There is more to the English Usage section than speed and vocabulary. Get closer to the philosophical and literary realm to make better sense of passages

Philosophy
By the early 1990s, Marxists seemed to have vanished or had become very cautious. Socialists either retreated or changed into “radical democrats.” The most significant philosopher of science since Francis Bacon, Sir Karl Popper, solved the puzzle of scientific method, which in practice had never seemed to conform to the principles or logic described by Bacon. Instead of scientific knowledge being discovered and verified by way of inductive generalizations, leaping from perceptual data into blank minds, Popper realized that science advances by deductive falsification through a process of "conjectures and refutations."

Literature
A Suitable Boy, a novel by Vikran Seth, at 1349 pages and 591,552 words, is one of the longest novels published in a single volume in the English language. The novel offers a satirical and an intense examination of national political issues in the period leading up to the first post-Independence national election of 1952. Haroun and the Sea of Stories a children’s book by Salman Rushdie is a phantasmagorical story. It begins in a city so old and ruinous that it has forgotten its name. Reflections by Graham Greene, a novelist, short-story writer, playwright and journalist, is one of the most widely read novelist of the 20th-century.

Economy and management
A number of factors including the mass mobilization of capital markets through neo-liberalism, the widespread proliferation of new media such as the Internet, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a realignment and reconsolidation of economic and political power across the world. As a result, living standards and democratic governance improved in many parts of the world, particularly in East Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South Africa.

Art and entertainment
Under the calming influence of the dot-com boom and the end of the Cold War, the art of the mid-1990s reflected both the newly global situation and the increasingly hazy line between the actual and the virtual. Cynical realism, a contemporary movement in Chinese art, began in the 1990s. It arose through the pursuit of individual expression by Chinese artists that broke away from the collective mindset that existed since the Cultural Revolution. Artists associated with Cynical Realism include Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, and Yue Minjun. Massurrealism is the development of surrealism that emphasizes the effect of technology and mass media on contemporary surrealist imagery.

People
Nadine Gordimer, a South African writer, political activist and Nobel laureate, has dealt with moral and racial issues, predominantly apartheid in South Africa in her writings. Her works comprise of 10 novels, including A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter, and July’s People etc. As an essayist Paz wrote on Mexican politics and economics, Aztec art, and anthropology. Günter Grass, German poet, novelist, playwright, sculptor, and printmaker, who, with his first novel, The Tin Drum, became the literary spokesman for the Germans who grew up in the Nazi era.