GRE Reading Comprehension

Home > GRE Test > GRE Reading Comprehension Questions

Next steps

Source: 2014

While the best sixteenth-century Renaissance scholars mastered the classics of ancient Roman literature in the original Latin and understood them in their original historical context, most of the scholars' educated contemporaries knew the classics only from school lessons on selected Latin texts. These were chosen by Renaissance teachers after much deliberation, for works written by and for the sophisticated adults of pagan Rome were not always considered suitable for the Renaissance young: the central Roman clas-sics refused (as classics often do) to teach appropriate morality and frequently suggested the opposite. Teachers accordingly made students' needs, not textual and historical accu- racy, their supreme interest, chopping dangerous texts into short phrases, and using these to impart lessons extemporaneously on a variety of subjects, from syntax to science. Thus, I believe that a modern reader cannot know the associations that a line of ancient Roman poetry or prose had for any particular educated sixteenth-century reader.

Question List: 1 2 3

The passage is primarily concerned with discussing the

  • A unsuitability of the Roman classics for the teaching of morality
  • B approach that sixteenth-century scholars took to learning the Roman classics
  • C effect that the Roman classics had on educated people in the Renaissance
  • D way in which the Roman classics were taught in the sixteenth century
  • E contrast between the teaching of the Roman classics in the Renaissance and the teaching of the Roman classics today

Show Answer

Previous       Next