GRE Reading Comprehension

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Source: CHP

Researchers of the Pleistocene epoch have developed all sorts of more or less fanciful model schemes of how they would have arranged the Ice Age had they been in charge of events. For example, an early classification of Alpine glaciations suggested the existence there of four glaciations, named the Gunz, Mindel, Riss, and Wurm. This succession was based primarily on a series of deposits and events not directly related to glacial and interglacial periods, rather than on the more usual modern method of studying biological remains found in interglacial beds themselves interstratified within glacial deposits. Yet this succession was forced willy-nilly onto the glaciated parts of Northern Europe, with hopes of ultimately piecing them together to provide a complete Pleistocene succession. Eradication of the Alpine nomenclature is still proving a Herculean task.

Question List: 1 2

According to the passage, one of the reasons for the deficiencies of the "early classification of Alpine glaciation" is that it was

  • A derived from evidence that was only tangentially related to times of actual glaciation
  • B based primarily on fossil remains rather than on actual living organisms
  • C an abstract, imaginative scheme of how the period might have been structured
  • D based on unmethodical examinations of randomly chosen glacial biological remains
  • E derived from evidence that had been haphazardly gathered from glacial deposits and inaccurately evaluated

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