GRE paper based TC question

GRE Verbal Problem Solving
1

Hi everyone,
Can someone help me solve the first blank of the following question using @gregmat method?
I did the second blank and eliminated the last option of blank one.
Quite confused between “a debased” and “a normative”

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2

using gregji’s method. only use information from sentences given. we have haunted, ghost, paradigm. only these words will help us solve first blank. hopefully u have got goosebumps… for second part. haha. now first blank says hardly ___ kind of story. so u have to know that ghost stories are rare in the time poe wrote his book. how we know this? well people are getting goosebumps reading. if everyone had constant exposure to scary shit then they wont get goosebumps. right? so ghost stories are rare. we established that much. good. so if they are rare that means they are hardly___ what? commonplace. or mundane or…?? NORMATIVE. k hope u got it. gg bye

3

I did normative too, but the answer is debased.
I eliminated debased because of context because there is no clue that something is immoral

4

You can use math strategy here like this:

  1. The comma divides the ideas into two supporting ones.

  2. The first idea has the blank, so let’s skip that for now.

  3. The second idea has the idea that “the ghost story is the paradigm of the form.” That’s a positive statement.

  4. So idea 1 has to be positive.

  5. But idea 1 has the word “hardly” before the blank, so the blank has to be negative

  6. Only “debased” works

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5

This is a really tricky question, because debased has two meanings. Both of these meanings fit in context, but only one of them conveys the meaning that the author is trying to convey.

Debased can, first of all, mean something is bad or morally wrong. For instance, we might say that a murderer is debased.

Debased can also mean lowered in quality or value. For instance, when they lower the percentage of gold in a gold coin, it is debased.

The author is intending to say that stories in general are “haunted” in the sense that they owe a lot to horror stories. So, he’s saying that ghost stories are hardly “debased” (lower in quality than normal stories), because they are the paradigm (or the most typical example) of the story.

The author is not trying to say anything about whether ghost stories are morally wrong.

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