Exam 4: Critical Analysis & Reasoning Skills

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. -The author describes socialism as "a pervasive bogeyman laying siege at the periphery of the American psyche" as part of a claim 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. -How could the passage author best support the statement that "any theory about Homeric authorship must accommodate the oral tradition"?

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." -If Dr. Bliss had displayed greater humility as a physician, which of the following would most likely have occurred?

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. -Suppose that the plays "Shogun" and "The King and I" are being performed at a Broadway theater in New York City.  The passage suggests which of the following scenarios is LEAST probable?

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. -Based on the passage, which of the following statements is the LEAST supported by evidence?

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. -Which of the following situations in the tourist business is most analogous to the one described in Paragraph 5 regarding the Man of Aran sweater?

Passage The name "Sun Tzu" is readily recognized by scholars and non-scholars alike; as the author of The Art of War, he is identifiable even to those who have never studied Chinese history or military strategy.  Much less familiar to the layman is his descendant Sun Bin, who one and a half centuries later (circa 350 BCE) extended the discussion of battlefield tactics with his own insights.  Although some deem Sun Bin's thinking to lack the philosophical depth displayed by his predecessor, the two strategists in fact bear many similarities, and we should not be overhasty in our evaluation of Sun Bin's contribution.An instructive example can be found in a historical record of his advice to another commander concerning a horse race: Sun Bin then said to Tian Ji, "You just go ahead and make a large wager; I will see to it that you win."…Just as the contest was to begin, Sun Bin counseled Tian Ji, "Pit your third-best team against their finest, your finest against their second-best, and your second best against their third."  When all three horse races were finished, though Tian Ji had lost the first race, his horses prevailed in the next two, in the end winning a thousand pieces of the king's gold.It would be easy to dismiss this episode as a demonstration merely of cunning or desire for personal gain.  However, Sun Bin's tactic essentially aligns with Sun Tzu's famous maxim: "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."  Nothing had changed about the horses, but Sun Bin arranged their deployment in a way that ensured an overall victory.  Hence, the story is not out of place in a context of military tactics because it illustrates the adaptation of circumstance to one's advantage.Similarly, while The Art of War remains of interest to the modern military mind, its study is even more often applied to non-martial contexts, such as commerce, politics, or simply how to live.  In one chapter, Sun Tzu gives the instruction to "throw your soldiers into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight.  If they will face death, there is nothing they may not achieve."  The military application is obvious, but the underlying idea extends much further: when one cannot give up, there is no choice but to strive for victory with full abandon.  The question then becomes whether one can play both general and soldier, throwing oneself into the inescapable position that must be confronted.Sun Bin refers to the success or failure of an army when saying: "If you take a road that goes nowhere, even Heaven and earth cannot make you prosper; if you take the right road, even Heaven and earth cannot waylay you."  Nevertheless, his words apply far beyond a military perspective.  By situating warfare within "the pattern of the heavens and the earth," Sun Bin conceives it as a microcosm of a larger and more abstract natural harmony.  To act in accordance with this harmony is to secure victory; to fail to do so is to ensure defeat.  Consequently, success in battle is achieved in the same way as success in any endeavor; as with the horse race, one must adapt to the natural propensities of a situation.  Ultimately, Sun Bin provides a compelling picture of battlefield tactics and strategy.  As with Sun Tzu's more famous insights, however, the true depth and value of Sun Bin's thinking lie in its broader scope and application. -Which of the following statements is most supported by evidence in the passage?

Passage A crucial part of Pinker's argument against the theory of the blank slate is to address people's motivations for wanting that theory to be true.  As he sees it: "To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed….  Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought that it is immoral to think."  People thus want to believe there is no such thing as human nature, in order to avoid the negative consequences they think would follow from its existence.  Pinker argues that this position not only must ignore the compelling scientific evidence that the mind does have an innate organization, but also depends upon a fundamental mistake about the implications of that idea.For example, suppose that the relative incidence of some desirable trait was higher in certain populations than in others.  If genetics plays no part in this phenomenon, then such a difference can be attributed solely to social conditions.  Not only would that analysis uphold our commitment to the fundamental equality of persons, but it would also mean that the difference is correctable-we have only to organize society in the proper way, and the disparities between groups would disappear.  On the other hand, if any part of the difference is attributed to genetics, then it would seem to open the door to stereotyping, mistreatment of individuals based on ethnicity, and other ills.  Thus the impulse to reject the prospect of a genetic component is strong, even if the evidence were to suggest such a correlation.However, this worry is based on two misconceptions.  Pinker notes that variance of traits by population would not justify treating members of some populations differently, because it is still wrong-logically as well as morally-to judge a particular person based on the average traits of a group.  Aside from recognizing that people should be evaluated as individuals, it is simply a fact that members of a group will display a variety of characteristics that may be closer to or farther away from a statistical average.  I would add that a supposed justification of differential treatment based on inborn traits does not reflect our normal moral intuitions.  For instance, if Person A is brighter than Person B, we do not therefore conclude that Person B deserves fewer rights or less human dignity.  In the same way, differences between groups also would not justify such a view.Similarly, Pinker argues that putative differences between the sexes are dismissed out of fear that such differences would promote an evaluative hierarchy between men and women.  However, the assumption that men and women cannot be equal unless they are the same ought to strike us as deeply troubling.  That claim would seem to imply that any difference must entail a difference of value, a position which is neither plausible nor morally legitimate…Such considerations also relate to the concerns about human perfectibility alluded to earlier.  Improving people through social institutions does not require that humans be blank slates; in fact, the opposite may be true.  If we ignore the realities of human nature, then the best-intentioned social programs may be ineffective or even harmful.  Moreover, the idea that human beings are completely malleable and can be "molded" as desired ought arguably to inspire more horror than optimism….  On the other hand, acknowledging the existence of human nature enables us to organize society in ways that work with humans as they really are.  Human traits and tendencies are not the straitjackets some imagine, and recognizing their influence allows nurture to work with nature instead of against it. -Pinker's position, as it is described in Paragraph 1, includes the assumption 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. -Which of the following is NOT mentioned as a consideration that should be made by the doctor prior to deciding what must be done with the antidote?

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. -Which of the following perspectives, if shown in a painting, would be LEAST like the bird's eye view?

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 does NOT provide information about Panama's:

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. -Based on passage information, Boethius' solution to the Freedom and Foreknowledge Dilemma depends on the idea that:

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." -Based on the author's view in the passage, the relation between different humanistic frameworks may one day be analogous to the relation between:

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 author most likely believes that the main reason for investigating the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey is that it will provide readers with:

Passage Since its origins in India around the 5th century C.E., the game of chess has gradually evolved into the modern form now played across the globe.  Although most people have some idea of what chess entails, there are many misconceptions about its practice.  For instance, a non-player might wonder about the maximum number of moves that can be planned in advance, but an experienced player would find that question naïve.  The unsatisfying but accurate answer is that it depends on the position, because the opponent's potential moves will at some points require calculating numerous possibilities but at other points will be an entirely forced sequence.  Similarly, a common scenario in fiction is for a player to defeat an opponent by sudden surprise-the rival's look of confidence morphing into complete disbelief as the winner unexpectedly proclaims "Checkmate."  In real chess such abrupt triumph occurs rarely or never, as the inevitability of checkmate will have been readily apparent to both sides.Checkmate is the primary goal of chess, but it is not the only way in which games may end, nor even the only way in which games may be won.  Indeed, at higher levels of play checkmate is uncommon, because the losing side typically resigns rather than prolong an unavoidable defeat by playing until checkmate has occurred.  One may also win "by flag" if the opponent runs out of time.  Nonetheless, not all games of chess result in a win for either side.  A draw may ensue by agreement of the players, by stalemate, or under certain other conditions.Public discourse about chess can occasionally veer into the ridiculous.  In 1912, it was reported that a move made by chess champion Frank Marshall elicited such admiration from onlookers that they showered gold pieces onto the board.  While the move may indeed be considered a brilliancy (thought by some to be the most beautiful chess move ever played), the story must otherwise be spurious.  Even supposing that the viewers were so impressed as to engage in such specific and effusive praise, precisely how much gold were they supposed to have had?At one time, the prospect of machines playing chess was widely deemed absurd.  Writer Edgar Allan Poe declared that its impossibility could be established a priori because, unlike the steps of a mathematical demonstration, "[n]o one move in chess necessarily follows upon any one other."  In the early 19th century, a human-shaped machine labeled "The Turk" toured the United States as a supposed chess-playing automaton.  Although its owner claimed and seemed to prove that it was purely mechanical, Poe correctly concluded that the device was actually operated by a real person hidden inside its cabinet.  Despite this subterfuge, however, machine chess was not fundamentally impossible as Poe believed.  The early chess computers of the 1960s possessed only limited abilities, but by 1997 IBM's "Deep Blue" had defeated world champion Garry Kasparov.  Today, the strongest chess computers are unbeatable in fair contests by even the most skilled human grandmasters.Nevertheless, however unassailable in the realm of calculation, computers will always lack the most valuable trait of any chess player.  Blaise Pascal once wrote: "When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing."  In a similar sense, although computers may "win" at chess, they can never experience their victory.  The artistry of a move like Marshall's will forever be lost on them, while a human being can view and partake in its beauty, making the enjoyment of chess a distinctly human pleasure. -For which of the following items of passage information does the author provide the LEAST explanation or evidence?

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. -Based on the author's description of adolescent initiation, which of the following assertions could most reasonably be inferred about the hunter-gatherer society described in the passage?

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. -Which of the following is an implicit assumption that the author makes in describing the reasons for the "catastrophic deterioration" of the White House?

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. -The "assumption of a deeper-level similarity underlying the higher-level differences" between cultures would be best exemplified by the belief that:

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. -Given the information in the passage, Putnam most likely set the first formulation of the Twin Earth thought experiment "centuries in the past" in order to:

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. -Jack White, the lead singer of the band The White Stripes, assumed the surname of his wife, Meg White, when they married in 1996.  This information would be LEAST consistent with which of the following passage claims?