Exam 4: Critical Analysis & Reasoning Skills

Passage To consult diverse interpretations is beneficial, especially in literature purporting to speak to the fundaments of human experience.  Reviewing alternative readings not only undermines complacency in scholarship, it reminds us that questions of meaning should seldom be viewed as settled but instead as suggestive of various avenues of discovery.Nevertheless, another pitfall lies at the opposite extreme.  The fear of missing genuine interpretive possibilities may lead one to imagine more differences in readings than truly exist, obscuring a hidden homogeneity among seemingly divergent understandings.  It has been said that to truly understand a people one must synthesize its stories; we must also acknowledge that to truly understand a story one must synthesize its interpretations.David McKee's deceptively rich Not Now, Bernard is an instructive example.  The plot initially concerns the futile attempts of a child to gain his parents' attention, to which, no matter the circumstance, the busy adults invariably reply: "Not now, Bernard."  The culmination of these encounters comes when Bernard informs them of a monster outside that wants to eat him, only to receive the same dismissive response.  Bernard walks into the yard and approaches the monster, whereupon "The monster ate Bernard up, every bit."The reader's shock at this turn of events is only increased upon seeing the reaction of Bernard's parents, who are entirely unfazed.  Indeed, they are entirely unaware.  The monster enters the house, eats Bernard's dinner, breaks Bernard's toy, and even bites Bernard's father, all the while finding itself just as ignored as Bernard had been.  Finally facing the indignity of being tucked into bed, the monster complains: "But I'm a monster," only to be told-naturally-"Not now, Bernard."Marina Warner views this delightfully savage story as informed by the same primal motivations which produced the carnivorous fiends of traditional fairy tales.  Referencing the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein, Warner writes: "the ogre who used to stalk children has now been internalized as the image of inner compulsions, especially greed and the ferocious survival instinct….  [I]t is the child who can be understood to be the potentially insatiable devourer, the possible monster of greed and gratification and excess."  Bernard's parents "cannot tell the difference between a tiny tot and an angry beast because the two are all the same to them: that is how they see Bernard."  Thus Warner casts McKee's tale as an incisive commentary on "parents who are so automatic in their oblivion-and rejection-that they do not notice when their child has been eaten."Intriguingly, writer Sheila Hancock assumes that Bernard's parents are not oblivious.  On her interpretation no one has been eaten and replaced; rather, the monster is Bernard.  It is worth noting that of the two lines spoken by the monster, the first is simply "ROAR," a bestial vocalization that makes little impression upon Bernard's mother ("Not now, Bernard").  The human-sounding "But I'm a monster" comes later, after a series of events in which the presence of a monster in the house has been treated as unremarkable.  The apparent powerlessness of the monster to be perceived as anything but mundane suggests it could be merely the external manifestation of the child's frustrated psyche.Even so, Hancock's view would not completely absolve Bernard's parents, who consistently ignore their son even if they do not literally allow him to be devoured.  Nor does the story lose its significance on Hancock's symbolic interpretation of events; rather, the latent psychological motivations identified by Warner would be just as operant.  Hence, whether the monster is literal or metaphorical, these seemingly divergent interpretations in fact exhibit a clear and striking coherence. -Based on the passage, the author would most likely agree with which of the following statements about the plot of Not Now, Bernard?

Passage An untamed but generative masculine spirit, ubiquitous though often elusive, haunts the interconnection of humans with nature.  Among its most prominent images are the carved faces, formed from leaves or sprouting them, that peer out from medieval church ceilings and walls.  At once comic and forbidding, this foliate head is neither a gargoyle nor a merely decorative motif, but an archetype whose history stretches as deeply into the mists of time and myth as the roots of a tree.  Nevertheless, it was only as recently as 1939 that British scholar Julia Hamilton Somerset, better known as Lady Raglan, noting a carved face of entwined leaves in a church in southeast Wales, initiated a study of similar images and christened this mysterious male presence the "Green Man."Like many mythological figures, the Green Man is syncretic, interweaving several images and themes or variations on a pattern.  He is, as writer John Matthews claims, "far larger than any simple attempt to define him."  Chiefly, the Green Man symbolizes the union of humans and nature.  Indissolubly linked with the vegetative cycle and the agricultural year, he exudes vitality and fertility and signals both material and spiritual abundance.  Whether as the foliage-covered King of the May Day, also called Jack-in-the-Green, or as the King of the Harvest, John Barleycorn, the Green Man has been an indispensable element of traditional European village celebrations.  He is Keeper of the Forest as well as woodwose, the wild man of the woods, and is sometimes recognized as the consort of Mother Nature.Green Man images can be found in mosaics and carvings from the early Roman Empire.  Originally a pagan icon, the Green Man was incorporated into early Christian iconography, reaching a zenith of architectural popularity in Europe from the eleventh through the fifteenth century.  Notably, Chartres Cathedral in France, built in 1194, features 70 foliate heads, while in Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, constructed in 1446, no fewer than 103 such heads can be counted.  The Green Man was also known farther east; for instance, near Hatra in present-day Iraq, an imposing leafy countenance stares out from the façade of an ancient temple.The Green Man's lineage is multifaceted.  In the West he is a variant of Dionysus, the god of the vine who dies and is reborn.  Indeed, the fifth-century BCE statue of a leaf-clad Dionysus or Bacchus in Naples, Italy, is perhaps his oldest surviving image, although Dionysus may himself descend from the green-skinned Egyptian god Osiris who likewise dies and rises.  The Green Man is thought to be related to the rustic Greco-Roman deities Pan and Silvanus, and, more speculatively, to Cernunnos, the Celtic horned god of the hunt and lord of the animals.  In the East this mythic being manifests in the figure of Al-Khidir, the Verdant or Green One who is a spiritual guide of heroes in the Koran.Green Man figures also pervade Western literature, which was influenced at its origin by the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and its character of Enkidu, a wild, shaggy nature man fashioned by the gods as a counterpart to the young King Gilgamesh.  Later the medieval tales of King Arthur feature the baffling Green Knight, who, like the eastern Al-Khidir, is a warrior guide.  In the fifteenth century, the Green Man reemerges as Robin Hood; in the twentieth century, J. M. Barrie's eternally youthful Peter Pan is tellingly "clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that flow from trees."In Matthews' view, the Green Man is the embodiment of "unvanquishable greenness."  This perspective might explain the recurrence of his image and its recent adoption by environmental awareness movements as an assurance of ecological renewal. -Which of the following statements about the Rorschach test is suggested by passage information?

Passage The destruction of the White House was not the fault of its original builders.  When James Hoban designed a presidential palace to reflect George Washington's vision for a residence in 1792, he upheld the best architectural standards of his day.  By the time of the 1948-1952 renovation, however, there were plenty of people to blame for the White House's condition.  A combination of poor planning, carelessness, and neglect throughout the intervening years caused a catastrophic deterioration.Robert Klara recounts a history of changes to the White House that gradually compromised its structural integrity, beginning as far back as 1833 when Andrew Jackson had pipes installed for running water.  Subsequent presidents added modern conveniences in pace with technological developments: gas lighting for James Polk, a telephone system for Rutherford Hayes, and air conditioning for Chester Arthur, among others.  None of these advancements could have been anticipated by Hoban, and they had the dual effect of increasing the load borne by the house while decreasing its ability to bear that burden.  The builders responsible for the many additions performed "careless and foolish maneuvers that a first-year architecture student would never have made," such as installing doorways in load-bearing walls or destroying the keystones of a brick arch.  Deep cuts were carved into crucial support beams to make room for pipes, wiring, and air ducts, weakening the beams and concentrating weight that would otherwise have been more evenly distributed.By the turn of the twentieth century, the structural failings of the White House had become difficult to ignore.  The building was likely beyond saving at that point, and President Roosevelt didn't help matters by allowing architect Charles McKim only four months to make repairs.  McKim reinforced the second floor as well as he could within the time allotted, but his efforts only delayed the inevitable.  In 1925, Calvin Coolidge scoffed at reports that the White House roof was unsafe until "[a] chunk of it broke off and bonked President Coolidge in the head."  Poetic justice notwithstanding, the repairs to which he only then begrudgingly agreed had a disastrous side effect: the weight of the roof was shifted away from the stronger outer walls to the weaker inner ones, causing enormous structural strain.The need to reconstruct the mansion reached a breaking point during the Harry Truman administration.  Walls continued to sink and pull away from ceilings; heavy chandeliers swung dangerously from movement on the floor above them; the entire East Room required scaffolding to prevent the collapse of its ceiling.  More dramatic incidents involved daughter Margaret Truman's piano.  Not only did the floor of her sitting room begin to sway up and down while she was playing a duet with a friend, but no steps were taken to move the piano away from the weak floor afterward.  Predictably, White House residents and staff were later horrified when one of the piano's legs crashed through, puncturing the overtaxed wood and sending debris cascading into the room below.  As for Margaret, Klara relates how she called the Steinway company to ask for "a man who could come over to rescue a piano."That event was the crescendo in a long string of architectural warnings.  Ultimately, there was little choice but to tear down and rebuild the White House.  The exterior façade was preserved, as were a few of the interior's furnishings and decorations.  Still, the extensive transformation left many feeling that the White House was no longer the same. -Based on the passage, the need to tear down and rebuild the White House in the mid-twentieth century might have been prevented if:

Passage Let us consider a widely accepted principle, what is called the "Principle of Voter Rationality."  It states that rationally motivated members of a democratic society ought to vote, as it is in their own best interest to do so.  The idea behind this principle is remarkably simple, of course: rationally motivated people ought to do whatever is in their own best interest.  Democratic societies provide citizens with the opportunity to exercise their will through the process of elections.  Rationally motivated citizens ought to vote, then, because electing candidates who will act on their behalf is in their own best interest.  If true, the principle elegantly justifies the scaffolding that upholds democracy itself: citizen engagement with the democratic process.As it turns out, there are excellent reasons to reject this principle.  Notice that the probability that any single vote will have an impact on the outcome of an election decreases as the number of voters increases.  In nationwide elections in democratic societies, the probability that any one vote will change the outcome of an election is infinitesimally small; so small, in fact, that a modest estimate for presidential elections in the US puts this probability at roughly one in one hundred million.  For all practical purposes, it is true to say that any single person's decision to vote will not affect the outcome of an election.Citizens who are rationally motivated in the relevant sense, when deciding whether to vote in an election, must weigh the potential benefits of voting against its known costs.  And there are many such costs: the loss of one's personal time, frustration caused by long lines at the polling station, the energy needed to sufficiently educate oneself about candidates' policies, and so on.  Because the probability that one's vote will have any significant impact on the outcome of the election is so minuscule, however, citizens can be practically certain that the costs of voting will outweigh its potential benefits.  Therefore, contra the Principle of Voter Rationality, citizens must conclude that it is not in their best interest to participate in the democratic process…Moreover, if we are willing to assume, in the way the principle does, that democratic citizens are rationally motivated, then, given a sufficiently large population of citizens who deliberate about whether to engage in voting behavior, the democratic process should break down.  For each citizen should find that he or she ought to abstain from participating in this process due to the aforementioned reasons…In truth, the democratic process is fully intact.  The problem with the Principle of Voter Rationality is that it assumes, falsely, that voting behavior is "rationally motivated" when and only when it is done for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election.  But other sources of justification are available.  As I see it, it is a commitment to the principles of democracy itself that should compel rational citizens, independently of whether it furthers their personal interests, to participate in the democratic process.  For with such a commitment comes a civic duty to prevent the breakdown of one's own democracy and, with this, comes the justification for voting behavior.But what can be said about the nature of "civic duties," and why should we suppose that there are any such duties in the first place?  For my part, I believe that a democratic government's policies and its citizens' civic duty to vote derive from the more general obligation upon man to help his fellow citizen, to increase the welfare of others with no expectation of a reward, a duty for altruism… -The author's position regarding the justification for voting behavior relies on the assumption that citizens should disconnect:

Passage The word "edutainment" refers to educational entertainment, media designed to educate while entertaining the audience.  One of the more successful of such enterprises was Square One, a television show that aired in the 1980s and 1990s.  Focusing on mathematics, Square One aimed to instruct elementary school children in a way that captured their attention and made them eager to learn.  Such objectives are common to most attempts at teaching.  But well-made educational entertainment goes a step further than simply trying to make learning enjoyable; ideally, the program is of a quality such that audiences find it worthwhile to watch for its entertainment value alone.Square One approached this goal in a number of ways, its iconic music videos being one of the most memorable.  Songs like "Angle Dance" and "Less Than Zero" described concepts such as acuteness or negative numbers, while the lyrics of "Archimedes" lauded the mathematical insights of that famous thinker.  Most of the songs contained humorous elements: the exhausted singers of "That's Infinity" tried vainly to reach the largest number, while "Eight Percent of My Love" saw a boy serenade his girlfriend about the small fraction of love he could give her (having already given away 92 percent to friends, the USA, his bicycle, and other things).  All of the songs boasted high production values and talented performers, subconsciously encouraging viewers to continue humming their lessons to themselves even after the show's closing credits.The creativity of these songs featured popular culture aspects that were often more noticeable to parents than to the child viewers themselves.  For instance, adults could easily guess that "Ghost of a Chance" (a song about probability) was inspired by Michael Jackson's "Thriller," and "Juan Cougar" was a reference to an actual singer, John Cougar Mellencamp.  Other parts of the show included similar references.  Details such as these functioned as a bonus, however, as the target audience found the material compelling despite not grasping all the references that elicited smiles from their elders.  Cabot and Marshmallow's "What's in a Name?" was comedic even without knowledge of the famous Abbott and Costello "Who's on First?" skit from which it was derived.  The math-based detective work of "Mathnet" was amusing and instructional even to those too young to have seen Dragnet.In addition to the music, skits, cartoons, and parodies constituting many of the program's segments, game shows were another way in which Square One imparted instruction.  The prizes were unexciting (everyday apparel bearing the Square One logo), but that was to be expected for a production that aired on public broadcasting.  Of course, the prizes were also not the point.  Part of the draw of a commercial game show may be a fabulous package of expensive prizes and money, but the game shows of Square One focused on education.In light of that distinction, one can imagine the most typical criticism of any educational entertainment program.  Education and entertainment are, at their cores, not aimed at the same ends.  Whether it is the worse crime to be insufficiently didactic or to be excessively didactic may depend on whom one asks; either way, one might worry that a work attempting to impart both amusement and instruction would ultimately fail in at least one of those objectives.  Yet Square One was that rare instance in which both goals were met.  Many children who disliked mathematics in school still enjoyed viewing a show with songs and skits about the subject, and for those who already enjoyed mathematics, all the better.  Teachers had good reason to be happy about the show's existence, and its lively presentation of educational concepts can surely be credited with the improved academic performance of many students. -As the phrase is used in the passage, "excessively didactic" (Paragraph 5) most probably refers to:

Passage Certain schools of thought that arose in the mid- to late 20th century and have since been labeled "poststructuralist" are well known for their propensity to "problematize," "destabilize," or "radicalize" the concepts of previous thinkers.  For example, the controversial French poststructuralist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan sought to reenvision the concept, first introduced by Freud in the early 1900s, of the ego as the autonomous agent of the psyche.  Hence in his salient 1949 essay, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the 'I' Function as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience," Lacan variously describes the formation and consequent function of the ego as a schismatic event of misrecognition, an epiphenomenon of narcissism, and a process of dialectical tension.  The latter sets up an interchange between identification and alienation, generating confusion between being a subject as opposed to an object, between self and other, between what is "me" and "not me."The drama of the ego's emergence in what Lacan has designated "the Mirror Stage" explains its contrary nature.  Somewhere between 6 and 18 months of age, an infant will likely encounter his (or her) own reflection in a mirror.  At this phase of development, the child lacks any sense of a unified self but, encouraged by an adult, is able to recognize his reflection in the glass and, at the same time, comes to understand that the specular image looking back at him is, in fact, not himself.  In other words, the image provides the infant with the first glimpse of himself as an object and specifically as "other."  According to Lacan, the initial fascination and pleasure the child experiences upon self-recognition dissolves into confusion at being unable to distinguish between what is and what is not himself.  Therefore, such recognition amounts to a kind of misrecognition, the French term for which, méconnaissance, implies an essential misunderstanding or lack of knowledge.Furthermore, while the reflection in the mirror appears coherent, coordinated, and whole, the child himself continues to perceive his body as uncoordinated and fragmentary, resulting in a profound sense of incongruity and disharmony.  By exuding mastery and harmony, the mirror image serves as a gestalt; it holds up an "Ideal-I" or future self that promises completeness and perfection-a condition, Lacan believes, that is ultimately unattainable, though we will likely spend the rest of our lives in pursuit of it.  Overall, the infant's reaction to the image or Ideal-I is narcissistic: he feels both attraction to it as a model and aggression toward it as a rival.Alienation, lack, absence, and conflict are thus constitutive of the Lacanian ego.  The child's image and, hence, the emerging ego mark an ontological gap that serves as a repository for the projections and desires, whether conscious or unconscious, of parents and others.  Consequently, this image is, as Adrian Johnston points out, "always already overwritten" with words that are not the child's own.  For Johnston, the ego could more properly be described as "a coagulation of inter- and trans-subjective alien influences."  Rather than a "fluid and autonomous subject," it becomes a rigid and "heteronomous" entity.  Derived from the desires of others, this ego is, in Lacanian terms, "extimate," or internally exterior.  It is an irreducible contradiction, both alien and alienating.This ego paradigm diverges from the more familiar and cohesive Freudian notion of the ego as the sovereign organizer of the personality, the rational mediator between internal drives and social pressures that in the interests of self-preservation will also resort to deceptions and defense mechanisms.  From a Lacanian perspective, the ego is intrinsically and irreparably divided; it functions mainly to support the fictional construct we identify-or rather, misrecognize-as the "self." -The author provides the LEAST evidence for which of the following passage assertions?

Passage Ironically, one of the most influential works of anthropology ever written was destined to have a more enduring impact outside this field.  An instantaneous bestseller when it appeared in 1890, Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion was considered controversial for its treatment of many religions as fertility cults centered on a cycle of death and rebirth.  While the book's overwhelming popularity assured its place in posterity, the changing face of science and the further emergence of anthropology as a discipline meant it would be as reviled as it was revered.  At worst it was dismissed as a relic, an egregious example of "armchair" anthropology and an encyclopedic monstrosity; at best it was exalted as a dazzling display of erudition packaged in poetic prose and enjoyed as a rare example of adventure tale, travelogue, and detective story all rolled into one.First published in two volumes, by 1915 Frazer's vast compendium of myth and ritual had filled twelve.  The work emphasized the striking similarities in myths across cultures and time periods-a comparativist or universalist view that Frazer did not invent but employed lavishly, piling example upon example.  The Golden Bough proved an intellectual and stylistic phenomenon with an ever-expanding influence on the cultural milieu.  Those pulled into the Frazerian vortex included pioneering psychologists Freud and Jung as well as many of the most creative writers of the early 20th century, such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad.  It is perhaps no coincidence that the first one-volume abridgement of The Golden Bough was published in 1922-the same year in which Eliot's unorthodox poem The Waste Land and Joyce's experimental novel Ulysses appeared in print.The year 1922 also saw the publication of Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown's The Andaman Islanders-groundbreaking anthropological works that departed radically in method and style from Frazer's grand exercise in mythography and ethnography.  In an approach termed "functionalist," Malinowski, who had described himself as "enslaved" by Frazer's text as a youngster, began incorporating fieldwork into the discipline and examining how mythic practices contributed to the overall stability of a society.  Later, Claude Lévi-Strauss synthesized Frazer's comparative method with the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson to create structural anthropology, which analyzed myths by organizing their basic elements into binary oppositions.Edmund Leach was a student of Malinowski's who, in turn, synthesized his teacher's methods with those of Lévi-Strauss.  Twice removed from Frazer's orbit, Leach gazed back upon The Golden Bough as a target rather than a benchmark.  While acknowledging Frazer's status as "a colossus in the history of English scholarship," Leach nevertheless attacked him as a plagiarist, distortionist, and popularizer.  In a particularly scathing critique entitled "Golden Bough or Gilded Twig?" Leach condemned Frazer's "artistic license," claiming that he routinely embellished sources and twisted information to support already formulated theories.  Moreover, Frazer relied shamelessly on secondhand material culled from missionaries and imperial officials rather than on his own interactions with native peoples.  Furthermore, many of his comparisons of myths were based solely on superficial resemblances between a few of their elements.  Another allegation was what some critics have called Frazer's "misapplication of Darwin's theory of biological evolution to human history and psychology" in positing that cultures progress through predictable stages from a belief in magic to a belief in religion, and, finally, in science.Such criticism notwithstanding, the popularity of The Golden Bough remains undiminished and its impact on the culture of the early 20th century is indisputable. -The passage author suggests that Frazer's work was popular because:

Passage Certain schools of thought that arose in the mid- to late 20th century and have since been labeled "poststructuralist" are well known for their propensity to "problematize," "destabilize," or "radicalize" the concepts of previous thinkers.  For example, the controversial French poststructuralist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan sought to reenvision the concept, first introduced by Freud in the early 1900s, of the ego as the autonomous agent of the psyche.  Hence in his salient 1949 essay, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the 'I' Function as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience," Lacan variously describes the formation and consequent function of the ego as a schismatic event of misrecognition, an epiphenomenon of narcissism, and a process of dialectical tension.  The latter sets up an interchange between identification and alienation, generating confusion between being a subject as opposed to an object, between self and other, between what is "me" and "not me."The drama of the ego's emergence in what Lacan has designated "the Mirror Stage" explains its contrary nature.  Somewhere between 6 and 18 months of age, an infant will likely encounter his (or her) own reflection in a mirror.  At this phase of development, the child lacks any sense of a unified self but, encouraged by an adult, is able to recognize his reflection in the glass and, at the same time, comes to understand that the specular image looking back at him is, in fact, not himself.  In other words, the image provides the infant with the first glimpse of himself as an object and specifically as "other."  According to Lacan, the initial fascination and pleasure the child experiences upon self-recognition dissolves into confusion at being unable to distinguish between what is and what is not himself.  Therefore, such recognition amounts to a kind of misrecognition, the French term for which, méconnaissance, implies an essential misunderstanding or lack of knowledge.Furthermore, while the reflection in the mirror appears coherent, coordinated, and whole, the child himself continues to perceive his body as uncoordinated and fragmentary, resulting in a profound sense of incongruity and disharmony.  By exuding mastery and harmony, the mirror image serves as a gestalt; it holds up an "Ideal-I" or future self that promises completeness and perfection-a condition, Lacan believes, that is ultimately unattainable, though we will likely spend the rest of our lives in pursuit of it.  Overall, the infant's reaction to the image or Ideal-I is narcissistic: he feels both attraction to it as a model and aggression toward it as a rival.Alienation, lack, absence, and conflict are thus constitutive of the Lacanian ego.  The child's image and, hence, the emerging ego mark an ontological gap that serves as a repository for the projections and desires, whether conscious or unconscious, of parents and others.  Consequently, this image is, as Adrian Johnston points out, "always already overwritten" with words that are not the child's own.  For Johnston, the ego could more properly be described as "a coagulation of inter- and trans-subjective alien influences."  Rather than a "fluid and autonomous subject," it becomes a rigid and "heteronomous" entity.  Derived from the desires of others, this ego is, in Lacanian terms, "extimate," or internally exterior.  It is an irreducible contradiction, both alien and alienating.This ego paradigm diverges from the more familiar and cohesive Freudian notion of the ego as the sovereign organizer of the personality, the rational mediator between internal drives and social pressures that in the interests of self-preservation will also resort to deceptions and defense mechanisms.  From a Lacanian perspective, the ego is intrinsically and irreparably divided; it functions mainly to support the fictional construct we identify-or rather, misrecognize-as the "self." -A successful Grand Unified Theory of Humanism (Paragraph 5) as envisioned by the author would imply:

Passage In September 1940, near the tiny village of Montignac in the southwest region of France, a band of four youths and a dog accidentally stumbled upon the opening to a series of underground caverns whose walls were covered with prehistoric paintings.  Their monumental discovery unleashed a mystery that has continued to puzzle scholars: What function did these magnificent caves perform for the society that painted them?  One plausible theory, yet unproven, is that they constituted a kind of sacred space, perhaps a site for religious ceremonies.Decades of work recording and analyzing the contents of this labyrinthine underworld, which came to be called Lascaux, have yielded some clues.  Pollen testing, carbon-14 dating, and the examination of flint and bone tools within the caves have been used to calculate the time period during which these subterranean reaches were painted and served their function.  The paintings date from between 17,000 and 12,000 BCE, which places them within the Upper Paleolithic era.  More specifically, they belong to the Magdalenian period of the last ice age that preceded the dawn of the current geological epoch and the invention of agriculture.More than 2,000 paintings and symbols cover the insides of the caverns.  Approximately 900 of these depict horses, bison, stags, large felines, and hares, clearly reflecting a society of hunter-gatherers.  Various pigments, mainly red, yellow, and brown, were used.  By employing a novel method that took advantage of the edges and curvatures of the cave walls, the artists were able to give lifelike dimensions to these images and endow them with a sense of motion.  Nevertheless, the cave art of Lascaux suggests a purpose that goes beyond artistic expression.It is likely these chambers served as a sanctuary within which the paintings would have corresponded to the iconography of a temple.  Moreover, countless footprints shown to have belonged to adolescent males suggest that the caves may have hosted initiation rituals marking a boy's passage from childhood to maturity.  At this critical juncture, the youths would have traditionally been separated from their families by the adult males and put through frightening ordeals.  The boys might have been tattooed, confined, or presented with physical challenges.  The purpose of such traumas was to prepare the adolescent for the physical and psychological rigors of the hunt, the brutalities of warfare, and the inevitable trials of adulthood.  Theologian Karen Armstrong describes such experiences as triggering "a regressive disorganization of the personality" followed by "a constructive reorganization" of the individual's faculties.  In other words, the rites were meant to force the youth to call upon inner resources of which he was not yet aware, thereby inducing a kind of psychological death and rebirth.Lying deep within the earth, the caves would have provided the perfect container for these traumatic rites-a fact that became evident when Lascaux was opened to the public in 1948.  As mythologist Joseph Campbell recalled of his visit there, when the lights were out, all normal orientation and sense of time were suspended and "you were never in darker darkness in your life."  In primitive societies, descending into the darkness of the caves must have seemed like immersing oneself in what religious historian Mircea Eliade has termed "sacred time," a kind of dissociative state conducive to the deeply transformative experience of the initiate.  When illuminated against the blackness, the realistic murals would have become a moving spectacle that simulated the hunt, the wonder and gravity of which was forever imprinted upon the boys' psyches. -According to the passage, the initiation rites of the hunter-gatherer society are based on the assumption that:hunting occupies a prominent place within the community.adolescent males are of particular concern to the older males.adolescent males are naïve and inexperienced.

Passage Christ Church, a colonial-era Anglican church near Weems, Virginia, is far from a typical house of worship.  Completed in 1735, the building has been conjectured by some to be based on a prototype by the renowned English architect Christopher Wren-indeed, it bears a more than canny resemblance to Farley Church in Wiltshire, England, which Wren designed back in the 1660s.  Christ Church was originally an unassuming wooden construct commissioned in 1665 by John Carter, a wealthy Virginia tobacco planter who sailed from his native England to American shores in 1635.  In 1730, his son Robert-who had by then become one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in the region-was determined to replace the wooden structure with a brick one.  He died in 1732, leaving three male offspring to oversee the completion of what experts would later hail as "the most finely crafted Anglican parish church in all of colonial Virginia."  Historical websites laud the church as "an extraordinary example of eighteenth-century architecture, featuring meticulous brickwork, vaulted ceilings, and gorgeous compass-headed windows."  Notably, it also contains a triple-decker pulpit-a rare but distinctive feature of its era.  In recent decades, however, Christ Church has become an object of interest more for what it conceals than for what it reveals.The remarkable intricacies of this church's architecture point to its dual nature as not just a religious sanctuary, but as a veritable temple to the Enlightenment, a kind of shrine to rationality.  Beneath its surface, Christ Church represents an architectural feat of mathematical precision in harmony with nature's laws.  In fact, horologist H. Stephen Stewart has characterized it as "a building of numbers"-specifically, calendric, solar, and lunar numbers.  As Stewart explains, two weeks after the vernal equinox, on the mean date for Easter, a sunbeam shines through the oval window above the main entrance that faces due west and rests upon the altar; this phenomenon repeats itself two weeks prior to the autumnal equinox.  Additionally, a shadow cast from a cornice of the church tracks the progression from spring to fall as it moves vertically along the church's outer west wall at the pace of a single row of bricks per day.  Moreover, for eight hours each day, the building serves as a sundial, casting its shadow on its north lawn.  This seemingly multifunctional edifice has been aptly pronounced "a time machine" by Stewart.The church's locale and physical orientation are critical; not just any site could have offered the perfect astronomical alignment.  Yet, as journalist Joy Aschenbach describes, "The Church's location was a rather lonely one, with woods all around, few or no houses near, and no good roads."  Its geographical remoteness and splendid isolation are reminiscent of another unusual sanctuary, the fifth-century BCE Temple to Apollo, the god of the sun and rationality, at Bassae in Greece.  As with the church, the temple's structure has been attributed to a famous architect, Iktynos, designer of the Athenian Parthenon.  Thrust deep into the countryside, it sits atop Kotylion Mountain, holding dominion over a desolate landscape through which, until the last century, no truly passable road led.  Thus, virtually inaccessible, the imposing sanctuary stood long forgotten.  In contemporary times it has been under restoration and studied for how, positioned north to south rather than east to west, it tracks the annual phases of the sun.  Likewise, Christ Church has resurged from encroaching dilapidation to bask in "lonely majesty" even as scientists figure the calculus of its blueprint.Clearly neither of these structures acquired its characteristics through happenstance.  The spaces created are at once pragmatic and sacred, their purposes overtly divine even while their designs honor nature and extol reason. -The author describes Putnam's original formulation of the Twin Earth scenario as "incoherent" because:fictional scenarios do not tell us anything about the actual world.people on Earth could not be physically identical to those on Twin Earth.Putnam underestimates the role of internal mental states in linguistic reference.

Passage Certain schools of thought that arose in the mid- to late 20th century and have since been labeled "poststructuralist" are well known for their propensity to "problematize," "destabilize," or "radicalize" the concepts of previous thinkers.  For example, the controversial French poststructuralist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan sought to reenvision the concept, first introduced by Freud in the early 1900s, of the ego as the autonomous agent of the psyche.  Hence in his salient 1949 essay, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the 'I' Function as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience," Lacan variously describes the formation and consequent function of the ego as a schismatic event of misrecognition, an epiphenomenon of narcissism, and a process of dialectical tension.  The latter sets up an interchange between identification and alienation, generating confusion between being a subject as opposed to an object, between self and other, between what is "me" and "not me."The drama of the ego's emergence in what Lacan has designated "the Mirror Stage" explains its contrary nature.  Somewhere between 6 and 18 months of age, an infant will likely encounter his (or her) own reflection in a mirror.  At this phase of development, the child lacks any sense of a unified self but, encouraged by an adult, is able to recognize his reflection in the glass and, at the same time, comes to understand that the specular image looking back at him is, in fact, not himself.  In other words, the image provides the infant with the first glimpse of himself as an object and specifically as "other."  According to Lacan, the initial fascination and pleasure the child experiences upon self-recognition dissolves into confusion at being unable to distinguish between what is and what is not himself.  Therefore, such recognition amounts to a kind of misrecognition, the French term for which, méconnaissance, implies an essential misunderstanding or lack of knowledge.Furthermore, while the reflection in the mirror appears coherent, coordinated, and whole, the child himself continues to perceive his body as uncoordinated and fragmentary, resulting in a profound sense of incongruity and disharmony.  By exuding mastery and harmony, the mirror image serves as a gestalt; it holds up an "Ideal-I" or future self that promises completeness and perfection-a condition, Lacan believes, that is ultimately unattainable, though we will likely spend the rest of our lives in pursuit of it.  Overall, the infant's reaction to the image or Ideal-I is narcissistic: he feels both attraction to it as a model and aggression toward it as a rival.Alienation, lack, absence, and conflict are thus constitutive of the Lacanian ego.  The child's image and, hence, the emerging ego mark an ontological gap that serves as a repository for the projections and desires, whether conscious or unconscious, of parents and others.  Consequently, this image is, as Adrian Johnston points out, "always already overwritten" with words that are not the child's own.  For Johnston, the ego could more properly be described as "a coagulation of inter- and trans-subjective alien influences."  Rather than a "fluid and autonomous subject," it becomes a rigid and "heteronomous" entity.  Derived from the desires of others, this ego is, in Lacanian terms, "extimate," or internally exterior.  It is an irreducible contradiction, both alien and alienating.This ego paradigm diverges from the more familiar and cohesive Freudian notion of the ego as the sovereign organizer of the personality, the rational mediator between internal drives and social pressures that in the interests of self-preservation will also resort to deceptions and defense mechanisms.  From a Lacanian perspective, the ego is intrinsically and irreparably divided; it functions mainly to support the fictional construct we identify-or rather, misrecognize-as the "self." -Which of the following most aptly describes Robinson's perspectives on the use of semicolons (Paragraph 1)?

Passage Locomotives were first invented in England, with the first major railroad connecting Liverpool and Manchester in 1830.  However, it was in America that railroads would be put to the greatest use in the nineteenth century.  On May 10, 1869, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines met at Promontory Point, Utah, joining from opposite directions to complete a years-long project-the Transcontinental Railroad.  This momentous event connected the eastern half of the United States with its western frontier and facilitated the construction of additional lines in between.  As a result, journeys that had previously taken several months by horse and carriage now required less than a week's travel.  By 1887 there were nearly 164,000 miles of railroad tracks in America, and by 1916 that number had swelled to over 254,000.Although the United States still has the largest railroad network in the world, it operates largely in the background of American life, and citizens no longer view trains with the sense of importance those machines once commanded.  Nevertheless, the economic and industrial advantages those citizens enjoy today would not have been possible without America's history of trains; as Tom Zoellner reminds us, "Under the skin of modernity lies a skeleton of railroad tracks."  Although airplanes and automobiles have now assumed greater prominence, the time has arrived for the resurgence of railroads.  A revitalized and advanced railway system would confer numerous essential benefits on both the United States and the globe.The chief obstacles to garnering support for such a project are the current dominance of the automobile and the languishing technology of existing railroads.  In a sense these two obstacles are one, as American dependence on personal automobiles is partially due to the paucity of rapid public transportation.  The railroads of Europe and Japan, by comparison, have vastly outpaced their American counterparts.  Japan has operated high-speed rail lines continuously since 1964, and in 2007, a French train set a record of 357 miles per hour.  While that speed was achieved under tightly controlled conditions, it still speaks to the great disparity in railroad development between the United States and other countries since the mid-twentieth century.  British trains travel at speeds much higher than those in America, where both the trains themselves and the infrastructure to support them have simply been allowed to fall behind.  In much of Europe it is common for trains to travel at close to 200 miles per hour.To invest in a modern network of railroads would improve the United States in much the same way that the first railroads did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  A high-speed passenger rail system would dramatically transform American life, as travel between cities and states would become quicker and more convenient, encouraging commerce, business, and tourism.  Such a system would also make important strides in environmental preservation.  According to a 2007 British study, "CO₂ emissions from aircraft operations are...at least five times greater" than those from high-speed trains.  For similar reasons, Osaka, Japan, was ranked as "the best…green transportation city in Asia" by the 2011 Green City Index.  As Lee-in Chen Chiu notes in The Kyoto Economic Review, Osakans travel by railway more than twice as much as they travel by car.It is true that developing a countrywide high-speed rail system would come with significant costs.  However, that was also true of the original Transcontinental Railroad, as indeed it is with virtually any great project undertaken for the public good.  We should thus move ahead with confidence that the rewards will outweigh the expenditure.  Both for society's gain and the crucial well-being of the planet, our path forward should proceed upon rails. -Suppose that there is an increasing trend of people using ride-sharing services for transportation.  If true, how does this information affect the author's argument?

Passage For decades, socialism has been a pervasive bogeyman laying siege at the periphery of the American psyche.  Policies and candidates alike are dismissed out of hand by pronouncing them "socialist," the term sufficing to preclude further consideration.  However, such reactions to any topic ought to give us pause: have we truly judged an idea as unworthy, impractical, or unjust?  Or do we simply demonstrate an unreflective fear of a label?Initial prejudice notwithstanding, legitimate scrutiny is warranted.  Perhaps the gravest threat of socialist programmes to capitalist America is their perceived unfairness-that the rewards of labor or industry will be siphoned from those who rightfully own or generate them and bestowed upon those who did not contribute to their production.Shall we accept without question, however, the assumptions intrinsic to such notions of "rightful" ownership, or more generally, those of fairness itself?  In fact, capitalists and socialists will likely agree on the broad outlines of what fairness entails.  The objection to redistribution of wealth rests on the idea that it takes from the more deserving and gives to the less-if not to the lazy or the layabout.  Given equality of opportunity, why should he who toils be denied the right of harvest?  Why should he who idles be afforded an equal reward?Nonetheless, this claim of initial social equality is precisely what socialism rejects as illusory.  Let us suppose that everyone in society begins life upon equal footing.  None are afforded a greater portion of opportunity, but all are competitors in open tests of skill over time.  By merit, coupled with the vicissitudes of fortune, some ascend to the heights of success, others plummet to the depths of failure, still more inhabit some middle ground.  Equality is shattered, but justly, and from an early uniformity of status rise differences in wealth, garnered according to the abilities and enterprise displayed by each person.As time passes, however, the wealth or destitution of one generation is bequeathed to the next, and then inequality becomes ingrained.  What was before an earned difference of outcome is now an unearned difference of potential.  One individual has an advantage that another lacks-not gained through striving and perseverance but inherited through accident of birth.Such effects only compound over time.  Inevitably, dynasties of wealth accrue by which a few through mere circumstance enjoy economic mastery over the many, who face through the tyranny of chance an undeserved impediment.  The socialist's claim, then, is that complaints against redistribution of wealth fail in light of the very concern for fairness upon which they are founded.This same concern has led various leaders throughout history to implement socialism.  For instance, eleventh-century Chinese statesman Wang An-shih instituted state control of the economy "with a view to succoring the working classes and preventing them from being ground into dust by the rich."  This noble goal met with only temporary success, however, as the system later fell to governmental corruption, private greed, and untimely droughts and floods.Are the dismissive reactions towards socialism then justified?  Not as such.  Capitalism has many virtues, but it is equally liable to exploitation.  In post-industrial America, governmental reforms and regulations on commerce and industry were required to redress the systemic injustices perpetuated by dynastic wealth, as well as to protect the welfare of a multitude bound to wages insufficient to secure life's necessities.  Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is that a "pure" form of either capitalism or socialism will ultimately prove destructive.  Rather than embrace or reject one system from the outset, we must avoid a focus on labels and instead inquire which ideas, and in what combination, best promote the justice whose value we profess. -Suppose a socialist claimed that those who object to wealth redistribution should instead support it.  Based on passage information, the socialist's argument for this claim would be that:

Passage Evil can most accurately be defined as the direct antithesis of good.  However, when a human situation does not lend itself to clear designations of ultimate good and ultimate evil, or of right and wrong, then the best that one can hope for is to be able to make an informed decision about which course of action is "more right" and which is "more wrong."Consider the hypothetical case of Dr. Jones, who, in discovering the antidote to a poison (Poison H) has so far concocted only a single vial.  Now suppose that six citizens have drunk from a well whose water has been contaminated with Poison H, but Citizen A has consumed an inordinate volume of the contaminated water.  Accordingly, the doctor has only enough of the antidote to save either Citizen A or the five other citizens.It may seem clear that a doctor could not justifiably allocate the entirety of an antidote to preserving one citizen's life at the expense of losing five others.  However, suppose that Citizen A is the only patient currently present in the doctor's clinic, as the remaining patients are being transferred to Dr. Jones' facility by their respective physicians.  Citizen A is, in fact, Dr. Jones' longtime patient.  The doctor must therefore decide between two exigencies:  to save his own patient's life or to await the arrival of the five remaining citizens.Would Dr. Jones be acting unethically in sacrificing Citizen A given the prospect of administering the antidote to the remaining citizens in time?  This dilemma asks the judicious individual to take into account additional factors that might encumber his or her ability to save the citizens who have not yet arrived.  One should consider, for instance, how long each patient can survive without the antidote.  Unfortunately, no one has a crystal ball to predict future events.  A decision must be made in conjunction with the information available at the time.With this in mind, one may argue that the determination of good versus evil in making a decision lies in the doctor's motivations as he considers the consequences of his impending actions.  Imagine Dr. Jones' nurse exclaiming, "But the doctor cannot make an objective comparison between the lives of other citizens and his own patient!"  Yet, perhaps the doctor would be selfishly inclined to save Citizen A, as Citizen A is the only one whose death would be considered a grievous personal loss.But are such selfish human instincts then to be labeled as evil?  The same propensities labeled as selfish underlie characteristics classified as decent human virtues, such as compassion, empathy, and loyalty.  There are particular circumstances in which the doctor would indeed be remiss to the point of what could be argued as evil-as in cases where he opts to dismiss or distrust his individual conscience.  Consider the case in which he doubts his ability to arrive at a judicious conclusion and abdicates his responsibility for making this grave decision to the nurse.  Or consider the case in which he concludes that it is indeed more valiant to save the five citizens, yet fails to act on his decision out of personal anguish at losing Citizen A or to put an end to the ordeal.In such circumstances, the decision between right and wrong, or the moral dilemma, escalates into what is more accurately a personal determination of good and evil.  In this way, the relative construct of right and wrong, as determined by one's best attempts at logic and sense, must be subordinated to a moral imperative that may be said to be absolute:  namely, that one must abide by an internal commitment to what one has reasoned to be the right decision and follow a corresponding course of action in the allotted time. -The author implies that the virtues of compassion, empathy, and loyalty are:

Passage Certain schools of thought that arose in the mid- to late 20th century and have since been labeled "poststructuralist" are well known for their propensity to "problematize," "destabilize," or "radicalize" the concepts of previous thinkers.  For example, the controversial French poststructuralist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan sought to reenvision the concept, first introduced by Freud in the early 1900s, of the ego as the autonomous agent of the psyche.  Hence in his salient 1949 essay, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the 'I' Function as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience," Lacan variously describes the formation and consequent function of the ego as a schismatic event of misrecognition, an epiphenomenon of narcissism, and a process of dialectical tension.  The latter sets up an interchange between identification and alienation, generating confusion between being a subject as opposed to an object, between self and other, between what is "me" and "not me."The drama of the ego's emergence in what Lacan has designated "the Mirror Stage" explains its contrary nature.  Somewhere between 6 and 18 months of age, an infant will likely encounter his (or her) own reflection in a mirror.  At this phase of development, the child lacks any sense of a unified self but, encouraged by an adult, is able to recognize his reflection in the glass and, at the same time, comes to understand that the specular image looking back at him is, in fact, not himself.  In other words, the image provides the infant with the first glimpse of himself as an object and specifically as "other."  According to Lacan, the initial fascination and pleasure the child experiences upon self-recognition dissolves into confusion at being unable to distinguish between what is and what is not himself.  Therefore, such recognition amounts to a kind of misrecognition, the French term for which, méconnaissance, implies an essential misunderstanding or lack of knowledge.Furthermore, while the reflection in the mirror appears coherent, coordinated, and whole, the child himself continues to perceive his body as uncoordinated and fragmentary, resulting in a profound sense of incongruity and disharmony.  By exuding mastery and harmony, the mirror image serves as a gestalt; it holds up an "Ideal-I" or future self that promises completeness and perfection-a condition, Lacan believes, that is ultimately unattainable, though we will likely spend the rest of our lives in pursuit of it.  Overall, the infant's reaction to the image or Ideal-I is narcissistic: he feels both attraction to it as a model and aggression toward it as a rival.Alienation, lack, absence, and conflict are thus constitutive of the Lacanian ego.  The child's image and, hence, the emerging ego mark an ontological gap that serves as a repository for the projections and desires, whether conscious or unconscious, of parents and others.  Consequently, this image is, as Adrian Johnston points out, "always already overwritten" with words that are not the child's own.  For Johnston, the ego could more properly be described as "a coagulation of inter- and trans-subjective alien influences."  Rather than a "fluid and autonomous subject," it becomes a rigid and "heteronomous" entity.  Derived from the desires of others, this ego is, in Lacanian terms, "extimate," or internally exterior.  It is an irreducible contradiction, both alien and alienating.This ego paradigm diverges from the more familiar and cohesive Freudian notion of the ego as the sovereign organizer of the personality, the rational mediator between internal drives and social pressures that in the interests of self-preservation will also resort to deceptions and defense mechanisms.  From a Lacanian perspective, the ego is intrinsically and irreparably divided; it functions mainly to support the fictional construct we identify-or rather, misrecognize-as the "self." -The actions of which of the following people contributed to President Garfield's eventual death from infection?Dr. Willard BlissAlexander Graham BellCharles Guiteau

Passage First of all, the notion that more than one author was responsible for the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey may fail to account adequately for the artistic unity and linguistic cohesion that mark these two works.  The idea of dual authorship instead privileges the inconsistencies between the texts stressed by late 19^th- and early 20^th-century scholars who suggested that the two epics are not, in fact, the work of a single poetic genius.  The promulgation of this theory served to undermine an earlier fundamentalist faith in a consensus from antiquity: one and only one poet called Homer authored both poems.Second of all, even if more than one author existed under the guise of Homer, there is no denying that these epics represent the culmination of a long tradition of oral poetry-specifically, oral verse concerning the Trojan War.  The existence of this oral tradition has sometimes been used to speculate that the texts we have of the Iliad and the Odyssey were merely strung together from shorter poems about warrior-heroes sung by itinerant bards to regale the aristocratic courts of ancient Greece.  In this context, the name "Homer" has been explained as a generic designation signifying either a group of ancient singer-poets or an imaginary author to whom a collective body of oral poetry was attributed.That epic poems of more than 12,000 lines could have been recited from memory has been well documented.  Research undertaken at the beginning of the 20^th century identified singers in the Balkans who could perform monumental epic poems from memory.  These performers seemed to have memorized discrete episodes or sections of poetry, arranging these as they recited.  Since then, it has been almost universally recognized that any theory about Homeric authorship must accommodate the oral tradition.Today many scholars find it unlikely that the same individual composed both Homeric epics.  Compellingly, even the ancient consensus that there was just one author cannot be traced further back than about 520 BCE when the two poems-which had been committed to writing in their recognizable form sometime after the introduction of the alphabet to Greece in the 8^th century BCE-were recited by bards at the festival of Athena.  Prior to this, there had already been some controversy regarding the authorship of the poems.  In particular, an alternative tradition claimed that the Odyssey had been written by the poet Melesigenes, who then appropriated the name Homer.Likewise, leading Homericists now conjecture more specifically that one poet wrote the Iliad and that the Odyssey was composed sometime later by a second.  This theory rests on two basic premises:  (1) Each poem has its own well-defined and unified design that discredits the possibility it is merely a pastiche of shorter poems passed down orally and finally stabilized in written form; and (2) differences between the poems seem to point to separate authors.  Scholars cite not only linguistic inconsistencies, including differences in vocabulary, but also discrepancies in background, underlying beliefs, ethics, and even geographical orientation.  Intriguingly, researchers have also found evidence in the Odyssey of imitation of passages from the Iliad.A few skeptics, however, continue to insist that the stylistic similarities between the two epics ascribed to Homer are too striking to support a theory of multiple authorship.  Far from clinging to idealistic notions of artistry or outdated modes of manuscript study, these single-author theorists have combined information technology and analysis of linguistic style to produce a legitimate body of evidence they can marshal against the prevailing trend. West, Martin. "The Homeric Question Today," in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol 155. No. 4, December 2011. -Based on the passage, which of the following best represents what Frege said was "shaken" by Russell's Paradox?

Passage People sometimes dance for joy, or report that they are so happy that they could dance for joy.  However, one might wonder why this is so.  What is it about happiness that would lead someone to dance?  What exactly is dancing, when one ponders this activity that might otherwise be taken for granted?  Is it only a human practice, or is dancing something in which other animals also engage?Indeed, some animals do seem to dance, although their reasons for doing so are goal-based.  For instance, bees dance to provide information to other colony members, using complicated movements to describe the location and quality of a food source.  This behavior is not emotive; it would seem odd, if not unscientific, to ascribe an emotive character to such displays.  Nevertheless, these displays are communicative, as are emotive human behaviors.Might this similarity bespeak a common evolutionary basis for the dance of humans and other animals?  Perhaps, although there are differences which cast doubt on that hypothesis.  A bee's dance is its main method of communication, whereas most human communication is vocal.  Even with non-vocal communication such as sign language, the types of bodily movements are qualitatively different than those used in dance, as dance movements signify at most a general feeling or impression rather than corresponding to specific words or ideas.  If the bee's dance functions like human sign language (albeit in a much less sophisticated form), it is questionable whether it is an appropriate analogue to human dance at all; the term "dance" would be simply a weak metaphor.  If the bee's dance is a type of language, then it is not the same sort of thing as human dance.Still, there are other types of animal behaviors that might more aptly be called dances.  Many animals engage in courtship displays of varying complexity, in which carefully choreographed movements are designed to win the favor of a potential mate.  Historically, a connection between human dance and courtship has also been assumed, and often cautioned against.  For instance, in the 1950s Elvis was denounced by parents as a corrupting influence upon the young women who swooned over him, and some of his dance moves were censored.  People often voice similar concerns with regard to the behavior of crowds in nightclubs and explicit lyrics in popular music.  Many believe that such an outcry may also be heard in the future, as the struggle of parental restraint against youthful vigor continues.It should not be thought, however, that all amorous dancing is subject to condemnation.  Weddings include dance as a matter of custom, suggesting a long-standing endorsement within socially approved couplings.  Through social tradition or natural instinct, dance seems linked with romance in the human mind.  Nevertheless, such a connection is clearly not the whole story.  One of the most fundamental uses of dance is the physical expression of music-a language not of words, but emotion.If music expresses emotion and dance expresses music, then, do we dance not only "for joy" but for all emotions?  Seemingly not, but why?  Certainly music itself conveys a wide spectrum of feelings.  Although we do not dance "for sadness" or "for anger," we do droop our bodies or clench our fists, and perhaps more subtle emotions produce other physical markers.  Still, happiness too can be seen in a smile, and to actually dance for joy is comparatively rare.  Is dance then truly an entity unto itself?  Or, is it merely one instance of a wider class of physical behaviors? -Which of the following is an assumption made in the passage about human dance?

Passage Jorge Luis Borges' 1946 short story "On Exactitude in Science" plays with the well-known aphorism, "The map is not the territory."  In this paragraph-long fable, an empire's ambitious cartographers produce a map so spectacularly isomorphic it corresponds precisely in scale and detail with the kingdom it represents.  Perfect yet useless, the map is virtually indistinguishable from the landscape until it begins to decay.  In a 1981 treatise, Simulacra and Simulation, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard cites Borges' tale as "the finest allegory" of his own provocative proposition that, in the current era, we have lost the ability to distinguish between reality and its representation.  Thus, Baudrillard-known as an extreme cultural relativist and often mocked as "the high priest of postmodernism"-postulates that "it is no longer a question of either maps or territories"; rather, "[s]omething has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other," that, he laments, once "constituted the charm of abstraction."  Indeed, our postmodernist world is saturated with signs, symbols, and images that are never neutral or transparent but, by mediating reality, come to construct it.  Consequently, in a sinister twist on the story, Baudrillard can assert that "today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the map."  As he elaborates, "[T]he territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it."  Instead, "[i]t is…the map that precedes the territory…that engenders the territory."  In other words, representation can be seen to precede, produce, and ultimately surpass reality.But how can a copy be the antecedent of an original?  How does an image become so alienated from reality?  In Baudrillard's scheme, signs are subject to degeneration.  Initially, a sign reflects reality, substituting for an original; like a carefully crafted counterfeit, it is a faithful but identifiable copy.  In the next stage, the sign devolves into a less faithful copy of the original, thus distorting what it represents and masking reality.  In its penultimate phase, the representation no longer pretends to be the original but now instead pretends to be a copy; hence, it masks an absence of reality and erodes the distinction between the real and representation.  For instance, when images are mass produced, they propagate, taking on a life of their own and diminishing the authoritative aura of the original.  In the final stage of the sign's devolution, it can claim "no relation to any reality whatsoever"; it no longer reflects or refers to reality but instead signifies nothing but signification.  It has become a pure simulation, a suspiciously specious semblance Baudrillard calls the simulacrum.In Baudrillardian theory, when the distinction between representation and reality, sign and referent, original and reproduction disintegrates, the real disappears; we are left with copies of copies that no longer have-or never had-an original.  What remains, then, is a "hyperreality" of simulacra and simulation.  So, Baudrillard maintains, "[s]imulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or substance....  It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody."  It is instead a question of substitution, of "substituting the signs of the real for the real."  As one writer describes it, "The simulation is no longer a reflection of reality, nor a reference to it, but a creation of a new real by models that are not based on reality."  This new real may be genetically engineered, as with cloning, or possibly computer generated.  Even something as essential as currency has been progressively replaced, first by checks and then by credit and debit cards, until finally only numbers, divorced from any concrete reality, are exchanged on money transfer apps.  Likewise, as reality dissolves into the hyperreality of simulacra, human experience devolves into "a simulation of reality." -The author would most likely agree with which of the following quotes?

Passage Dominated by stock character types and gloomy urban settings, film noir is a highly stylized art form with plots that pivot around crime and intrigue.  Chiefly a product of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood, noir was arguably more an approach, mood, or sensibility than a discrete genre.  Noir drew inspiration for its scenery from classic movies about bootlegging and heists but primarily imported its storylines and dialogue from the crime novels and pulp magazine tales of the Depression Era.  At the same time, noir imitated the unsettling cinematography of the German expressionist movement of the 1920s and borrowed from French poetic realist cinema a fundamentally jaundiced and tragic worldview.  As an unlikely amalgamation of ideas and styles, film noir also readily absorbed other contemporary cultural strains, notably existentialism and psychoanalysis.Most noir-type films belong to what is known as the "B" movie category-low-budget, black-and-white motion pictures originally produced to accompany a higher-budget or "A" film as a double feature-and display certain conventions that give them a distinguishing character.  Apart from a brooding mood, or pervasive sense of pessimism and meaninglessness, noir conventions include the investigation of a crime and a difficult-to-decipher plot unfolding in flashback sequences accompanied by voiceover narration.  Camera angles are distorting and disorienting, creating a sense of menace.  Chiaroscuro or contrast lighting predominates, with characters often appearing in silhouette or caught within the contrasting shadows cast by Venetian blinds.  Dark and rainy streets illuminated solely by flickering signs point to a dodgy underworld of corruption that is played out in crowded nightclubs, deserted warehouses, or dingy offices.Standard noir roles include an isolated, "hardboiled" detective and a dangerous female character who proves as duplicitous as she is sharp-tongued and glamorous.  Often, a kind of anti-hero is also featured-a man disillusioned and marginalized, down on his luck, desperate to escape his past, and morally ambivalent-who makes an easy target for the double-crossing woman.  Film noir is also replete with witty and ironic verbal exchanges that heighten the tension between characters who traverse treacherous ground in a hostile universe where fate is inexorable.  Such stylistic tropes, along with morally questionable character types, brought noir into conflict with mid-20^th-century American values.Despite conventions so recognizable they have hardened into clichés that lend themselves to parody, as a genre noir remains indistinct.  Although a few films, such as Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, seem paradigmatic of the style, most vary widely in the degree to which they follow the formula.  Many emphasize or are known for certain conceits: The Big Sleep and The Lady from Shanghai are notorious for the many twists and turns of their incoherent plots; Sunset Boulevard and Gilda for their deceptive female characters; and The Maltese Falcon for introducing the quintessential noir detective, deftly brought to life through the fedora-and-trench-coat-clad character of Sam Spade.Noir is so notoriously ambiguous and elusive that many films from the era flirt with the classification.  For example, 1941 saw the release of renowned film director Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, a quasi-documentary drama concerning a newspaper magnate, which has long been deemed a masterpiece and is considered noir by some critics.  At the least, it was heavily influential in the development of this film style due to its dark cinematography, enigmatic plot of an investigative nature, voiceover, multiple flashbacks, inventive camera angles, and themes of corruption.  Likewise, the 1942 World War II classic Casablanca features chiaroscuro lighting and flashback; moreover, it takes place in a crowded, urban setting filled with suspicious characters and spotlights a bitter loner haunted by his past.  Given such uncertainty, it is fitting that noir was a label applied only after the heyday of these films ended. -Based on the passage, which of the following scenarios would represent a noir convention?A private eye goes undercover.A plot is nonlinear.A woman is attractive.

Passage Throughout the twentieth century, the performer-spectator dynamic has been challenged both in artistic practice and from a theoretical perspective.  Contextual Futurists, nonsensical Dadaists, and the surreal avant-garde theatrical experiments upended the conventional notion of passive spectatorship, paving the way for performers to disrupt the invisible wall between the artist and audience altogether.  Most scholarly attention, however, has traditionally been directed toward one-way theatrical practices by which performers engage, transform, and heighten the bodily state of the audience through a framework of communal "felt-experience," and not vice versa.The actors on stage are ostensibly the central object of attention, yet their communication with those in attendance is not solely a one-way discourse.  After the curtain falls at the end of a performance, it is common to hear professional performers commentate on audience reaction:  sometimes the spectators were "attuned"; at other times they seemed "aloof."  Occasionally, performers feel as if they "captured" the audience; at other times, they perceive that they "lost touch" with the viewers entirely.  One could say that this jargon is merely an oversimplified and closed communication that reduces the true complexity and aesthetic dimensions of the theater experience.Nevertheless, performers are ultimately the vessels responsible for detecting and absorbing the moods, attitudes, and emotions of individuals, and these aspects are vital to the apparent success or failure of the performative process.  One day, actors might find the audience energetic, welcoming, and appreciative; the next day, they may find a stiff, critical, and disconnected crowd, even when performing in the same production with unchanged levels of enthusiasm.  In some instances, a single audience may be unmoved, regardless of how well a show is performed.  In concert with this insight, the language used by artists from across the globe to portray such audience encounters is notably similar.  Their predilection for tactile idiomatic expressions when describing the performer-audience connection is perfectly captured in these remarks from a well-known stage actor:"The level of attention the audience gives to what is happening on stage provides a certain quality of stillness that makes it possible for a performer to know whether the audience is attuned or not.  However, for the audience to be 'with' the performer, it must embrace a state of tension and immerse itself in the profundity of the performance…it's a very 'tangible' moment-it's all I can find as a word."Because the audience is the proclaimed foundation of a theatrical event, a staged play aims to affect the audience, usually by "capturing" the viewers in some poignant manner.  According to this paradigm, there can be no performance without an audience.  Despite this, the presence of spectators does not guarantee that a meaningful emotional, or affective, exchange will transpire.  Such collective encounters in a shared space and time present only the possibility-for connection or disconnection; and, accordingly, an audience member must be physically present and willing to be affectively influenced.The audience serves an integral function in the performance:  it activates, intensifies, and amplifies the circulation of emotional affect in a communal social space.  Individually and collectively, each spectator is able to participate in the intrinsically variable theatrical plot.  Affect is thereby experienced simultaneously through action, thought, and perception by both the artist and the audience.  This mutual "transmission of affect" induces a corporeal sentiment that ultimately resonates as a palpably emotional atmosphere.  Entertainers can only know if the audience is "present" to the degree that they also embrace the mutual tension of the experience.  In this way, the performer dutifully influences the audience, and the audience, in essence, "re-affects" the stage. Adapted from Pais, A, Affective Resonance as the Function of the Audience. Published 2016. -The author's attitude toward the comments of the "well-known stage actor" (Paragraph 3) can be best described as: