Exam 4: Critical Analysis & Reasoning Skills

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. -The strength of the author's proposal depends most on whether which of the following claims is true?

Passage At the forefront of the modernist poetry movement were T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and others, such as Ezra Pound, whose injunction, "Make it new!" characterized their artistic approach.  Hindered by the same internal conflict plaguing many intellectuals within the cultural upheavals of the time, these poets felt, on one level, that old linguistic certainties had evaporated and new forms must be embraced.  Yet many of them, particularly the later modernist poets, maintained a sentimental attachment to all that had been lost from the cultural certitude of earlier eras, their despondency reflected in much of their work.  At the periphery of the movement were E. E. Cummings and Robert Frost, who were named among modernist poets largely for the chronological classification of their poetry and not necessarily for their style or means of artistic production.A self-titled "poet" and "painter," Cummings was beyond his time in his efforts to innovate.  He would become well known for his erratic applications of punctuation and syntax, and, later, for his visual configurations of words.  Much of Cummings' writing also used idiosyncratic similes and metaphors.  This style, which later evolved to include symbolism and allegory, caused even some of the most progressive modernists to dismiss his work as eccentric, self-indulgent, and lacking depth.  However, as a quintessential dissenter, Cummings remained unaffected by the reactions of his contemporaries and focused more on creating a graphic effect with words.To Cummings, the artist was not one who discerns or describes, but one who feels.  He often contrasted the "doing" of others-scientists in particular-to the "being" of the artist.  Compared to what he defined as the "nonartist," Cummings held that the artist must be original, self-reliant, and free to live according to his or her own truth.  For Cummings, this meant disentanglement from any shackles of societal standards, ranging from the man-made notions of reality and reason to traditional literary conventions.Contrarily, Frost believed that a true poet could-and should-achieve poetic excellence without resorting to what he described as the "new ways of being new."  Consequently, his poetry was composed of ordinary sounds that derived from conventional language.  Although many contemporary critics dismissed his work as overly simplistic, or "too near the level of talk," Frost remained unperturbed by such views, holding that poetry sprang from the natural intonations of a person's voice and should remain true to traditional forms.Frost claimed that "a poem begins with delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down."  This conception of a poem led Frost to elucidate that, behind the scenes, the poet must always approach writing intimately and organically, allowing the words to originate seamlessly from "a lump in the throat, a homesickness, a loneliness."  Provoking both poet and reader to recollect an oft-distant truth lingering in some obscure region of the brain, this practice culminates in wisdom that may be profound or just a momentary reprieve from the world.Uncompromising and not always popular, Frost and Cummings nevertheless mingled with the literary elite and developed long-term acquaintances with Ezra Pound, who especially championed Frost's literary career.  Each shared with other modernist poets an opposition to the scientific rationalism and commercialist vulgarity that had infiltrated Western culture after the Industrial Revolution.  Yet both poets also continued to exhibit a commitment to the role of nonconformist and favored aspects of the Romantic poetry movement-namely, the significance of the individual's experience and the rejection of societal scrutiny-over the tormenting self-doubt that had beset their peers.  Thus, even in an age defined by its pure and absolute originality, Frost and Cummings occupied unique positions within the modernist poetry movement. -The author's suggestion that "even in an age defined by its pure and absolute originality, Frost and Cummings occupied unique positions within the modernist poetry movement" can most reasonably be interpreted to mean that the two poets:

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. -What is the point of the author's reference to humans as being "bounded in time as we are" (Paragraph 5)?

Passage At the forefront of the modernist poetry movement were T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and others, such as Ezra Pound, whose injunction, "Make it new!" characterized their artistic approach.  Hindered by the same internal conflict plaguing many intellectuals within the cultural upheavals of the time, these poets felt, on one level, that old linguistic certainties had evaporated and new forms must be embraced.  Yet many of them, particularly the later modernist poets, maintained a sentimental attachment to all that had been lost from the cultural certitude of earlier eras, their despondency reflected in much of their work.  At the periphery of the movement were E. E. Cummings and Robert Frost, who were named among modernist poets largely for the chronological classification of their poetry and not necessarily for their style or means of artistic production.A self-titled "poet" and "painter," Cummings was beyond his time in his efforts to innovate.  He would become well known for his erratic applications of punctuation and syntax, and, later, for his visual configurations of words.  Much of Cummings' writing also used idiosyncratic similes and metaphors.  This style, which later evolved to include symbolism and allegory, caused even some of the most progressive modernists to dismiss his work as eccentric, self-indulgent, and lacking depth.  However, as a quintessential dissenter, Cummings remained unaffected by the reactions of his contemporaries and focused more on creating a graphic effect with words.To Cummings, the artist was not one who discerns or describes, but one who feels.  He often contrasted the "doing" of others-scientists in particular-to the "being" of the artist.  Compared to what he defined as the "nonartist," Cummings held that the artist must be original, self-reliant, and free to live according to his or her own truth.  For Cummings, this meant disentanglement from any shackles of societal standards, ranging from the man-made notions of reality and reason to traditional literary conventions.Contrarily, Frost believed that a true poet could-and should-achieve poetic excellence without resorting to what he described as the "new ways of being new."  Consequently, his poetry was composed of ordinary sounds that derived from conventional language.  Although many contemporary critics dismissed his work as overly simplistic, or "too near the level of talk," Frost remained unperturbed by such views, holding that poetry sprang from the natural intonations of a person's voice and should remain true to traditional forms.Frost claimed that "a poem begins with delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down."  This conception of a poem led Frost to elucidate that, behind the scenes, the poet must always approach writing intimately and organically, allowing the words to originate seamlessly from "a lump in the throat, a homesickness, a loneliness."  Provoking both poet and reader to recollect an oft-distant truth lingering in some obscure region of the brain, this practice culminates in wisdom that may be profound or just a momentary reprieve from the world.Uncompromising and not always popular, Frost and Cummings nevertheless mingled with the literary elite and developed long-term acquaintances with Ezra Pound, who especially championed Frost's literary career.  Each shared with other modernist poets an opposition to the scientific rationalism and commercialist vulgarity that had infiltrated Western culture after the Industrial Revolution.  Yet both poets also continued to exhibit a commitment to the role of nonconformist and favored aspects of the Romantic poetry movement-namely, the significance of the individual's experience and the rejection of societal scrutiny-over the tormenting self-doubt that had beset their peers.  Thus, even in an age defined by its pure and absolute originality, Frost and Cummings occupied unique positions within the modernist poetry movement. -On the basis of information contained in the passage, the illusion of the panorama was most likely created by doing all of the following EXCEPT:

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. -According to the passage author, which of the following describes a feature of many noir-style films?

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. -Based on the passage, Edmund Leach's critique of Frazer implies that:

Passage The 1929 stock market crash in the United States, also known as the Great Crash, affected virtually every American who had a stake in the financial market.  In its wake, a deep economic crisis creating political and social unrest caused the United States government to create a strict financial regulatory system that worked effectively from the 1930s through the 1960s.In the late 1930s, as experts clamored to unravel the source of this financial disaster, British economist John Maynard Keynes organized a dynamic revolution in neoclassical macroeconomics, purporting that free markets could ultimately lead to more adequate employment, rather than the normative "boom and bust" cycle of fiscal recessions and depressions in the United States.  However, Keynes also supported government interference, contending that a reduction in consumer spending due to economic hardship must be adequately supplemented by government expenditure.  The American economics professor Hyman Minsky joined the Keynesian cause two decades later, adding that an accumulation of debt by the national government drives an unstable economy toward crisis, especially in the nongovernment sector.Preceding the Great Crash, the financial market was already unstable, which in hindsight has proven to be one of the many warning signs for emerging crises.  Regrettably, these "red flags" were not characterized until after the collapse.  To prevent another crash as experienced in 1929 and, to a lesser extent in 2008, changes must be made as financial markets expand and become more intricate.  Many economists agree that the mainstream theory of financial markets, which is the foundation of support for the archaic New Financial Architecture (NFA), must be replaced by the realistic economic theories proposed by Keynes and Minsky.  In opposition to singular market ownership, Keynesian economics points to a macroeconomic system wherein a "mixed economy" places the bulk of financial responsibility on households, to be supplemented by governmental spending when necessary.  However, NFA regulations tout the practice of "business as usual," allowing the market to cycle in and out of recessions.Progress has been made toward overall reform, however slowly.  A January 2009 report from the Comptroller General's Office to the United States Congress was delivered in hopes of shaping potential regulatory reform efforts.  These efforts "seek to: 1) describe how regulation has evolved in banking, securities, thrifts, credit unions, futures, insurance, secondary mortgage markets and other important areas; (2) define several key changes in the financial sector in recent decades that have highlighted significant limitations and gaps in the existing regulatory system; and (3) present an evaluation framework that can be used by Congress and others to restructure regulatory reform."Also, there must be a broad political mandate in support of serious financial regulatory reforms.  For too long, monetary elites such as lobbyists, private bankers, and commercial investors have controlled a potentially fragile financial system.  Regulation is needed for remedying market failure and protecting the economy from an imminent collapse.These conjectures are meant to replace fragmented and complex arrangements of federal and state regulations-put into place over the past 150 years-that have not kept pace with major developments in financial markets and commercial products in recent decades.  Without safeguards in place, the American financial market will face a continuous ebb and flow of prosperity and may be forced to face another crisis. -The author claims that financial regulatory reform is necessary to:

Passage In 1482, a thirty-year-old Leonardo da Vinci left his art studio in Florence and traveled to Milan to seek employment at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza.  A drafted letter of application to the duke detailed Leonardo's many useful skills, the majority of which concerned military developments such as "methods for destroying any fortress" and making "unassailable armored chariots."  Peacetime talents such as "guiding water from one place to another" or producing "sculpture in marble, bronze and clay" were mentioned only at the end of the letter.  Nevertheless, one of the most intriguing items is the entry stating, "I have designed extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be easily carried": in other words, portable bridges.Modern scholars question whether most of the devices mentioned in Leonardo's letter could really have been constructed.  For instance, Krull describes the fact that Leonardo never sent the letter as "a good thing, as it was mostly bluff."  Isaacson, though a bit more charitable, similarly declares that Leonardo's "boasts were aspirational."  Regarding the bridge, however, there is no doubt that the design is workable.According to at least one account, Leonardo really did make such a bridge for Sforza.  More significantly, examples of the bridge have been built and used in contemporary times.  A sketch in one of Leonardo's notebooks illustrates the bridge's construction, which includes different sets of wooden beams cut to specific lengths.  Requiring no nails, ropes, or other fasteners, nor any tools, the bridge can be assembled by a mere handful of people, and even some children could potentially build a small version or model.When the bridge is constructed correctly, each component helps to hold all the other components in place.  The original sketch calls for the beams to be notched so that the pieces of the bridge lock together.  However, in some cases this feature can be omitted, provided the wood is sufficiently rough.  This version of the bridge then stands and bears weight due to friction, gravity, and the physical integrity of the pieces.  In this way, the structure depends entirely on the interplay of physical forces upon its parts.The design is modular and repeatable, meaning that a longer bridge can be made by simply adding another section, with the supports interlocked accordingly.  Given enough materials, time, and manpower, such a bridge could in principle be made to quite a great length.  However, in longer bridges the notches would in fact be needed, because some of the beams would be at steeper angles.Despite the relative ease of constructing the bridge, there is one challenge: building it requires access to both sides of the region to be crossed, as well as the area in between.  Such a consideration might seem obvious in building any bridge, but it can still prove problematic.  If a bridge is meant to help cross a body of water, not all members of the group attempting to cross will receive its benefit, as some would have to stand in the water during the bridge's construction.  Of course, this assumes that it is safe to enter the water in the first place.  Crossing a chasm or a deep pit would pose even greater difficulties, as the bridge's prospective builders would, like the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, lack a place to stand.  Leonardo may have confronted that problem as well and considered how to make a bridge that was not only portable and freestanding, but constructible in sequence from one end to the other.  Although no evidence exists of such a design in the known pages of his notebooks, many pages have been lost to history and might one day be rediscovered. -Which of the following assertions would most strongly challenge one of the claims made by the author?

Passage The 1929 stock market crash in the United States, also known as the Great Crash, affected virtually every American who had a stake in the financial market.  In its wake, a deep economic crisis creating political and social unrest caused the United States government to create a strict financial regulatory system that worked effectively from the 1930s through the 1960s.In the late 1930s, as experts clamored to unravel the source of this financial disaster, British economist John Maynard Keynes organized a dynamic revolution in neoclassical macroeconomics, purporting that free markets could ultimately lead to more adequate employment, rather than the normative "boom and bust" cycle of fiscal recessions and depressions in the United States.  However, Keynes also supported government interference, contending that a reduction in consumer spending due to economic hardship must be adequately supplemented by government expenditure.  The American economics professor Hyman Minsky joined the Keynesian cause two decades later, adding that an accumulation of debt by the national government drives an unstable economy toward crisis, especially in the nongovernment sector.Preceding the Great Crash, the financial market was already unstable, which in hindsight has proven to be one of the many warning signs for emerging crises.  Regrettably, these "red flags" were not characterized until after the collapse.  To prevent another crash as experienced in 1929 and, to a lesser extent in 2008, changes must be made as financial markets expand and become more intricate.  Many economists agree that the mainstream theory of financial markets, which is the foundation of support for the archaic New Financial Architecture (NFA), must be replaced by the realistic economic theories proposed by Keynes and Minsky.  In opposition to singular market ownership, Keynesian economics points to a macroeconomic system wherein a "mixed economy" places the bulk of financial responsibility on households, to be supplemented by governmental spending when necessary.  However, NFA regulations tout the practice of "business as usual," allowing the market to cycle in and out of recessions.Progress has been made toward overall reform, however slowly.  A January 2009 report from the Comptroller General's Office to the United States Congress was delivered in hopes of shaping potential regulatory reform efforts.  These efforts "seek to: 1) describe how regulation has evolved in banking, securities, thrifts, credit unions, futures, insurance, secondary mortgage markets and other important areas; (2) define several key changes in the financial sector in recent decades that have highlighted significant limitations and gaps in the existing regulatory system; and (3) present an evaluation framework that can be used by Congress and others to restructure regulatory reform."Also, there must be a broad political mandate in support of serious financial regulatory reforms.  For too long, monetary elites such as lobbyists, private bankers, and commercial investors have controlled a potentially fragile financial system.  Regulation is needed for remedying market failure and protecting the economy from an imminent collapse.These conjectures are meant to replace fragmented and complex arrangements of federal and state regulations-put into place over the past 150 years-that have not kept pace with major developments in financial markets and commercial products in recent decades.  Without safeguards in place, the American financial market will face a continuous ebb and flow of prosperity and may be forced to face another crisis. -An opponent of John Maynard Keynes' and Hyman Minsky's theories would most likely be willing to support:

Passage Until the 1970s, many states mandated that women assume their husbands' surnames upon marriage.  Today, women are no longer bound by this constraint, and some, like journalist Ellen Goodman, have argued that future generations will view the tradition of married women changing their names as a kind of madness.  That tradition remains strongly ingrained in society, however, and the freedom to reject it comes with social costs.Law professor Elizabeth Emens notes that although cases such as Kruzel v Podell and Dunn v Palermo established in 1975 that a married woman may legally decline to become "Mrs. His Name" (a term used by psychologist Jean M. Twenge), it is still customary for children's surnames to be conferred patrilinearly.  Hence, a prospective bride faces a dilemma of symbolic identity; she may either retain her nominal connection to her parents and past self or create a nominal connection to her husband and future children.  Meanwhile, Emens continues, "her husband has the same name as his parents and his child and thus continuity across all three generations of his family."  Alternatively, a woman might attempt to bridge both worlds through hyphenation, by which "she alone bears the hassle of all the computer forms that apparently can't accommodate such a name, and the people who can't seem to remember it, and the people who think she's constantly trying to make a point about her independence."Other disadvantages are associated with societally atypical naming choices.  These difficulties range from the mild, like eliciting confusion when introducing oneself, to the more egregious, such as a woman whose new neighbors would not believe she and her husband were truly married.  Men also experience social backlash if they choose to adopt or incorporate their wives' names, such as movie reviewer Sam Van Hallgren, who acquired the "Van" from Carrie Van Deest.  Those cases are rare, however; thus, it is women who primarily endure these kinds of burdens.Nevertheless, there are some who see the issue differently.  In a 1996 Good Housekeeping article, Peggy Noonan advocates for the value of name changing as reflecting the couple's commitment to marriage.  In particular, she writes that the typical "bride in her 20s grew up in the Age of Divorce" and that "[t]his bride and her husband…may have fewer misconceptions than their parents about how important freedom and self-actualization are.  They may think other things are more important."  Noonan goes on to suggest that "for these brides, taking their husbands' names is a declaration not only of intention, but of faith…faith in yourself and your spouse."  Noonan ends her article by applauding the trend of more couples choosing to share a married surname.Emens criticizes this stance.  As she argues, equating commitment to marriage with a woman's willingness to change her name makes sense "only when there is no realistic possibility of him or both changing" to create a shared surname.  Legal scholar Kelly Snyder faults an argument from Laura Dawn Lewis on similar grounds, observing: "It is unclear why these [reasons] should explain a woman's choice to change her name, but not a man's."  Like Emens, Snyder stresses the importance of name to a person's sense of self as well as the legal inequities surrounding traditional marital naming.  In her view, the best way to promote a woman's freedom to make a genuine choice about her name is to facilitate men's ability to change names when marrying.  If men no longer face arduous legal and social challenges to changing their own names, then the idea of a woman doing so will no longer be seen as the natural default position. -Regarding the unequal burden on women with respect to marital names, Kelly Snyder argues that the best way to grant women a genuine choice about whether to change names is to make it easier for men to change their own names.  This argument is:

Passage In the 1890s, the world of American dance underwent a profound transformation when a group of pioneering dancers dared to challenge the rigid 350-year-old protocols of classical ballet.  The likes of Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis rebelled against ballet tradition while simultaneously rejecting the alternative world of vaudeville.  Duncan, in particular, was a proponent of what was deemed "uninhibited freedom of movement."  Appearing on stage in a loose tunic with bare feet and her hair down, she performed natural, flowing movements she claimed "emanated from her solar plexus."  For her part, Fuller combined billowing costumes, dramatic lighting, and improvised movements in attempting to imitate natural phenomena, as exemplified by her "serpentine" dance.  Meanwhile, St. Denis and her partner Ted Shawn incorporated elements of Native American and East Asian ritualistic dance into their work.  These artists managed to break through the prejudice of tradition, clearing the way for the advent of modern dance in the20th century.The second generation of artists, which included Doris Humphrey and Lester Horton, continued to loosen dance from the restraints of classical ballet.  Many were also determined to raise the audience's consciousness about contemporary social concerns during a time that witnessed the aftermath of World War I, increased industrialization, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism in Europe.  For a while, the modern dance movement became more than an assault on classical ballet; by dramatizing events on stage to inspire a collective emotional response, dance became a vehicle designed to spur sociopolitical change.Martha Graham, a student of St. Denis and Shawn, went on to develop a radical new system of movement.  The "Graham technique" originated from her cardinal belief that movement expresses the emotions that people attempt to conceal and words are inadequate to express.  The new technique was organic; based on the natural rhythm of breathing, it exaggerated the muscular contraction and release, as well as the consequent flexion of the spine, required to breathe.  The visual effects were startling, and the iconoclastic Graham went so far as to assert that the technique "represented the human being's inner conflicts."  Furthermore, the movement of contraction became a regular feature of modern dance, which, as some sources stress, was "used, altered, and redefined by many subsequent choreographers."As modern dance evolved, it became the antithesis of ballet, which followed strict patterns of movement and aimed to be light and graceful.  By contrast, the new dance style was often angular, jagged, and stark; the choreography featured nonlinear movements and irregular contours.  Instead of working against gravity as in ballet's sequences of vertical leaps, the contemporary style made gravity the dancers' ally in initiating movements from the lower abdomen with their bare feet rooted to the floor.  Whereas ballet emphasized the body's limbs, the new dance mode accentuated the torso.  While ballet was made to appear effortless, Graham's main goal as a choreographer was to display the physical exertion of articulating emotion through the body's movement.Graham also strove to make the works she created and choreographed holistic.  She collaborated with sculptor Isamu Noguchi on stage sets, consulted with the designer Halston on costumes, and partnered with composers such as Louis Horst and Samuel Barber.  Aaron Copland wrote the score to the highly acclaimed modern "ballet" Appalachian Spring, which Graham choreographed and in which she performed the lead female role in 1944.  Building on the foundation of her precursors, Graham-who continued to dance until age 76 and to choreograph until shortly before her death at 96-made modern dance, in one scholar's estimation, "an established art form that was no longer merely regarded as an avant-garde aberration." -The author implies that the dance styles of Duncan and Fuller departed from convention because they:

Passage The Aran Islands, a trio of carboniferous limestone slabs, likely more than 350 million years old, are situated at the mouth of Galway Bay off the western coast of Ireland, on what in ages past must have seemed the very periphery of the civilized world.  For those who have dared to test the habitability of these rocky fragments, one certainty has always awaited: challenge.  Indeed, the presumed prototype of the Aran economy has been one of bare subsistence, a veritable experiment in self-sufficiency, demanding resourcefulness, endurance, and, above all, austerity.Of the three isles, Inishmore, the largest and westernmost, whose length forms a 9-mile breakwater against the Atlantic, has perhaps also been the most economically diverse and certainly the most historically colorful.  The island hosted the first monastic communities of Ireland and withstood the blunt force of Viking raiders and, centuries later, Cromwellian soldiers.  Following these invasions, the population-and the economy along with it-managed to flourish despite a landscape whose barrenness offered an almost equal shortage of arable land and surface water.  In addition, Inishmore's prolonged growing season, the result of year-round moderate temperatures, afforded an exquisite irony: the flora and fauna it supported, a curious admixture of that which could be found in alpine, Mediterranean, and arctic climes, were wonders for the naturalist to behold but worthless to inhabitants seeking to sustain themselves on the land's bounty.  Nevertheless, the island has long been able to defy its hardscrabble character and has demonstrated a talent for economic self-reinvention, all the while retaining its image as pristine, primitive, and inhospitable.By the early 19th century, the denizens of Inishmore had learned to effectively counterbalance the meagerness of their island's natural resources by swiftly focusing on new and evermore efficient ways to exploit them.  For example, the abundance of seaweed off its shores supplied a remedy for the scarcity of soil.  Once most of the boulders were cleared away, the sand could be layered with the seaweed, which, as it rotted, transformed the granular matter into fertile earth in which common crops such as barley, rye, oats, and potatoes have since been cultivated.  More land also meant more livestock could be raised, and the grass-fed calves of the island are still prized by mainlanders.  Seaweed could also be harvested by the ton and burnt in kilns to produce kelp, the sale of which on the mainland continues to be a thriving, if seasonal, industry, often more reliable than fishing.This is not, however, to say that life on the Aran isles was ever easy; in fact, the lifestyle of the inhabitants demanded a delicate equilibrium, and in the face of economic marginality most households resorted to occupational plurality-to include any combination of fishing, agriculture, kelp-making, boat-making, fowling, textiles, and manual labor.  Yet, despite this ever-shifting quest for resources, life on Inishmore even in the 1800s was a far cry from that depicted in Robert J. Flaherty's self-styled documentary film of 1934, Man of Aran, which dramatized the islanders' daily existence as a never-ending and desperate struggle against the elements, particularly the constant apocalyptic threat of the sea.Eighty years later, this image of Aran life endures, perpetuating a myth that has arguably become a commodity as real as the Man of Aran sweater sold on Inishmore but typically knit elsewhere in Ireland-a symbol of the island's dual character, of its commercial nature that so patently contradicts its celebrated identity as isolated and self-sufficient.  Still, the persistence of this image of remoteness, exposure, and inexorable hardship, however fabricated or embellished, has helped the island reinvent its economy as one heavily reliant on the outside-particularly on a tourist industry that brings in as many as 2,000 visitors a day by ferry-rather than self-sufficient. -The information that Inishmore is now particularly favored as a place of tourism is NOT plausibly connected to which of the following assertions?  Inishmore:

Passage The fledgling public television industry faced an uncertain future in the late 1960s.  Near the end of his presidency, Democrat Lyndon Johnson allocated $20 million to create the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  In 1969, however, his newly elected Republican successor Richard Nixon hoped to reduce government spending and was considering a cut of 50% or more to that appropriation.  Before a final decision was made, public broadcasting representatives were invited to appear before Congress to make their case for the full funding.  One of their leaders, future Public Broadcasting Service president Hartford N. Gunn, Jr., asked TV personality Fred Rogers to join him in testifying as a key advocate for public television.As the creator and host of the show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Rogers embodied moral values, a deep sense of purpose, and concern for the welfare of children, all of which would later make him one of the most beloved figures in television history.  At the time of the congressional hearing, however, Rogers' show had aired nationally for only a year.  Although highly regarded by his current audience, Rogers did not yet possess the level of recognition he would eventually obtain.  His televised appearance before the Sub-Committee on Communications would be many Americans' first time seeing him.  In addition, despite having studied early childhood development under such prominent psychologists as Benjamin Spock and Margaret McFarland, Rogers was not widely known as an expert in that field.  In short, Rogers was an unusual figure to be chosen to testify before Congress.  Rogers' biographer Maxwell King describes Gunn's decision to depend so heavily on Rogers' testimony as "a pretty big gamble."Chairing the sub-committee hearing was Democratic senator John Pastore of Rhode Island, portrayed by King as "a blunt, no-nonsense social conservative who shared the Republican interest in keeping federal spending in line."  Pastore had also been critical of the television industry for what he saw as its promotion of immorality.  Although those criticisms had been leveled primarily at commercial programs, Pastore's views certainly couldn't have helped the case that Rogers needed to make.  The unproven nature of public television as a recent enterprise added an additional hurdle to securing the funding.Nevertheless, despite the odds stacked against him, Fred Rogers greatly impressed Pastore and the rest of the sub-committee.  Rather than giving the type of formal testimony that might have been expected at such a hearing, Rogers simply spoke earnestly about what, in his view, made public television so important.  He shared Pastore's worries about television's content, and was especially concerned about television geared toward children.  Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which addressed children directly and acknowledged their unique perspective, was based on Rogers' vision of public programming as a positive social force.  As he explained, taking children's problems seriously and showing them that their lives can be understood and managed makes a profound difference in the type of people they become and the society they help to create.The highlight of the testimony came when Rogers recited the lyrics to one of the songs from his show, which had been inspired by a child's question about how to deal with anger.  The song acknowledges the frustrations and fears of childhood while affirming each child's ability to control his or her feelings and behavior.  Rogers' simple but encouraging words clearly moved the sub-committee members, including Senator Pastore, who responded: "Looks like you just earned the twenty million dollars."  Hartford Gunn's gamble had paid off.  In an interesting twist of affairs, Pastore himself testified the following year at the White House Conference on Children-an event chaired by none other than Fred Rogers. -Based on the passage, it can most reasonably be inferred that Wagner's greatest achievement as a composer was that:

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. -The passage suggests that all major civilizations have:

Passage Although the primary canon in the history of political thought largely ignores the views of Immanuel Kant, he nevertheless was as important a political thinker as Rousseau, Locke, or even Aristotle.  Working in the context of the Prussian Enlightenment, Kant championed the idea that the only innate right of human beings is freedom.  Fittingly, the centerpiece of his political theory is that freedom can be the only basis for a just political state.A political theory that advances freedom as its core tenet may appear inherently problematic.  The very existence of a political state would seem to require limitations on the freedoms of those within it.  However, this presents no serious problem for Kant's theory.  The Kantian notion of political freedom-which stands in stark contrast to the notion of transcendental freedom widely associated with Kant's nonpolitical writings-is restricted to the external relations between human persons.  In its political sense, freedom refers to the innate right of every person to independence from being constrained by another's choice.  In other words, every person has the innate right to make choices freely but only so long as these choices do not interfere with those of others.  Laws that do not allow for political freedom are forbidden in Kant's view because within a just civil condition, the promulgation of a law requires that an entire people agree to be subjected to it.There are more substantive problems facing Kant's political theory.  Most notable among these concerns is Kant's promotion of welfare legislation.  As he says, "The government is authorized to constrain the wealthy to provide the means of sustenance to those who are unable to provide for even their most necessary and basic needs."  Given Kant's notion of political freedom, to enact such legislation would be catastrophic.  Welfare legislation violates Kant's own criterion regarding laws promulgated within a just civil condition: Governmental interference of this kind is a prime example of legislation on which an entire people will be divided.This was an egregious error on Kant's part.  At the same time, proponents of a Kantian conception of the state need neither embrace this result nor dismiss the possibility of consistently incorporating welfare legislation into their preferred brand of political theory.  Although Kant did not explicitly advocate it himself, a Kantian may hold that public provision of welfare is necessary for the state to fulfill its primary function-namely, protecting the liberties of its citizens.  For instance, if failing to adopt welfare legislation would threaten the continued existence, security, or stability of the state, then Kantians may justify such legislation on the grounds that it serves an instrumentally necessary role in upholding the fundamental aims and principles of Kantianism itself.  It is interesting to note that followers of Kant will likely have independent reasons to accept something along these lines.  Kant himself held that rational entities-such as persons, corporations, and states-have a duty of self-preservation, and thus are obligated to take measures to ensure their continued existence, security, and stability.There are still other issues surrounding a Kantian theory of the state.  These will need to be dealt with separately, but they should not go overlooked.  Breaking down the barriers that leave Kant outside the primary canon of political theory is a laudable task, which will take much effort to accomplish. -To decide if welfare legislation is justified, proponents of a Kantian conception of the state would need to determine:

Passage In the 1890s, the world of American dance underwent a profound transformation when a group of pioneering dancers dared to challenge the rigid 350-year-old protocols of classical ballet.  The likes of Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis rebelled against ballet tradition while simultaneously rejecting the alternative world of vaudeville.  Duncan, in particular, was a proponent of what was deemed "uninhibited freedom of movement."  Appearing on stage in a loose tunic with bare feet and her hair down, she performed natural, flowing movements she claimed "emanated from her solar plexus."  For her part, Fuller combined billowing costumes, dramatic lighting, and improvised movements in attempting to imitate natural phenomena, as exemplified by her "serpentine" dance.  Meanwhile, St. Denis and her partner Ted Shawn incorporated elements of Native American and East Asian ritualistic dance into their work.  These artists managed to break through the prejudice of tradition, clearing the way for the advent of modern dance in the20th century.The second generation of artists, which included Doris Humphrey and Lester Horton, continued to loosen dance from the restraints of classical ballet.  Many were also determined to raise the audience's consciousness about contemporary social concerns during a time that witnessed the aftermath of World War I, increased industrialization, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism in Europe.  For a while, the modern dance movement became more than an assault on classical ballet; by dramatizing events on stage to inspire a collective emotional response, dance became a vehicle designed to spur sociopolitical change.Martha Graham, a student of St. Denis and Shawn, went on to develop a radical new system of movement.  The "Graham technique" originated from her cardinal belief that movement expresses the emotions that people attempt to conceal and words are inadequate to express.  The new technique was organic; based on the natural rhythm of breathing, it exaggerated the muscular contraction and release, as well as the consequent flexion of the spine, required to breathe.  The visual effects were startling, and the iconoclastic Graham went so far as to assert that the technique "represented the human being's inner conflicts."  Furthermore, the movement of contraction became a regular feature of modern dance, which, as some sources stress, was "used, altered, and redefined by many subsequent choreographers."As modern dance evolved, it became the antithesis of ballet, which followed strict patterns of movement and aimed to be light and graceful.  By contrast, the new dance style was often angular, jagged, and stark; the choreography featured nonlinear movements and irregular contours.  Instead of working against gravity as in ballet's sequences of vertical leaps, the contemporary style made gravity the dancers' ally in initiating movements from the lower abdomen with their bare feet rooted to the floor.  Whereas ballet emphasized the body's limbs, the new dance mode accentuated the torso.  While ballet was made to appear effortless, Graham's main goal as a choreographer was to display the physical exertion of articulating emotion through the body's movement.Graham also strove to make the works she created and choreographed holistic.  She collaborated with sculptor Isamu Noguchi on stage sets, consulted with the designer Halston on costumes, and partnered with composers such as Louis Horst and Samuel Barber.  Aaron Copland wrote the score to the highly acclaimed modern "ballet" Appalachian Spring, which Graham choreographed and in which she performed the lead female role in 1944.  Building on the foundation of her precursors, Graham-who continued to dance until age 76 and to choreograph until shortly before her death at 96-made modern dance, in one scholar's estimation, "an established art form that was no longer merely regarded as an avant-garde aberration." -Based on passage information, the prime objective of modern dance is most probably:

Passage The fledgling public television industry faced an uncertain future in the late 1960s.  Near the end of his presidency, Democrat Lyndon Johnson allocated $20 million to create the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  In 1969, however, his newly elected Republican successor Richard Nixon hoped to reduce government spending and was considering a cut of 50% or more to that appropriation.  Before a final decision was made, public broadcasting representatives were invited to appear before Congress to make their case for the full funding.  One of their leaders, future Public Broadcasting Service president Hartford N. Gunn, Jr., asked TV personality Fred Rogers to join him in testifying as a key advocate for public television.As the creator and host of the show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Rogers embodied moral values, a deep sense of purpose, and concern for the welfare of children, all of which would later make him one of the most beloved figures in television history.  At the time of the congressional hearing, however, Rogers' show had aired nationally for only a year.  Although highly regarded by his current audience, Rogers did not yet possess the level of recognition he would eventually obtain.  His televised appearance before the Sub-Committee on Communications would be many Americans' first time seeing him.  In addition, despite having studied early childhood development under such prominent psychologists as Benjamin Spock and Margaret McFarland, Rogers was not widely known as an expert in that field.  In short, Rogers was an unusual figure to be chosen to testify before Congress.  Rogers' biographer Maxwell King describes Gunn's decision to depend so heavily on Rogers' testimony as "a pretty big gamble."Chairing the sub-committee hearing was Democratic senator John Pastore of Rhode Island, portrayed by King as "a blunt, no-nonsense social conservative who shared the Republican interest in keeping federal spending in line."  Pastore had also been critical of the television industry for what he saw as its promotion of immorality.  Although those criticisms had been leveled primarily at commercial programs, Pastore's views certainly couldn't have helped the case that Rogers needed to make.  The unproven nature of public television as a recent enterprise added an additional hurdle to securing the funding.Nevertheless, despite the odds stacked against him, Fred Rogers greatly impressed Pastore and the rest of the sub-committee.  Rather than giving the type of formal testimony that might have been expected at such a hearing, Rogers simply spoke earnestly about what, in his view, made public television so important.  He shared Pastore's worries about television's content, and was especially concerned about television geared toward children.  Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which addressed children directly and acknowledged their unique perspective, was based on Rogers' vision of public programming as a positive social force.  As he explained, taking children's problems seriously and showing them that their lives can be understood and managed makes a profound difference in the type of people they become and the society they help to create.The highlight of the testimony came when Rogers recited the lyrics to one of the songs from his show, which had been inspired by a child's question about how to deal with anger.  The song acknowledges the frustrations and fears of childhood while affirming each child's ability to control his or her feelings and behavior.  Rogers' simple but encouraging words clearly moved the sub-committee members, including Senator Pastore, who responded: "Looks like you just earned the twenty million dollars."  Hartford Gunn's gamble had paid off.  In an interesting twist of affairs, Pastore himself testified the following year at the White House Conference on Children-an event chaired by none other than Fred Rogers. -The author's description of what "some American engineers recommended" (Paragraph 5) is most similar to suggesting that a student do which of the following when choosing between two topics for a college English project?

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." -In the last paragraph, the author compares telegrams with text messages.  Based on this comparison, the author considers the telegram to be a communication mode that was:

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 on voting behavior suggests that he or she would be most likely to disapprove of which of the following:

Passage Of the myriad problems facing translators, perhaps the most significant lies in the tension between what a text conveys and the words used to convey it.  Strict fidelity to the specific words of a text often fails to capture the full sense of its meaning.  Beyond this loss of meaning can also arise a loss of artistry and structural features which often cannot be replicated.For instance, a fully evocative rendering of the 119th Psalm seems unattainable.  Comprising twenty-two strophes of eight lines each, the one hundred and seventy-six verses do appear somewhat poetic in translation.  But in the original Hebrew the Psalm is an acrostic: the verses of the first strophe all begin with the letter Aleph, those of the second with Beth, and so on, with Tav, the last letter of the alphabet, commencing the final eight verses.  The reader of a translation would, understandably, be ignorant of this fact.  While this does not affect the essential meaning of the verses, it does affect their character-something is lost from the original in its non-native presentation.  Although there have been occasional attempts to mimic this structure in other languages, they have all been unsuccessful.  The tortured and unnatural wording that results proves the wisdom of most translators in prioritizing readability.  Nevertheless, the Psalmist wrote with a particular purpose that is left untransmitted.  The sacrifice of the acrostic, however necessary, is regrettable.Another concern is what might be called translational multiplicity.  Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges famously remarked: "The Quixote, due to my congenital practice of Spanish, is a uniform monument, with no other variations… the Odyssey, thanks to my opportune ignorance of Greek, is an international bookstore of works in prose and verse."  To speak of "the" Odyssey, or more generally, "the" text of any work, runs headlong into the reality that for translated works, "the text" is not a unitary entity but a collection of candidates.  Thus, a perennial difficulty of translation is conveyed through Borges' idiosyncratic presentation.  Or is it?  For Borges' remarks are elsewhere listed as: "Since Spanish is my native language, the Quixote is to me an unchanging monument, with no possible variations….  But the Odyssey, thanks to my opportune ignorance of Greek, is a library of works in prose and verse."  That we might ask which of these translations more closely represents his actual words is a fact that Borges would likely have found amusing.Considerations of this sort are magnified when one approaches the writings not only of individual authors, but of past civilizations.  Despite being one of the world's foremost sinologists, the late D. C. Lau was convinced that none of us truly understand classical Chinese.  The sentiment was no mere expression of modesty; fellow scholar Roger Ames described Lau as "[h]aving assimilated the classical corpus through a lifetime of careful study and reflection."  Rather, Lau was keenly aware of the difficult truth that the fluidity of language and culture over time can shroud the works of the ancients in obscurities that may be inscrutable to even their most passionately curious descendants.Modern works may also be altered, however, and sometimes through more subtle types of translation.  The book known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in England was changed to refer instead to the "Sorcerer's Stone" in the United States, reportedly due to a belief that the original title would be unpalatable to an American audience.  While that depressing assumption may indeed have been correct, the change removes a titular connection to a pre-existing myth.  The generic fantasy idea with which it is replaced thus fails to embody the full character of the original work. -According to the author, it is unlikely that the ongoing conflict between Australia and Japan over whale hunting will soon be resolved.  Which of the following claims made in the passage most strongly supports the author's conclusion?