enliven ANY theme from small spurts of overviews." The passage certainly didn't say ANY THEME, hence we cannot go with D for sure.

Is this question legit?

Hello Experts,

Can you please explain me question 4 and how to reach out to answer of this question?

Hello, Lucky1994. I read the passage cold and answered this question correctly in a little over 2 minutes. Let us take a closer look:


This is a form of an EXCEPT question, so you can take comfort in the fact that there are four justifiable answers from the passage. You just have to find the odd one out, specifically the answer that does not follow from the text.


Analysis: I will admit to pausing on this one for a moment. We have to interpret the pronoun here as referring to the English author, rather than the author of the text. The line from the middle of the first paragraph speaks to this exact point: Style, grammar, taste, feeling, are all bad. The author of the passage is commenting on the English author's biography of Dumas. Since style is mentioned explicitly, the author of the text does allude to this expression, as the question puts it. Red light.


Analysis: Following the line that I just quoted in the previous analysis, we get more of a railing against the English author's biography:

The author does not so much write a life as draw up an indictment. The spirit of his work is grudging, sneering, contemptuous, and pitifully peddling. The great charge is that Dumas was a humbug, that he was not the author of his own books, that his books were written by "collaborators"--above all, by M. Maquet

No, we do not get the word focus laid out for us, but we understand that the English author wrote a disparaging work on Dumas. If one line will not do for you from the above excerpt, then another ought to do just fine (draw up an indictment... spirit of his work... great charge). Thus, this is NOT what we are looking for. Red light.


Analysis: This is a reversal of what we would expect. As mentioned in the previous analysis, the English author clearly did not think highly of Dumas, according to the author of the passage. Since there is no such glorification of Dumas by the English author, this answer delivers on the EXCEPT framework of the question. Green light.


Analysis: Even if you are not necessarily on board with envy here, the second part, derision, is undeniable. If the upper-level vocabulary is throwing you for a loop, then you could mark this as a yellow-light response, but this choice is not as strong as (C), given that the English author clearly did not like Dumas, to put it mildly. If there is firm grounding in the text for even a part of the answer, then that puts the answer on thin ice. Red light.


Analysis: If you read the first paragraph, then this answer choice sums it up perfectly. The author of the passage offers statements or observations about the English biography of Dumas. It should be hard to blunder into this answer if you understood the content of the first paragraph. Red light.

I hope that helps. This is not the easiest passage, but if you work to understand the question first, what it is driving at, then the task becomes a lot simpler. Good luck to you in your studies.

- Andrew

Is this even a GMAT 'style' passage? The answer choices are very subtly and vaguely worded?!