GRE Verbal; growing a reading habit part – 2

Hello readers, here I am with another article regarding reading habit.

In one of my previous articles of growing functional vocabulary, I discussed very thoroughly about growing a reading habit. Here I am, showing how exactly a functional reading habit can be manifested into something of a substantial preparation strategy for verbal aptitude. GRE is a game of skill and the only chance anyone has into having a win in this game is to acquire sufficient level of skills which will be functional and useful during the exam. And to do so, growing a reading habit happens to be one of the most vital ways to do so.Let us notice the following passage and take a deep dive into it with a verbal point of view. Today I have brought here an article with a bit subjective perspective. It is seen that sometimes in GRE, not only in reading passages but also in other verbal parts, subjective matters emerge very frequently. Therefore I would like to strongly urge to the readers that they go through the entire passage with perseverance and try to make the best out of it.

THE MAIN PASSAGE

[Source: Smithsonian Magazine]

The Bahamas were spared this past weekend when Tropical Storm Humberto’s 70 mph winds just brushed by the islands. Only two weeks earlier, they were not so fortunate as Hurricane Dorian caused such havoc to the country that the full extent of the damage has yet to be accounted. The Category 5 behemoth rampaged through the upper Bahamas with record-setting wind-speeds, then lethally paused its forward motion over Grand Bahama for more than a day, allowing its destructive eyewall to spin in place. The storm’s 185 miles-per-hour winds splintered homes and whipped up a storm surge that swallowed the land. An international effort is searching for the 1,300 people (as of this writing) still missing. The level of destruction is reminiscent of Hurricane Maria’s landfall on Dominica in 2017, which killed 65, damaged or destroyed 90 percent of the island’s structures, and prompted a fifth of the island to migrate in its aftermath. Maria also tore through Puerto Rico, causing flash floods, destroying homes and completely crashing the power grid for months. The initial death toll of 64 was later expanded to nearly 3,000 as people died from the lingering effects the storm caused. An estimated 130,000 Puerto Ricans left the island in its aftermath.

In the past four Atlantic hurricane seasons, five Category 5 hurricanes have formed; the vulnerability of these islands has never seemed starker. Can these communities recover and survive such an uncertain future? If history is any guide, they will, as many times as they need to. Hurricanes have ravaged the Caribbean for millennia. The cycles of activity have varied, but the massive storms have always presented a threat. Centuries ago, long before the advent of weather forecasting, the storms in and around the Caribbean inflicted so much catastrophic damage that it seems remarkable people remained. But they did, and they rebuilt. Now, as we enter an uncertain era marked by a warming planet, the resilience of these communities will be tested again and again.

For the indigenous Taíno and Carib people who populated the Caribbean islands in the pre-Columbian exchange years, the storms were part of the cycle of their seasons—feared, but expected. The Carib, from the Lesser Antilles, were skilled navigators on the water and scheduled the launch of their raiding party canoes for early winter, past what is recognized today as the June-to-November hurricane season, notes Yale history professor Stuart Schwartz in Sea of Storms, his history of Caribbean hurricanes. “There’s even evidence Europeans relied on Indians to tell them when hurricanes were coming,” Schwartz said. The indigenous islanders read signs in the way birds and fish behaved, the color of the sun, and abrupt shifts in the breeze. “The Indians are so skillful that they know two or three or four days beforehand the coming of it,” one Englishman wrote in 1638.

Scientists still marvel at a Taíno statuette, believed to be the god Huracán—from which we get the word hurricane—found in Cuba by scholar Fernando Ortiz. The ceramic sculpture depicts a head with two arms sweeping in counterclockwise direction, mimicking a hurricane’s spiral winds. “How they may have made this deduction remains mysterious,” writes MIT hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel in his history of hurricanes Divine Wind. The storms are far too big for humans to perceive from the ground. It wasn’t until much later that Europeans deduced the storm’s counterclockwise circular wind pattern. Perhaps they inferred this from the pattern of destruction, or from observing small funnel clouds over the water called windspouts, he suggests. While the hurricane’s fearsome vortex winds may have been well known to the Taíno and Caribs, they were new to the colonizing Europeans in the 16th century. Because the early colonists had no name for them, researchers scouring diaries and records look for the telltale description of winds “coming from all points on the compass,” according to Schwartz.’

More often than not, the storms caught the European colonizers off-guard, with cataclysmic results. Christopher Columbus had experienced a hurricane or tropical storm in 1495 near Hispaniola, the first known recorded. Seven years later, on his fourth voyage from Spain, Columbus stopped in what is now the Dominican Republic. In port, he observed signs of an approaching cyclone and warned the island’s governor, who was about to send 30 ships back to Spain, including one carrying gold pilfered by Columbus. The governor, a political enemy, ignored the warning and ordered the fleet to sail. While Columbus took his own ships to the lee side of the island for protection, where they survived relatively unscathed, the ensuing hurricane sank nearly all of the governor’s ships.

From there, hurricanes themselves would reshape the wars among European powers to control the New World. In the middle of the 16th century, both Spain and France had footholds on the Florida peninsula and neither was willing to share. The French had a settlement along the St. Johns River near what is now Jacksonville, called Fort Caroline; the Spanish were not far away in St. Augustine. In 1565 Spain tried to attack France by sea, but a hurricane scattered the fleet. The French counterattack was thwarted by another storm. Finally, the Spanish marched over land to take the French by surprise at Fort Caroline, winning control of Florida. Over and over again, the storms intervened in the affairs of men.

In 1640, a hurricane destroyed a Dutch fleet as it sailed to attack Havana, Cuba, allowing the island to remain in Spanish possession. In 1666, 17 British ships were destroyed by a hurricane in the Lesser Antilles, allowing the French to retain control of Guadeloupe. In each of these tempests, hundreds, even thousands, of lives were lost. But it was one month in 1780 that still stands as the deadliest on record. By then, the Caribbean had a thriving economy based on sugar, rum and other products, and its population had grown as enslaved laborers and others were imported to do the work. On October 3, the Savanna-la-Mar hurricane landed on Jamaica’s shores, whipping up a storm surge so swiftly that people gathering outside to observe the clouds were swept away. The storm ripped through the port city of Savanna-la-Mar, the village of Lucea and Montego Bay. It cruised northwestward after destroying much of Jamaica, crossing Cuba and the Bahamas. Along the way it flattened sugar cane fields, crushed homes and buildings, and sank ships by the dozen, including a British transport ship with hundreds of Spanish prisoners aboard. In all, 3,000 people were killed by this storm. “Not a tree, or bush, or cane was to be seen: universal desolation prevailed,” wrote British clergyman George Bridges.

One week later, while the residents of Jamaica, Cuba and the Bahamas were still digging out, a second storm, so deadly it still holds the record as the most lethal Atlantic hurricane recorded, swept up from the south. On October 10, it struck the Lesser Antilles. The storm leveled Barbados, destroying nearly the entirety of the island’s sugar plantations and rum production, and killing 4,300 people. It tore through St. Vincent, St. Eustatius, St. Lucia and Martinique, where storm surges swept whole villages into the sea. It continued on a lethal path up to Bermuda before heading out to sea on October 18. The storm severely crippled the British navy in the region, weakening the empire at a crucial point in the American Revolution. In total, the storm directly killed 22,000 people. Even as the Great Hurricane of 1780, as it came to be known, was assaulting the outer islands, a third cyclone whipped up off Jamaica and sped west into the Gulf of Mexico six days later. It is known as Solano’s hurricane, after the Spanish Admiral Don José Solano y Bote, who was at that time leading an armada of 64 ships and 4,000 soldiers to attack the British in Pensacola in the fight to control Florida. The storm skirted Cuba then hit the Gulf and made landfall in the United States, killing roughly 2,000 people along its journey. In total, these three hurricanes, only weeks apart, were responsible for roughly 27,000 deaths. The cost of sugar and rum shot up in Europe and America, and it would take years to rebuild the destroyed economies.

But they did rebuild, which is the point. The infrequency of hurricanes—some years you have them, some you don’t—and the lucrative industries of the Caribbean made it worth the risk. The sugarcane grew back, ships and homes were hammered back together. No “normal” exists when living with the threat of hurricanes; they are unpredictable and inconsistent. The mechanism by which a low-pressure system blows up into a tropical cyclone is not even completely understood. But the question today for the Bahamas and elsewhere is whether the hurricanes we do experience are going to be more powerful, intense and dangerous because of our new environment. While science can’t tell us if global warming “caused” a specific hurricane or a more active season, the impact of a warming world is undeniable. Ocean temperatures are rising, and warmer water is what gives a hurricane energy. Warmer air holds more moisture, allowing hurricanes to drop more rain. Studies indicate that all aspects of hurricane development are being affected, from the weakening of air currents guiding the storms, thus allowing them to wobble and pause as Dorian did over the Bahamas, to an increasing rate of rapid intensification during which storms strengthen quickly and unexpectedly.

Given their history, it’s far too soon to write off the Bahamas, or any of the islands. Humans live with extreme weather and adapt. But Hurricane Dorian, and the outlook for future storms, does prompt the question of whether we can adapt fast enough. The endless cycles of rebuilding helped shape society; after a big blow, many small farmers couldn’t afford to rebuild and would sell their property to large plantations and migrate, helping consolidate land with the very rich. “The storms contribute to that history of inequality in the region,” Schwartz noted. Schwartz also points out in his book that the Europeans initially attributed hurricanes to divine punishment for man’s sinful ways. But as we came to better understand the science, we saw them as natural phenomena. Now with today’s comprehension on climate change, Schwartz argues we have “once again placed the onus for natural disasters on human error, but this time on human decisions and policies, not on sin or moral failures.”

WAYS TO ANALYZE THE PASSAGE

There are several steps by which the passage can be analyzed:

First, the list of vocabulary;

It is quite obvious that the passage is almost filled with words that may be unknown or unheard of. However, you better speak for yourself, because I know about the most of the words here, just kidding, this may be as new to me as you all guyz. After all, I am merely a human just like you all. So here are the word list:

Havoc
Accounted
Behemoth
Rampaged
Eye-wall (s)
Splintered
Storm Surge
Reminiscent
Lingering
Starker
Ravaged
Inflicted
Resilience
Indigenous
Statuette
Counterclockwise
Mimicking
Windspout (s)
Inferred
Vortex
Telltale
Off-gaurd
Cataclysmic
Pilfered
Lee-side
Unscathed
Footholds
Thwarted
Tempests
Northwestward (s)
Desolation
Armada
Skirted
Landfall
Wobble
Onus

Here is the list of functional vocabularies, there are some subjective words, beside which I have denoted with as “s” in the bracket. There may be some words that you may know already, nevertheless, these words should be the ones that you should look for.

Second, look for the sentence structure;

If you look into the passage, I have underlined some sentences or part(s) of sentence which should be observed very thoroughly. Because not only that they will be handy in case of learning new structures of sentence and applying them into the writing part, contemporary sentence structures like these are also very much common in case of both Sentence Correction and Sentence Completion of the verbal part of GRE.

Third, make questions by yourselves from the passage and try to answer them all;

This part is going to be very much effective in case of reading comprehension part of GRE verbal. Here are some question samples, which you should be able to make by yourself, if you want a GRE level preparation:

What should be the appropriate title of the passage?
How many storms did the author mention in the passage that had direct military effects on European regimes?
Who is the criminal in the passage, the Governor or Colombus?
Describe the rout of any of the storms mentioned in the passage.
What should be the near-about round figure in number of people who have been either directly or indirectly harmed by the storms of Caribbean ?
How many scholars have been referred in this passage?
What is the mean velocity of all the storms mentioned in the passage?
What is your opinion on the relation between the global warming and the way hurricane is occurring; what should be a positive environmental change to reverse the effects of hurricane?

——- and so on!!!

Now , the above are only some of the sample questions that I came up with. There may be thousands more of them, and the candidates have to find almost all of them by themselves. If they can do so, then their preparation would be GRE level and their scores will be higher than that of expected; win-win situation.

For more update, please contact me at this email ID: renewable.and.green@gmail.com

That’s it for today. In my next GRE related article, I will discuss some quantitative analysis related topics. Till then, happy reading!!!