Práctica de MCAT CARS

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Las 15 preguntas de un vistazo

¿Prefieres leer antes de jugar? Abajo están todas las preguntas de la muestra. Las respuestas y explicaciones quedan plegadas hasta que las abras.

1. 1. When a museum label reads acquired 1897, the date does a quiet kind of work. It fixes attention on the moment of transfer and away from everything that made the transfer possible: the gunboat in the harbor, the treaty signed under duress, the market that had already priced the object before it left the shrine. Curators who defend such labels say they record only what can be documented. But a record that documents the buyer and not the taking is not neutral. It is a decision about which part of the story deserves a date. Which of the following best states the main idea of the passage?

   • A. Museums should return the objects they acquired during colonial rule.
   • B. Curators knowingly falsify the provenance records of objects in their collections.
   • C. An acquisition date presents a selective account of an object's history as though it were a neutral one.
   • D. Reliable documentation is impossible for objects taken before the twentieth century.
   Ver respuesta y explicación

   Respuesta: C. An acquisition date presents a selective account of an object's history as though it were a neutral one.

   This is a foundations of comprehension question, main idea. The last two sentences decide it: the record is not neutral, and the date is a choice about which part of the story counts. The return of objects is never mentioned, so that choice is out of scope. Knowing falsification is too extreme, since the author says the labels record what can be documented and objects to what gets left out, not to lying. The last choice states an impossibility the passage never claims.

2. 2. Every generation of critics announces that the last one asked the wrong questions, and every generation is partly right. The formalists were correct that a poem is made of words and not of the poet's biography. Their successors were correct that words do not sit still. What neither camp admits is how much of the quarrel is procedural, a matter of which evidence a critic is permitted to bring into the room. Read the manifestos side by side and the shared assumptions outnumber the disputed ones, though you would never guess that from the footnotes. The author's attitude toward these critical quarrels is best described as:

   • A. Sharply contemptuous of both camps
   • B. Neutral and purely descriptive
   • C. Admiring of the advances each generation made
   • D. Wry and unimpressed by the scale of the disagreement
   Ver respuesta y explicación

   Respuesta: D. Wry and unimpressed by the scale of the disagreement

   This is a foundations of comprehension question about tone. The closing clause, that you would never guess it from the footnotes, is dry rather than angry, and the author grants each camp a real point, so contempt is too extreme. Purely descriptive misses the evaluation running through the whole passage. Admiring is half right, since the author does credit both sides, but the point of the passage is that the fight is smaller than it looks.

3. 3. Complete the sentence.

   Oral historians once treated memory as a flawed substitute for the archive, valuable only where documents had gone missing. The newer view treats forgetting itself as evidence: what a community declines to repeat marks the shape of an injury as clearly as what it chooses to record. On this reading the interview is not a _____ source but a different kind of source, one that reports on the present at least as much as on the past.

   Opciones para el hueco 1: primary, written, deficient, contemporary

   Ver respuesta y explicación

   Respuesta: deficient

   This is a foundations of comprehension question about the meaning of a word in context. The first sentence sets up the old view, memory as a flawed substitute, and the last sentence rejects it with a contrast between quality and kind: not worse, just different. Only deficient carries that judgment. Primary, written and contemporary are all classifications rather than criticisms, so none of them is the thing the newer view is refusing.

4. 4. Utilitarians hold that an act is right if it produces the greatest total well-being. Critics answer with the transplant case: a surgeon could save five patients by killing one healthy visitor, and the arithmetic approves. Almost nobody accepts that conclusion. Defenders reply that a world in which surgeons behave this way would soon have no patients willing to walk into a hospital, so the rule forbidding the killing maximizes well-being after all. The reply is clever. It also concedes the critics' real point, which is that the arithmetic alone was never doing the moral work. The second paragraph functions primarily to:

   • A. Introduce a fresh objection that the first paragraph had not raised
   • B. Supply historical background for the transplant case
   • C. Restate the first paragraph in more technical language
   • D. Present a defense of the theory and then turn that defense against it
   Ver respuesta y explicación

   Respuesta: D. Present a defense of the theory and then turn that defense against it

   This is a reasoning within the text question about the function of a paragraph. The paragraph gives the defenders their answer and then says it concedes the critics' point, so it does two jobs and the second one is the author's. No new objection appears, since the objection is still the transplant case from paragraph one. There is no history in the passage at all, and nothing is merely restated, because the paragraph moves the argument forward.

5. 5. The claim that printing caused the Reformation rests on a tidy sequence: presses spread, pamphlets multiplied, doctrine changed. Yet the presses were busiest in cities that were already arguing about the church, and the same technology in Spain produced almost no reformist literature at all. The correlation is real. The causal arrow is not obvious. A technology does not choose its own uses, and the historian who forgets that will find the printing press explaining whatever the century happened to do. The author's argument depends on which of the following assumptions? Select all that apply.

   Marca todas las que correspondan.

   • A. A case in which the technology spread without producing the outcome is relevant to judging the causal claim.
   • B. A correlation between two developments is not by itself enough to show that one caused the other.
   • C. The printing press had no effect at all on religious change in Europe.
   • D. Conditions already present in a place can shape what a new technology gets used for.
   • E. Spanish printers were less technically skilled than their German counterparts.
   Ver respuesta y explicación

   Respuesta: A. A case in which the technology spread without producing the outcome is relevant to judging the causal claim., B. A correlation between two developments is not by itself enough to show that one caused the other., D. Conditions already present in a place can shape what a new technology gets used for.

   This is a reasoning within the text question about unstated assumptions. The Spain example only counts as evidence if a case without the outcome bears on the causal claim, and the whole passage turns on correlation not settling causation. The point that presses were busiest where the argument was already under way assumes local conditions steer use. The no effect at all choice is too extreme, since the author says the arrow is not obvious rather than absent, and skill in Spain is a detail the passage never raises.

6. 6. Defenders of the standard concert program argue that audiences want the familiar, and they point to the box office: halls fill for Beethoven and empty for almost anything written after 1950. The figure is accurate. It is also a poor test of the claim, because the programming decides in advance which unfamiliar works get a hearing at all, and then books them late in the season, in smaller rooms, without the marketing the warhorses receive. A preference measured only under the conditions that produce it explains very little. The author's main objection to the box office evidence is that:

   • A. The conditions under which the preference is measured are set by the very practice the evidence is meant to justify.
   • B. The ticket figures the defenders cite are not accurate.
   • C. Audiences in fact prefer new music to the older repertoire.
   • D. Concert halls built after 1950 are too small to hold large audiences.
   Ver respuesta y explicación

   Respuesta: A. The conditions under which the preference is measured are set by the very practice the evidence is meant to justify.

   This is a reasoning within the text question about the strength of support. The decisive sentence is the last one: the measurement is contaminated by the practice it is supposed to defend. The accuracy choice is directly contradicted, since the author concedes the figure is accurate. The claim that audiences prefer new music is stronger than anything the author says, and the small rooms detail is about scheduling of new works, not about when the halls were built.

7. 7. Translators speak of a text's grain, the resistance it offers to being carried across. A sentence with little grain slides into the new language and leaves no mark, and the reader forgets there was ever another version. High grain does the opposite. Idioms sit awkwardly, rhythms refuse to line up, and the translator has to decide whether to sand the surface smooth or to leave the roughness visible as a sign that the reader is a guest in someone else's house. In the passage, to sand the surface smooth most nearly means to:

   • A. Shorten the text so that it reads more quickly
   • B. Choose a more literal, word for word rendering
   • C. Make the translation read as though it had been written in the new language
   • D. Correct factual errors that appear in the original
   Ver respuesta y explicación

   Respuesta: C. Make the translation read as though it had been written in the new language

   This is a foundations of comprehension question about the meaning of a phrase in context. The alternative given in the same sentence, leaving the roughness visible so the reader feels foreign, fixes the meaning of the other option by contrast. Word for word is the opposite move, since literalism is what makes idioms sit awkwardly. Shortening and correcting errors are both true things translators sometimes do, but neither is what this sentence sets against visible roughness.

8. 8. Complete the sentence.

   Ethnographers who spend years in one village often report a discovery that embarrasses their training: the informants have theories too. They explain their own kinship rules, and the explanations are neither naive nor identical to the anthropologist's. Treating those accounts as raw data to be interpreted, rather than as _____ to be argued with, quietly reserves the work of thinking for the visitor. The fieldworker's authority then rests less on evidence than on _____.

   Opciones para el hueco 1: claims, rituals, errors, artifacts

   Opciones para el hueco 2: fluency, position, patience

   Ver respuesta y explicación

   Respuesta: claims, position

   This is a reasoning within the text question, since both blanks turn on how the author's argument is built. The contrast is between raw data, which you interpret, and something you can disagree with, and only claims can be argued with. The second blank follows from reserving the thinking for the visitor: if the informants' theories are ruled out in advance, what is left holding up the authority is who the fieldworker is rather than what the evidence shows.

9. 9. Cities preserve buildings for two different reasons that are often confused. One is aesthetic: the facade is worth looking at, and losing it would make the street poorer. The other is evidentiary: the building is the only surviving record of how a group of people lived, and no drawing or photograph replaces standing inside it. The second reason can protect an ugly building. It can also fail to protect a beautiful one, if a dozen near identical examples survive elsewhere in better condition. Based on the author's second reason, preservation would be most strongly justified for which of the following?

   • A. A handsome nineteenth century bank facade of a type found in many cities
   • B. A modern office tower that architects admire and photographers visit often
   • C. A ruined chapel already recorded in a complete set of measured drawings
   • D. A plain, poorly built shed that is the last standing example of a migrant labor camp
   Ver respuesta y explicación

   Respuesta: D. A plain, poorly built shed that is the last standing example of a migrant labor camp

   This is a reasoning beyond the text question, applying the author's distinction to new cases. The evidentiary reason turns on being the only surviving record, which the shed is and the common bank facade is not. The office tower is defended by the aesthetic reason, which the question does not ask about. The chapel is the case the author explicitly weakens, since full documentation is what the evidentiary reason cares about.

10. 10. The great man account of scientific change survives because it is easy to narrate. A single mind sees what everyone else missed, and the textbook gets a chapter title. Against it stands the pattern of simultaneous discovery: calculus, natural selection, the telephone, each arriving from more than one direction within a few years. If the problem, the instruments and the shared literature were ripe, the argument runs, some competent person was going to solve it, and the name attached is an accident of the calendar. Which finding, if true, would most weaken the argument made against the great man account?

    • A. Several celebrated cases of simultaneous discovery turn out to be separated by more than a decade and to differ substantially in content.
    • B. Many important discoveries were made by research teams rather than by individuals.
    • C. Textbooks devote more space to the biography of scientists than to their methods.
    • D. Scientific instruments improved unusually quickly during the nineteenth century.
    Ver respuesta y explicación

    Respuesta: A. Several celebrated cases of simultaneous discovery turn out to be separated by more than a decade and to differ substantially in content.

    This is a reasoning beyond the text question of the weaken type. The case against the great man account rests entirely on simultaneous discovery, so removing the simultaneity removes the evidence. Teams instead of individuals cuts against the lone genius, so it strengthens the same side. The textbook choice is about how history gets written, not about how discovery happens, and faster instruments support the ripeness claim the author is defending.

11. 11. Museums report record attendance and conclude that public interest in art is rising. Attendance counts admissions, though, and not interest. A traveling blockbuster, a free evening, a cruise ship in the harbor and a good lobby cafe all raise the number without anyone looking at a painting a moment longer. If the claim is about interest, the evidence has to survive the removal of every reason to walk into a museum that is not the art. By the standard the author sets, which findings would strengthen the museums' conclusion? Select all that apply.

    Marca todas las que correspondan.

    • A. Attendance rose in years with no blockbuster exhibition and no change in admission pricing.
    • B. The average time visitors spent in front of individual works rose along with attendance.
    • C. Museum cafes and gift shops reported higher revenue per visitor.
    • D. Admissions grew fastest in the cities that had opened new cruise terminals.
    • E. Membership renewals by residents of the museums' own cities rose over the same period.
    Ver respuesta y explicación

    Respuesta: A. Attendance rose in years with no blockbuster exhibition and no change in admission pricing., B. The average time visitors spent in front of individual works rose along with attendance., E. Membership renewals by residents of the museums' own cities rose over the same period.

    This is a reasoning beyond the text question about new evidence. The author's test is whether the rise survives once the non-art reasons are stripped out, so growth without a blockbuster or a price change, longer looking, and repeat commitment from locals all pass it. Higher spending in the cafe is the author's own example of a confounding attraction, and growth concentrated near cruise terminals is the tourism explanation rather than the interest one.

12. 12. Historians of the plague once wrote as though the mortality figures spoke for themselves. A third of a population dies, labor grows scarce, wages rise, serfdom weakens. The chain looks mechanical. But wages rose in England and did not rise across much of eastern Europe, where landlords met the same shortage by binding peasants more tightly to the land. Demography set the problem. It did not write the answer. What decided the outcome was who already held the power to respond, and that varied by region. The two short sentences, demography set the problem and it did not write the answer, serve mainly to:

    • A. Concede that the mortality figures are unreliable
    • B. State the general principle that the eastern European contrast is offered to support
    • C. Introduce a new topic that the passage then abandons
    • D. Summarize the mechanical chain described in the opening sentences
    Ver respuesta y explicación

    Respuesta: B. State the general principle that the eastern European contrast is offered to support

    This is a reasoning within the text question about the function of a sentence. The England and eastern Europe contrast is the evidence, and these two sentences are the lesson drawn from it, which the final sentence then spells out. The author never questions the figures themselves, only what follows from them. Nothing is abandoned, and the sentences reject the mechanical chain rather than summarizing it.

13. 13. Complete the sentence.

    Critics of the term folk art point out that it names a position rather than a style. The objects it gathers have almost nothing in common with one another, and everything in common in how they arrived at the museum: made outside the academies, collected by outsiders, exhibited without the maker's own account of the work. The category is therefore best read as a record of _____ rather than as a description of what the objects are.

    Opciones para el hueco 1: technique, geography, reception, chronology

    Ver respuesta y explicación

    Respuesta: reception

    This is a reasoning within the text question, since the blank has to match the argument the paragraph just made. Every shared feature the author lists is about how the objects were found, collected and displayed, which is reception rather than anything in the objects. Technique is ruled out by the sentence saying the objects have nothing in common with one another, and neither geography nor chronology appears in the list at all.

14. 14. Public apologies for historical wrongs are often dismissed as cheap, on the grounds that the speaker risks nothing and the dead gain nothing. The objection assumes that the audience is the dead. It is not. An apology issued by a state is a statement about what that state will now count as a wrong, made in front of the people who have to live under its judgments. Whether it is cheap depends on what it commits the speaker to afterward, and that is a question about the future rather than the past. The author's primary purpose is to:

    • A. Show that state apologies reliably lead to concrete reparations
    • B. Argue that historical wrongs cannot fairly be judged by present standards
    • C. Reject a common objection by showing that it misidentifies who is being addressed
    • D. Describe the wording that official apologies typically use
    Ver respuesta y explicación

    Respuesta: C. Reject a common objection by showing that it misidentifies who is being addressed

    This is a foundations of comprehension question about the author's purpose. The structure gives it away: an objection is stated, then the assumption inside it is named and denied, then the real audience is identified. Reliably leading to reparations is far stronger than the passage, which says only that the answer depends on later commitments. Judging the past by present standards is a different debate, and no actual wording is described.

15. 15. A canon is not a list of the best books. It is a list of the books a culture has agreed to keep arguing about. That is why a work can enter the canon by being attacked, and why a novel everyone admires and nobody rereads slips quietly out of it. The test is not praise. The test is continued use: does anyone still have to answer this book in order to say what they think? By the author's test, which of the following would count as evidence that a work belongs to the canon? Select all that apply.

    Marca todas las que correspondan.

    • A. Scholars publish sustained refutations of the book decades after it first appeared.
    • B. The book won the most prestigious literary prize of its year.
    • C. New writers structure their own books as replies to it.
    • D. The book outsold every other novel of its decade.
    • E. Critics who dislike the book still assign it so that they can argue with it.
    Ver respuesta y explicación

    Respuesta: A. Scholars publish sustained refutations of the book decades after it first appeared., C. New writers structure their own books as replies to it., E. Critics who dislike the book still assign it so that they can argue with it.

    This is a reasoning beyond the text question, applying a stated criterion to new cases. The author's test is continued use, and refutation, imitation in the form of reply, and hostile teaching are all cases of people having to answer the book. A prize and high sales are both forms of praise or popularity at a single moment, and the passage separates those from the test on purpose, since a book everyone admires can still drop out.

Qué te pide de verdad la sección CARS del MCAT

CARS es la sección del MCAT que no evalúa nada de ciencias. Te da 9 textos y 53 preguntas en 90 minutos, lo que sale a unos diez minutos por texto contando las preguntas. Los textos tienen varios cientos de palabras cada uno y vienen de las humanidades y las ciencias sociales: filosofía, ética, historia, crítica literaria, estudios culturales, historia del arte y música. Todo lo necesario para responder está dentro del texto. Si una pregunta parece pedir un dato de alguna de tus asignaturas, es señal de que has metido algo que el texto nunca dijo. Como las demás secciones, CARS se puntúa de 118 a 132, y las cuatro puntuaciones de sección suman un total de entre 472 y 528. Los detalles de formato sí se actualizan, así que trata el esquema publicado por la propia AAMC como la autoridad y compruébalo antes de fiarte de cualquier número de una página de preparación, incluida esta.

La AAMC clasifica las preguntas de CARS en tres categorías, y saber cuál tienes delante cambia cómo respondes. Fundamentos de comprensión, alrededor del 30 por ciento de la sección, pregunta qué dice el texto: la idea principal, el significado de una expresión en su contexto, el tono del autor. Razonamiento dentro del texto, otro 30 por ciento más o menos, pregunta cómo está construido el texto: qué hace ahí un párrafo, qué dio por supuesto el autor sin decirlo, si el apoyo que ofrece basta para sostener la afirmación. Razonamiento más allá del texto, alrededor del 40 por ciento, es el grupo más grande y el que la gente subestima. Te da algo que el texto nunca mencionó, un caso nuevo, una prueba nueva, un campo distinto por completo, y te pide que lleves ahí el argumento del autor o que digas qué lo debilitaría.

Dos cosas de CARS sorprenden. La primera es que leer mucho ayuda menos de lo esperado y tener opiniones fuertes no ayuda nada. Un tema familiar te tienta a responder de memoria, y un texto que defiende algo que te parece equivocado te tienta a responder desde el desacuerdo. Las dos cosas cuestan puntos. La segunda es que las respuestas incorrectas no son aleatorias. La mayoría están cerca: demasiado extremas para lo que el autor dijo de verdad, ciertas en el mundo pero nunca afirmadas en el texto, acertadas en la mitad de la frase, o afirmaciones correctas que responden a una pregunta que nadie hizo. Aprenderte esas cuatro formas vale más que aprenderte cualquier contenido, porque vuelven en todos y cada uno de los textos.

Cómo usar esta muestra

Esta muestra te da 15 preguntas repartidas en 15 extractos cortos, así que cambia la resistencia con textos largos de la sección real por cobertura de los tipos de pregunta. Cada extracto tiene entre 70 y 110 palabras y lo escribió el equipo de StudyPDF en el registro que usa CARS. No son textos reales del MCAT ni ítems de la AAMC. La mezcla sigue las categorías reales: algunas preguntas piden qué dice el texto, otras cómo está construido el argumento, y otras te dan un caso nuevo o un hallazgo nuevo y te piden razonar con él. Tres preguntas son de completar huecos, donde la palabra que falta es la que sostiene la postura del autor, y eso va bien para practicar fijarte en los matices, los condicionantes y la diferencia entre una afirmación rotunda y una medida.

Hazla de una sentada, sin apuntes y sin releer eternamente. Después lee todas las explicaciones, también las de las preguntas que acertaste, porque una respuesta correcta a la que llegaste por el camino equivocado no se repite. Cada explicación señala la frase que decide la pregunta y dice por qué fallan las demás opciones. Sigue la forma de tus fallos, no la cantidad. Fallar dos respuestas demasiado extremas es un problema distinto de fallar dos respuestas fuera del alcance del texto, y las soluciones son distintas. Lo primero significa que estás redondeando al autor hacia arriba, leyendo una afirmación prudente como si fuera rotunda. Lo segundo significa que estás respondiendo desde lo que sabes en vez de desde la página que tienes delante.

Más allá de una muestra, la gente mejora en CARS con volumen más revisión, y la revisión es la parte que hace el trabajo. Haz un texto y, antes de comprobar nada, escribe una frase que diga cuál era el punto del autor y otra que diga contra qué argumentaba. Si no puedes escribir esas dos frases, los fallos fueron fallos de lectura, no de pregunta. Lee ensayo difícil sobre temas que no te importan, porque es lo más parecido a un texto de CARS que puedes hacer a diario. Con el tiempo practica secciones completas cronometradas, porque la sección es en parte una prueba de resistencia y nueve textos seguidos no se parecen en nada a nueve textos repartidos en una semana.

Cómo StudyPDF crea práctica de CARS con tu material

Quince preguntas te enseñan qué hábitos de lectura te faltan. No pueden construir la resistencia que pide la sección real, y ningún set fijo de preguntas sigue funcionando una vez te sabes las respuestas. CARS es la sección donde más importa tener textos nuevos, porque releer un texto del que ya sabes la respuesta no enseña casi nada.

StudyPDF trabaja con el material que traes tú. Sube tu libro de preparación del MCAT, un cuaderno de CARS, tus propias lecturas de clase o cualquier artículo denso con el que quieras practicar, y Bo, el agente de estudio, crea preguntas de práctica con esas páginas exactas. Cada explicación cita de dónde viene la respuesta, así que puedes volver directo a la fuente cuando una opción parezca discutible. Puedes generar sets nuevos tantas veces como quieras y apuntarlos a una sola destreza, por ejemplo las suposiciones no dichas o las preguntas de debilitar, y así entrenas la categoría en la que sigues perdiendo puntos.

No necesitas ningún documento. Si no tienes nada que subir, di solo un tema, por ejemplo los argumentos sobre la ética de la memoria o la literatura de viajes del siglo XIX, y Bo escribe el texto y las preguntas con eso. Empezar es gratis. Todo lo de esta página es práctica de examen escrita por el equipo de StudyPDF a partir de las categorías de pregunta de CARS publicadas. No es orientación médica, no es material de examen real, y StudyPDF no está afiliada a la AAMC ni a ningún creador de exámenes.