Table Of ContentGAMSAT
Graduate Medical School Admissions Test
Practice Test 3
First edition
Contents
Introduction 3
Section I: Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences 4
Section II: Written Communication 38
Section III: Reasoning in Biological and Physical Sciences 40
Notes on Assessment of Written Communication 91
Answers to Multiple Choice Questions 92
Acknowledgements 93
First edition 2017 by the
Australian Council for Educational Research
Copyright © 2017 Australian Council for Educational Research
Introduction
The GAMSAT Practice Test 3 contains materials and questions equivalent to the full Graduate Medical School
Admissions Test, and will take approximately five and a half hours to complete if worked through under test
conditions.
Questions contained in Practice Test 3 are grouped, as in the live test, into three sections:
Section I Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences
Section II Written Communication
Section III Reasoning in Biological and Physical Sciences
As in the live test, the timing of each Section is as follows:
Section I 75 questions 100 minutes
Section II 2 questions 60 minutes
Section III 110 questions 170 minutes
You are encouraged to devote an entire day to the completion of Practice Test 3, taking a one-hour break before
commencing Section III. You are strongly advised not to check your answers against the keys provided for Sections
I and III until you have completed all three sections of the test. It would be beneficial to score your work and
analyse any errors on the following day.
By working through Practice Test 3 you will become familiar with the level of difficulty and the kind of materials
found in the live test. You will also accustom yourself to the number of questions it is necessary to complete in
the given timeframe. These questions should enable you to gain useful experience in the techniques of answering
multiple choice questions.
The writing prompts provided for Section II give you an opportunity to complete two writing tasks in a limited
time. Notes on the assessment of GAMSAT Written Communication are provided on page 91.
More general advice on how you can prepare for GAMSAT is contained in the GAMSAT Information Booklet,
available from the address or website below:
GAMSAT OFFICE
ACER
Private Bag 55
Camberwell VIC 3124
Australia
Email: [email protected]
Web: https://gamsat.acer.org
3
Section I
Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences
Questions 1 – 5
In the following passage Sigmund Freud describes his idea of ‘dream-work’.
From the comparison of the remembered manifest dream-content with the latent dream-thoughts
thus discovered there arises the conception of ‘dream-work’. The entire sum of the transforming
processes which have changed the latent dream-thought into the manifest dream is called the dream-
work. The astonishment which formerly the dream evoked in us is now perceived to be due to the
dream-work. 5
The function of the dream-work may be described in the following manner. A structure of
thoughts, mostly very complicated, which has been built up during the day and not brought to
settlement – a day remnant – clings firmly even during night to the energy which it had assumed – the
underlying centre of interest – and thus threatens to disturb sleep. This day remnant is transformed
into a dream by the dream-work and in this way rendered harmless to sleep. But in order to make 10
possible its employment by the dream-work, this day remnant must be capable of being cast into the
form of a wish, a condition that is not difficult to fulfil. The wish emanating from the dream-thoughts
forms the first step and later on the nucleus of the dream. Experience gained from analyses – not the
theory of the dream – teaches us that with children a fond wish left from the waking state suffices
to evoke a dream, which is coherent and senseful, but almost always short, and easily recognizable 15
as a ‘wish fulfillment’. In the case of adults the universally valid condition for the dream-creating
wish seems to be that the latter should appear foreign to conscious thinking, that is, it should be a
repressed wish, or that it should supply consciousness with reinforcement from unknown sources.
Without the assumption of the unconscious activity in the sense used above, I should be at a loss
to develop further the theory of dreams and to explain the material gleaned from experience in 20
dream-analyses. The action of this unconscious wish upon the logical conscious material of dream-
thoughts now results in the dream. The latter is thereby drawn down into the unconscious, as it were,
or to speak more precisely, it is exposed to a treatment which usually takes place at the level of
unconscious mental activity, and which is characteristic of this mental level. Only from the results of
the ‘dream-work’ have we thus far learned to know the qualities of this unconscious mental activity 25
and its differentiation from the ‘fore-conscious’ which is capable of consciousness.
1 In dream-work
A latent and manifest content are separated.
B latent and manifest content are reconciled.
C manifest content is changed to latent content.
D latent content is changed to manifest content.
4
2 The latent content of a dream is best described as
A the residue of the day.
B the fore-conscious.
C an expressed wish.
D the unconscious.
3 The function of dream-work is to
A repress wishes.
B settle thoughts from the day.
C intensify thoughts from the day.
D bring energy into the unconscious.
4 Dream-work casts a ‘day remnant’ (line 8) in the form of a wish so as to
A disturb sleep.
B create energy.
C facilitate sleep.
D create a day remnant.
5 A ‘dream-creating wish’ (lines 16 and 17) for an adult is
A evident.
B disguised.
C fragmented.
D indecipherable.
5
Question 6
The following diagrams present performance assessments of English hospitals for:
• England as a whole
• three individual hospitals (I, II, III)
• mining and industrial areas
• prospering areas.
Health Health
improvement improvement
Fair Health Fair Health
access outcomes access outcomes
Effective Effective
delivery Patient/care delivery Patient/care
of appropriate experience of appropriate experience
care care
Efficiency Efficiency
England England
Prospering areas Hospital I
Mining and industrial areas Hospital II
Hospital III
6 Which hospital probably focuses on caring for the terminally ill?
A I
B II
C III
D indeterminable
6
Question 7
If you suspect a man, don’t employ him, and if you employ him, don’t suspect him.
Chinese proverb
7 This statement suggests that
A suspicion can damage even the trustworthy.
B employment is an endorsement of employees.
C employers have to be wary of their employees.
D employees have to be wary of their employers.
Question 8
‘Who can refute a sneer?’
William Paley
8 This statement implies that
A sneering is powerful and cannot be reasoned away.
B it takes skilful reasoning to disarm a sneer.
C sneering is a powerful form of reasoning.
D refutation provokes sneering.
7
Questions 9 – 13
The following four poems are all concerned with World War I.
I Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries1
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended; 5
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
A.E. Housman, 1922
1 Mercenaries: an insult directed at British soldiers, who were paid volunteers, by German soldiers, who were
unpaid
II ‘They’
The Bishop tells us: ‘When the boys come back
They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought
In a just cause: they lead the last attack
On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought
New right to breed an honourable race, 5
They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.’
‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply.
‘For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;
Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;
And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find 10
A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.’
And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of God are strange!’
Siegfried Sassoon, 1917
8
