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The passage suggests which of the following about individual learning?
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Studies show that liking increases with familiarity for many classes of objects but not for representational paintings. Representational paintings have meaning, a factor that might idiosyncratically affect one's liking for an artwork independent of its familiarity. A person who does not like flowers might not like van Gogh' s paintings of sunflowers no matter how familiar they are. Thus, preference for a painting's content might conceal the effects of familiarity. Furthermore, art is embedded in a cultural context that might contribute to the effects of individual taste and general knowledge on judgments of liking. Some people might dislike the famous van Gogh paintings because they think the paintings are commercially exploited or because they've heard the paintings are fakes.
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The highlighted sentence performs which of the following functions in the passage?
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he author mentions the possibility that van Gogh' s famous paintings are commercially exploited primarily in order to
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Though respectful of the groundbreaking work in translating Native American oral narratives done by Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock in the 1970s, Robert Parker notes that their work emerged when "Romanticized ideas of 'the Indian' ... and of poetry "converged to
create a surprisingly uncritical reception of their claim that Native American stories are in fact poetry. Parker objects that by claiming to discover poetry as the true nature of Native American narrative and asserting the value of such narrative on that ground, Hymes and
Tedlock "misconstrue the social relation between power genre, and value." Parker' s own position is that Native American literature, on its own terms, matches the best canonical literature in the European tradition and need not be validated by that tradition's notions of value.
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According to Parker, when Hymes and Tedlock argued for the value of the Native American narratives, they based that claim on the value the European tradition places on
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The author of the passage suggests that Parker would agree with which of the following statements about the work done by Hymes and Tedlock?
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The importance of the relatively docile eland (antelope) in the diet of Middle Stone Age (MSA) people contrasted with the increased importance of aggressive wild pigs to Late Stone Age (LSA) people has been interpreted as an indication that MSA hunters were less
proficient than LSA hunters. This has been used to support the view that neurological changes dramatically increased the behavioral sophistication of anatomically modern humans. However, alternative hypotheses have not been sufficiently examined to warrant this interpretation. The possibility that economic motives drove prey selection must first be excluded. Since eland are very large but less dangerous to hunt than wild pigs, it is likely that they would be a favored prey animal whether or not hunting strategies were sophisticated enough to tackle more aggressive prey.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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This passage is adapted from an essay published in 2010.
As I write, the Large Hadron Collider, the worid' s biggest atom-smasher at CERN in Geneva, has switched on with almost unprecedented media jamboree. Asked about the practical value of it all, Stephen Hawking has said that "modern society is based on advances in pure science that were not foreseen to have practical
applications." It's a common claim, and it subtly reinforces the hierarchy that Medawar identified: technology and engineering are the humble offspring of pure science, the casual cast-offs of a more elevated pursuit.
I don't believe that such pronouncements are intended to denigrate applied science as an intellectual activity; they merely speak into a culture in which that has already happened. Pure science undoubtedly does lead to applied spin-offs, but this is not the norm. Rather, most of our technology has come from explicit and
painstaking efforts to develop it. And this is simply a part of the scientific enterprise. A dividing line between pure and applied science makes no sense at all, running as it does in a convoluted path through disciplines, departments,even individual scientific papers and careers. Research aimed at applications fills the pages of
the leading journals in physics, chemistry, and the life and Earth sciences; curiosity-driven research with no real practical value is abundant in the “applied" literature of the materials, biotechnological, and engineering sciences. The fact that "pure" and "applied" science are useful and meaningful terms seduces us sometimes into thinking that they are real, absolute, and distinct categories.
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In the context of the passage, the mention of the Large Hadron Collider primarily serves to
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According to the passage,the “explicit and painstaking efforts” are
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The passage implies that the statement made by Stephen Hawking has which shortcoming?
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Until recently, study of motor control in amphibian feeding was limited to a few model taxa (taxonomic groups), for example, toads (genus Bufo), frogs ( Rana), and salamanders(Ambystoma). Studies of these taxa suggested that amphibian feeding in general is highly stereotyped, that is, performed in much the same way every time, with little variation in the timing or extent of movements. However, recent studies of a great variety of salamanders, frogs, and caecilians (tropical amphibians) have revealed that the model taxa are probably exceptions among amphibians, and were unfortunate models on which to base generalizations about amphibian feeding. Indeed, Bufo is now known to be one of the most stereotyped amphibians in its feeding movements,and Ambysfoma lies at the low end of variation for salamanders.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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In the context in which it appears, "unfortunate” most nearly means
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Blues music speaks histories that, from the conventional perspective, originate in the experiences of African Americans. But invariably, the blues exceed rigid cultural boundaries. Ralph Ellison's definition of the blues suggests an expansive vista, limited only by a speaker's capacity to lyrically express an
"autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe." As an idiom, the blues record histories, yet Ellison' s definition privileges the personal and leaves uncertain the role of national histories, the stories that speak our collective experiences. Locating the collective histories in the personal has proved a pivotal problem for readers in the written use of the blues both in Ellison's fiction and in works by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and others.
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The passage suggests that which of the following is an accurate characterization of the blues as defined by Ralph Ellison?
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Select the sentence in the passage that describes a particular alternative to the conventional perspective on the blues.
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Many herbivorous insects utilize plant resources during small windows of development or during short periods when plants are of suitable quality. Such temporal associations have been documented in numerous systems, where temporal constraints limit insect abundance and affect insect feeding strategy. Classic studies of winter moths, for example, suggest that the synchrony of larvae with leaf emergence is a primary determinant of larval success. Because many insect-plant associations have a temporal component, they may be negatively affected by environmental changes; some scientists fear, for example, that global warming may decouple insect-plant synchrony Hellman, however, notes that the timing of insect-plant synchrony is affected by many factors, including insects behavioral and physiological ability to adapt to changing host plant quality and the availability of alternative host resources.
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