|
The primary purpose of the passage is to
|
|
The argument is open up to criticism on the grounds that it
|
|
The information given, if accurate, most strongly supports which of the following hypotheses?
|
|
In the passage, the two highlighted portions play which of the following roles?
|
|
Benovians set their clocks back an hour for the winter. The result is that, during winter`s short days, it is light when most commuters drive to work, but dark when they drive back home. Darkness contributes to accidents. Changing the clocks, however, does not actually increase the amount of driving done in the dark, so it is unlikely to have any effect on Benovia`s automobile accident rate.
|
|
Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument relies?
|
|
Elizabeth Bishop`s Complete Poems(1927-1979) has come to seem to most of its readers so achieved and sufficient as a life`s work that it is hard not to lose sight of how slowly Bishop wrote poems and of how few poems, finally, she completed. But Bishop herself never ceased to find her productivity inadequate. The size and pace of her output were always in her eyes a failing (vaguely moral in complexion) for which she apologized throughout her career, although, as I will argue in this essay, Bishop`s inability to write more poems than she did was also a refusal to do so. The small, manageable size of Bishop`s body of work has facilitated its extraordinary critical reception since her death. (Robert Lowell, whose oeuvre is so much larger, has never had a complete edition of his poetry published.) Yet the size of her work is also a sign of Bishop`s alienation, that is, her uneasy, resistant relation to the literary culture that today claims her as the major poet of her generation.
|
|
The passage indicates that the small size of Bishop`s body of work contributed to bringing about which of the following?
|
|
In the context in which it appears, “complexion” most nearly means
|
|
Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument depends?
|
|
Following the United States Civil War (1861-1865), many former slaves in the rural South became sharecroppers (raising a landlord`s crop for a share of the profits) or tenant farmers (selling what they raised and paying a share of the profits as rent). Most historians tend to depict these African Americans as victims of racism and the farm tenancy system. This approach, however, overlooks the role played by such African American rural reformers as Robert Lloyd Smith, founder of the Farmers' Improvement Society of Texas, and Joseph Elward Clayton, the first African American to organize farmers` institutes for the Texas Department of Agriculture, as anti-racists. Both men advocated comfortable homes and better schools for African Americans, both attributed poverty and illiteracy to causes other than racism, such as insect damage to crops, and both worked to keep Black farmers on the land, although Smith opposed farm tenancy system on Black farmers and of accommodating racism. While the extent of these reformers` influence requires more study, their organizations provided a voice for African American farmers seeking to improve their positions in the agrarian South.
|
