Question 1
The word "exculpate" most nearly means:
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B - To clear of blame or guilt
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The Philadelphia Police Exam exam has 118 questions and runs 35 minutes.
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The word "exculpate" most nearly means:
Correct answer: B - To clear of blame or guilt
A supervisor describes an officer's review of a case file as "cursory." The review was:
Correct answer: A - Hasty and lacking attention to detail
Which of the following words means "to forbid or prohibit"?
Correct answer: C - Proscribe
A witness described as "reticent" is:
Correct answer: D - Reserved and uncommunicative
Based on its prefix and root, the word "contravene" most nearly means:
Correct answer: B - To act or go against
Read the passage and answer the question that follows. For decades, shoreline retreat along the Atlantic coast was explained almost entirely by rising sea level. The reasoning was intuitive: as water rises, it advances landward. Beginning in the 1970s, however, researchers who measured sediment flux systematically found the relationship to be far less direct. Two stretches of coast experiencing identical rates of sea-level rise could behave in opposite ways - one retreating rapidly, the other holding steady or even advancing seaward. The difference lay in supply. Where rivers and longshore currents delivered sand faster than waves removed it, beaches persisted. Where dams, jetties, and dredging interrupted that delivery, beaches thinned and retreated regardless of what the water was doing. Sea level remains a genuine driver, but it now appears to set the background condition rather than determine the outcome. The main idea of the passage is best expressed as:
Correct answer: D - Sediment supply, rather than sea level alone, governs shoreline retreat.
Read the passage and answer the question that follows. The decennial census has never been a simple headcount. From the first enumeration in 1790, census takers were asked to sort the population into categories, and those categories have shifted with each administration's assumptions about what mattered. Occupational data appeared, disappeared, and returned. Questions about ancestry were rewritten repeatedly. What is often overlooked is that these revisions were not merely bureaucratic housekeeping. Because federal funds and legislative apportionment are allocated on census figures, a change in how a category is defined can redirect resources between regions without a single person moving. Statisticians who study the record therefore treat the census less as a photograph of the population than as a document shaped by the questions its designers chose to ask. It can be inferred from the passage that a change in census category definitions could:
Correct answer: A - Alter the distribution of federal funding without any change in population.
Read the passage and answer the question that follows. Critics who first encountered Berthe Morisot's canvases in the 1870s struggled to describe them. The brushwork was loose to the point of appearing unfinished, and the domestic subjects - a woman at a mirror, a child in a garden - seemed slight beside the historical scenes then in fashion. Yet reviewers returned again and again to the same observation: the paintings were arresting. Something in the handling of light held the eye far longer than the modest subject matter seemed to warrant. A generation later, that quality would be named as the achievement of the movement rather than an oddity of it. As used in the passage, the word "arresting" most nearly means:
Correct answer: C - Strikingly impressive
The City of Philadelphia administers the entry-level Police Officer Recruit examination (civil service class 6A01) in which format?
Correct answer: D - A Modified Training and Experience Evaluation with no scheduled written test
A candidate has been approved and placed on the Police Officer Recruit eligible list. Which step comes next in the Philadelphia Police hiring process?
Correct answer: C - Orientation, including the reading and physical fitness tests
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