OG-VR TC(1 blank)

GRE Verbal Problem Solving
1

In his unexpurgated autobiography, Mark Twain commented freely on the flaws and foibles of his country, making some observations so _______ that his heirs and editors feared they would damage Twain’s reputation if not withheld.
Blank i
a) buyoant
b) acerbic
c) premonitory
d) laudatory
e) temperate

In this question, what I did was take the phrase ‘commented freely’ and ‘damage reputation’ as a key to solve the blank. My problem always has been the correct rephrasing of my clues.
Here, anyone help me out how being acerbic damages someone’s reputation? Isn’t it bringing outside knowledge here? Maybe his observations were just buoyant which could hurt his reputation. How do we differentiate ourselves from story telling?

2

Buoyant is being cheerful and lively. And here in the sentence, we can find clues such as unexpurgated( expurgated means to censor or remove offensive parts of a book but here they’ve used unexpurgated which means they’ve not censored ) , commenting freely on the flaws and foibles which basically hint at something negative. And of all the answer choices, acerbic seems to be the correct one. According to the sentence we can kind of figure out that Mark Twain was a strong individual who didn’t fear about anything and expressed his opinions freely and thus his heirs should also continue the same thing.

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