Exam 4: Critical Analysis & Reasoning Skills

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. -Which of the following is most illustrative of Kant's understanding of "rational entities" (Paragraph 4), as described in the passage?

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. -Which of the following surprising states of affairs is 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. -As the author uses the word, a "crescendo" is best described as:

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 argues that those who deny the existence of human nature are motivated partly by faulty reasoning.  However, it could be true that the mind is a blank slate even if people held that view for mistaken reasons.  Does this observation undermine Pinker's position on human nature?

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. -Based on passage information, it is most reasonable to conclude that which of the following factors contributed to the whaling conflict between Australia and Japan?Japanese resistance to cultural oppressionThe international ban on commercial whalingMoral sentiments in Australia

Passage Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's instantly identifiable painting Der Schrei der Natur or, more simply, The Scream, destabilizes the very concept of a work of art as discrete and unique.  Boasting two versions in pastel and two in oil as well as a lithograph-all generated between 1893 and 1910-Munch's masterpiece arguably constitutes not a single but a multiplicitous work.  Moreover, Munch originally conceived of the painting not as a freestanding piece but as part of a more ambitious project called the Frieze of Life.  The Frieze included 22 panels portraying life circumstances and moods, such as illness, love, and death; the panel depicting despair was the precursor for The Scream.In a poem based on an 1892 diary entry, Munch relates the genesis of what would become his most celebrated work.  He was walking across a bridge with two friends in the vicinity of Ekeberg Hill, overlooking Oslo, when "…the sun was setting-suddenly the sky turned blood-red-I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence-there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city--my friends walked on and I stood there trembling with anxiety-and I sensed an infinite Scream passing through nature."The artistic consequence of Munch's terrifying epiphany is a black-shrouded figure, ill-defined and ghostlike, whose sickly pale face stares out at the viewer against the menacing background of a bloodshot sky.  Mouth wide open, eyes bulging, hands clasped to its ears in a pose more horrified than horrifying, the figure appears to tremble on a bridge over turbulent waters.The Scream aptly captured both the self-indulgence and despair characterizing the turn of the twentieth century at the same time that it heralded the existential angst of the mid-century.  Influenced by luminaries such as the impressionist painter Monet and the more deeply expressive Van Gogh, Munch's free-form style, vivid colors, and striking juxtapositions mark this work as avant-garde.Nevertheless, as art curator Martha Tedeschi asserts, The Scream is one of only a handful of paintings in the history of art able to "communicate a specific meaning almost immediately to almost every viewer"; its primitive character transmits a raw emotionality and subjectivity.  Unsurprisingly, then, the painting has over-spilt the bounds of traditional art to become an icon of popular culture.  In the 1970s, Andy Warhol mass-produced the image on silk, the serial replications reflecting the painting's own multiplicity.  Wildly appropriated and often misused, the image-through which Munch purported to be doing nothing less than studying his own soul-has appeared on everything from keychains to dormitory posters and is in danger of becoming kitsch.Interestingly enough, two different versions of The Scream have been the targets of unusual thefts; however, in both instances the paintings were recovered.  First, a version was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo during the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer.  In an almost comical heist, two men employed a ladder to easily access a second-story window and abscond with the painting, taking the time to leave a postcard that read, "Thanks for the poor security."  Then, in 2004, robbers entered Oslo's Munch Museum in broad daylight, intimidated museum guards with firearms, and used a wire cutter to extract another version of The Scream from the wall along with Munch's Madonna painting.Munch was a remarkably prolific painter; when he died in 1944, he left a legacy of over a thousand paintings, several thousand drawings, and more than 15,000 prints.  Ironically, however, it is the "single" provocative image of The Scream that, as both masterpiece and pop icon, has eclipsed all this artist's other works. -The author's probable motive in mentioning the thieves' postcard message is to show that:

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. -The passage does NOT suggest which of the following as a potential social cost of marital naming choices?

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. -In Paragraph 3, the passage author suggests that William James:

Passage Since the 1950s, scholars have been engaged in reconstructing a multifarious collection of ancient sacred texts, now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, from a welter of as many as 100,000 fragments of disparate size and shape.  With some fragments no larger than a postage stamp and covered with barely decipherable writing, the formidable paleographic project presents a jigsaw puzzle of epic proportions and frustrating intricacy.  Yet, despite the fragmentary condition of the scrolls, their discovery has turned out to be the most important religious archaeological windfall of the 20th century.The scrolls were found in large pottery jars hidden inside the caves that dot the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, at a site called Khirbet Qumran, 13 miles east of the city of Jerusalem, by Bedouin goatherds in late 1946.  In the desert near Qumran, members of a Jewish sect known as the Essenes had established a small community during the latter half of the Second Temple period that began in the 6th century BCE and lasted into the first century CE.  The Essenes are noted in the works of the Roman statesman and historian Pliny the Elder, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, and the Jewish historian Josephus.  In the first century, Pliny described the Qumran community as a monastic brotherhood that followed an ascetic lifestyle of work, prayer, and the study of sacred law and esoteric doctrine.  The Essenes differed from the mainstream Jewish community in objecting to animal sacrifices and subscribing to the heretical dictum that fate is "the mistress of all."  The group had migrated to the desert, eschewing urban areas, as Philo reports, "because of the ungodliness customary among the city-dwellers."The scrolls date from approximately 250 BCE to 68 CE.  Scholars speculate that they represent either the library of the Essene community or the collected works of various local Jewish groups.  It is likely that the Essenes stashed the scrolls in jars and placed these inside the caves when they fled the imminent destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple (Herod's Temple) by the Romans in 70 CE.  The more than 900 identified manuscripts include parts of every book in the Old Testament canon except the Book of Esther, some with as many as 39 copies.  Only one scroll, the Great Isaiah Scroll, offers a virtually intact book: its 24 feet of parchment features all 66 chapters of the Book of Isaiah.  Other scrolls contain noncanonical texts, including apocrypha and pseudepigrapha-late pseudonymous writings ascribed to various biblical prophets and patriarchs.  Before the scrolls' fortuitous discovery, some of these works were known only through translations, or even translations of translations.  A few scrolls contain extra-biblical texts, chiefly sectarian manuals cataloguing the rules of the Essene community.Over 75% of the parchment and papyrus scrolls are written in Hebrew; most of the others are in Aramaic (a related language that had become the standard linguistic currency in the Near East), while a smaller number are inscribed in ancient Greek.  The writing on the scrolls moves from right to left with only the occasional paragraph break for punctuation, which makes deciphering the manuscripts almost as daunting a task as piecing together their fragments.The manuscripts demonstrate remarkable consistency with the Masoretic or medieval Hebrew text used for many English translations of the Bible, notably the King James Version. Thus, the scrolls, which predate the Masoretic text by about 1,000 years, largely substantiate its reliability and authoritative status.  They also offer a window onto a critical period in Judeo-Christian culture; in particular, they confirm the religious diversity of the time and the similarity of an eschatological, messianic Jewish sect of the first century to early Christian communities. -The passage description of the Essenes would be most challenged if which of the following assertions were true?

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

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 philosophers mentioned in Paragraph 5 would most likely make which of the following judgments about Boethius' solution?

Passage The traditional tea ceremony evolved from multiple strands of Japanese culture.  Variously referred to as "chanoyu," "sado," or "chado," meaning "the way of tea," the ceremony is a highly codified and choreographed performance in which tea-typically a ground green variety known as "matcha"-is prepared and presented to guests by a host.  The tea ceremony is practiced to promote the harmony of nature and humanity as well as to discipline the mind and calm the heart of those who seek enlightenment.During the ninth century, a Buddhist monk named Eichu brought green tea to Japan from China, where it had already been cultivated for more than 1,000 years and used by monks to facilitate meditation.  Earlier in the century, the Chinese master Lu Yu had composed a treatise on the cultivation and preparation of tea called Cha Jing, or The Classic of Tea.  This treatise was heavily influenced by Buddhist ideas, which then impacted the development of the Japanese tea ceremony.  Toward the end of the twelfth century, another Japanese monk, Myoan Eisai, traveled to China to study philosophy and religion, returning with the seeds of green tea plants.  Eisai went on to build the first Zen Buddhist temple in his native land and was the first of his nation to cultivate tea purely for religious purposes.A tea culture, or "teaism," in Japan was initially popular with the ruling class, and the samurai adopted it as a status symbol.  Indeed, the tea ceremony was in its origins closely entwined with the political elite of the country; by the fifteenth century, however, it had begun to spread to all classes.  Murata Shuko, known as "the father of the tea ceremony," had been largely responsible for moving the tea ceremony away from the political to become more "transformative" or spiritual in nature.  For instance, he greatly enhanced the simplicity of its presentation, making tea ceremonies less formal and more intimate.  Gatherings now took place in smaller tearooms or secluded teahouses rather than luxurious salons.It was the famous tea master Sen no Rikyu who later elevated the tea ceremony to a virtual art form and codified its performance.  This meant that every action and gesture on the part of the preparer-using the kettle, gazing at the teacup, measuring the tea powder into a cup-constituted a procedure to be performed in a prescribed manner.  Even the actions of the guests evolved to become scripted in a precise ritual.  Rikyu's teachings fostered the development of the way of tea based on four cardinal principles-harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility-which were meant to be incorporated into the daily life of the tea practitioner.Chiefly through the efforts of Shuko and Rikyu, the tea ceremony took on a distinctive artistic character and became known as wabi-cha.  The term "wabi," or often "wabi-sabi," refers to the quintessential Japanese aesthetic founded upon the three Buddhist marks of existence: impermanence, suffering, and emptiness.  Unlike the standard concept of beauty in the West that favors symmetry, proportion, and static perfection, wabi-sabi embraces the imperfect and celebrates the transient.  It exalts the rustic and the humble as exemplified by the pottery used in the tea ceremony, which is typically crude, ordinary looking, and even asymmetrical.  Moreover, it is thought that a chip or crack, and even the general wear and tear of repeated use, renders such objects more interesting and, hence, more aesthetically pleasing.  Outdoors, such beauty is found in the fleeting color of autumn leaves and the patina that forms on roof tiles after exposure to the elements.  The simplicity, humility, and naturalism epitomized by wabi-sabi thus became the hallmarks of the way of tea. -The author describes humans acting from a "skewed" sort of rationality.  Which of the following scenarios most exemplifies this type of thinking?

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… -Suppose that before firing Sarah, her employer offered her the chance to stay on if she agreed to use the company's scripts for her readings.  The passage author would most likely advise Sarah to:

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." -Which of the following assertions about modern dancers is NOT implied by the passage?

Passage The traditional tea ceremony evolved from multiple strands of Japanese culture.  Variously referred to as "chanoyu," "sado," or "chado," meaning "the way of tea," the ceremony is a highly codified and choreographed performance in which tea-typically a ground green variety known as "matcha"-is prepared and presented to guests by a host.  The tea ceremony is practiced to promote the harmony of nature and humanity as well as to discipline the mind and calm the heart of those who seek enlightenment.During the ninth century, a Buddhist monk named Eichu brought green tea to Japan from China, where it had already been cultivated for more than 1,000 years and used by monks to facilitate meditation.  Earlier in the century, the Chinese master Lu Yu had composed a treatise on the cultivation and preparation of tea called Cha Jing, or The Classic of Tea.  This treatise was heavily influenced by Buddhist ideas, which then impacted the development of the Japanese tea ceremony.  Toward the end of the twelfth century, another Japanese monk, Myoan Eisai, traveled to China to study philosophy and religion, returning with the seeds of green tea plants.  Eisai went on to build the first Zen Buddhist temple in his native land and was the first of his nation to cultivate tea purely for religious purposes.A tea culture, or "teaism," in Japan was initially popular with the ruling class, and the samurai adopted it as a status symbol.  Indeed, the tea ceremony was in its origins closely entwined with the political elite of the country; by the fifteenth century, however, it had begun to spread to all classes.  Murata Shuko, known as "the father of the tea ceremony," had been largely responsible for moving the tea ceremony away from the political to become more "transformative" or spiritual in nature.  For instance, he greatly enhanced the simplicity of its presentation, making tea ceremonies less formal and more intimate.  Gatherings now took place in smaller tearooms or secluded teahouses rather than luxurious salons.It was the famous tea master Sen no Rikyu who later elevated the tea ceremony to a virtual art form and codified its performance.  This meant that every action and gesture on the part of the preparer-using the kettle, gazing at the teacup, measuring the tea powder into a cup-constituted a procedure to be performed in a prescribed manner.  Even the actions of the guests evolved to become scripted in a precise ritual.  Rikyu's teachings fostered the development of the way of tea based on four cardinal principles-harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility-which were meant to be incorporated into the daily life of the tea practitioner.Chiefly through the efforts of Shuko and Rikyu, the tea ceremony took on a distinctive artistic character and became known as wabi-cha.  The term "wabi," or often "wabi-sabi," refers to the quintessential Japanese aesthetic founded upon the three Buddhist marks of existence: impermanence, suffering, and emptiness.  Unlike the standard concept of beauty in the West that favors symmetry, proportion, and static perfection, wabi-sabi embraces the imperfect and celebrates the transient.  It exalts the rustic and the humble as exemplified by the pottery used in the tea ceremony, which is typically crude, ordinary looking, and even asymmetrical.  Moreover, it is thought that a chip or crack, and even the general wear and tear of repeated use, renders such objects more interesting and, hence, more aesthetically pleasing.  Outdoors, such beauty is found in the fleeting color of autumn leaves and the patina that forms on roof tiles after exposure to the elements.  The simplicity, humility, and naturalism epitomized by wabi-sabi thus became the hallmarks of the way of tea. -Which of the following individuals would the passage author most likely regard as a true practitioner of wabi-sabi as this term is explained in Paragraph 5?

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. -In the past it has been asserted that women should be excluded from politics because they are too "pure" to participate in that "dirty business."  This claim most exemplifies which of the following ideas discussed in the passage?

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 passage descriptions of the Mirror Stage, a caregiver would be most likely to facilitate the development of the child's ego by:

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. -Passage information would most support which of the following claims about the presence of a triple-decker pulpit in an eighteenth-century church?