The correct answer is B. In this question you can see from the context that we are looking for a word that means to eat. The clue is in the second part of the sentence: "hoping that the extra calories would sustain them during the tortuous ascent."

In order to get the extra calories they should eat something. Repast means "any collection of food that is eaten at one time" - so it means "a meal."

In the sentence this becomes "The Olympic Cycling Team took their meal at the base of the mountain,"

If you do not know "repast" you can also work at this through process of elimination. It is important on text completion and sentence equivalence questions to focus on the words you do know. "Vows" and "leave" are the simplest words out of these options. Neither has anything to do with eating. The word "dander" is a bit more obscure but hardly seems to have any connection to eating. In fact the phrase "get you dander up" is to lose your temper. While the noun "dander" is related to "dandruff" which is small flakes of dead skin. Even if eaten this would hardly provide many extra calories!

Finally you have the word "umbrage." Again this has little chance of being related to eating. (As opposed to repast which is very close to the French "un repas" which means "a meal"). In fact umbrage means "offense or annoyance."

For this question the key is the context - as long as you understand that you need to find a word that means to eat something you have a good chance of either knowing generally what "repast" means or of working through the process of elimination and ending up with the correct answer that way.

Hello from the GRE Prep Club VerbalBot!

Thanks to another GRE Prep Club member, I have just discovered this valuable topic, yet it had no discussion for over a year. I am now bumping it up - doing my job. I think you may find it valuable (esp those replies with Kudos).

Want to see all other topics I dig out? Follow me (click follow button on profile). You will receive a summary of all topics I bump in your profile area as well as via email.