MCAT CARS (Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills)

MCAT CARS Passage Content Categories

Below is the breakdown of various Humanities and Social Science subjects that are covered in the MCAT exam.

*A passage on Studies of Diverse Cultures can be classified as either Humanities or Social Sciences depending on the focus of the text's discussion.

Question Types: What They Are and How They Are Distributed in the Test

The types of questions presented in this section correspond to the reasoning skills being assessed. They are also distributed in the exam as follows:

MCAT CARS questions will not only test your comprehension of the text but also your ability to analyze and use reason and logic in order to make sense of the intricate concepts discussed by the authors. You will also be asked to apply them - in some cases, reinterpret them - in new contexts and situations.

MCAT CARS Sample Passage and Questions by Gold Standard

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it.

It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

Guided by these considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I have attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense, haphazard visions—that is to say, my choice of subjects has been determined not by the desire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motives of convenience and of art. It has been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain. It would have been futile to hope to tell even a precis of the truth about the Victorian age, for the shortest precis must fill innumerable volumes. But, in the lives of an ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I have sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth which took my fancy and lay to my hand.

I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interest from the strictly biographical, no less than from the historical point of view. Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes—which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men.

With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One is tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed by that functionary as the final item of his job. The studies in this book are indebted, in more ways than one, to such works—works which certainly deserve the name of Standard Biographies.

For they have provided me not only with much indispensable information, but with something even more precious—an example. How many lessons are to be learned from them! But it is hardly necessary to particularise. To preserve, for instance, a becoming brevity—a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant—that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. That is what I have aimed at in this book—to lay bare the facts of some cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a Master—“Je n'impose rien; je ne propose rien: j'expose.” [I impose nothing; I propose nothing; I expose.] Wilson, A. N. (1990). Eminent Victorians. New York: W.W. Norton.

MCAT CARS Sample Question 1

According to the passage information, which trait is necessary for a historical biographer?

• A. The ability to write artistically
• B. The ability to convey information concisely
• C. An appreciation for the time period and subjects
• D. The ability to uncover new information
• Submit answer

MCAT CARS Sample Question 2

Which of the following statements would the author of the passage most probably agree with?

• A. There is little point in writing about the Victorian era
• B. English biographical tradition has massively decreased in quality
• C. Strictly factual accounts of people’s lives are not useful
• D. The Victorian era was uneventful
• Submit answer

Access 18 sample MCAT CARS practice questions with helpful explanations through our free MCAT practice test.