GRE Reading Comprehension

Home > GRE Test > GRE Reading Comprehension Questions

Next steps

Source: magoosh reading hard

Dark matter and dark energy have little effect on conventional matter over familiar distances. Instead, they make their presence known through their prodigious gravitational effects. In tracking them down, therefore, astronomers have had to study gigantic assemblages of matter, extending across spans of millions and billions of light-years. Perhaps the first to take that sweeping viewpoint was the Swiss-American astronomer Fritz Zwicky. In the 1930's, Zwicky traced the motions of individual galaxies within great clusters of galaxies and made a remarkable discovery: the individual galaxies are moving too fast to be held together in a cluster by the force of gravity exerted by the starry matter visible within them. From his measurements, Zwicky concluded that the great clusters of galaxies must be held together by the gravitational effect of some unseen mass, which he dubbed"dark matter."

Question List: 1

It can be inferred from the passage that Zwicky hypothesized the existence of "dark matter" in order to account for

  • A the speed in which galaxies are moving away from one another
  • B the manner in which large galaxies tend to clump together
  • C the great distance between certain galaxies
  • D a phenomenon that visible matter alone is unable to explain
  • E the behavior of galaxies outside of great clusters

Show Answer

Previous       Next