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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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Which of the following best describe the organization of the passage?
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Which of the following can be inferred regarding the pulsar discussed in the first paragraph?
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In 1838, twenty-nine years before publishing his translation of Dante`s Inferno, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that "to understand Dante- it is absolutely necessary to understand the Italian Language." How true was Longfellow to his own dictum? Judging by the problems he had in composing a simple inscription, his ability to express himself in Italian was probably modest. However, this does not mean his understanding of the written language was inadequate. Longfellow`s translation is on the whole not only correct but accurate and attentive to the semantic nuances of the original. Indeed, the literalness of his translation shows he understood Dante`s language so well that he felt duty bound to render into English its extraordinary precision, richness, and variety.
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The author cites Longfellow`s remarks from 1838 in order to
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Which of the following does the author cite as support in assessing Longfellow`s knowledge of the Italian language?
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Marine ecosystems certainly have less permanence than terrestrial ecosystems. Ashore, ecologists are not confronted with shifting ecological discontinuities, or with changes in the characteristic conditions of individual ecosystems, because, unless man intervenes, the tree line on a mountain or the passage between grassland and savannah remains approximately static over a human lifetime. It is only on the millennial scale that such boundaries migrate significantly, or that characteristic regional ecosystems disappear. Urban sprawl, deforestation, overgrazing, and intensive agriculture are accomplishing in a few decades what nature cannily do in centuries, but that sad fact does not alter the argument. Although the human population explosion can produce pressures that rapidly shift ecological boundaries and modify ecosystems ashore, it is paradoxically more difficult directly to modify the average locations of the ephemeral and shifting ecological boundaries of the sea. We can accomplish this only indirectly by atmospheric modification, resulting in a changed global climate and a shifted ocean circulation.
Indeed, if we are agreed that the regional characteristics of marine ecosystems are consequent on the characteristics of the physical environment, then we must assume that ecological conditions are as impermanent as the physical conditions themselves. And these, it is now well understood, are in continual flux and state of change at all scales of variability.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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The passage indicates which of the following about the "ecological boundaries of the sea?"
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W.E.B. Du Bois` exhibit of African American history and culture at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle attracted the attention of a world of sociological scholarship whose value his work challenged. Du Bois believed that Spencerian sociologists failed in their attempts to gain greater understanding of human deeds because their work examined not deeds but theories and because they gathered data not to affect social progress but merely to theorize. In his exhibit, Du Bois sought to present cultural artifacts that would shift the focus of sociology from the construction of vast generalizations to the observation of particular, living individual elements of society and the working contributions of individual people to a vast functioning social structure.
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The passage implies that Du Bois attributed which of the following beliefs to Spencerian sociologists?
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The passage implies that Du Bois believed which of the following statements about sociology?
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Favorable environments do not necessarily lead to the occurrence of plant cultivation. South China is warmer and moister than North China and the Yangtze Basin, with wild rice and highly abundant natural resources. Yet archaeological data indicate that cereal cultivation did not occur in this region until approximately 7,000 to 6,500 years ago. This cultivation was likely a result of cultural contact with and expansion from the Yangtze Basin. Clearly, environmental factors were important for the occurrence of cultivation in China, but were not the absolute determining factors. While incipient cultivation might occur in areas of relatively abundant resources, it may not occur in areas of very abundant resources, such as South China, where foraging might be a more efficient way of life.
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The author implies which of the following about natural resources in South China prior to 6,500 years ago?
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Which of the following can be inferred from the passage about plant cultivation in the Yangtze Basin?
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Wildcats are improbable candidates for domestication. Like all felids [cats], wildcats are obligate carnivores, meaning they have a limited metabolic ability to digest anything except proteins. Wildcats live a solitary existence and defend exclusive territories, making them more attached to places than to people. Furthermore, cats do not perform directed tasks and their actual utility is debatable; even as mousers, in this latter role, terrier dogs and ferrets are preferable. Accordingly, there is little reason to believe an early agricultural community would have sought out and selected the wildcat as a house pet. Rather, the best inference is that wildcats exploiting human environments were simply tolerated by people and, over time and space, they gradually diverged from their "wild" relatives.
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The author would most likely agree that in early agricultural communities cats would have been
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Which of the following best describes the function of the highlighted sentence in the context of the passage as a whole
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George Milner cites three primary problems with the labeling of Cahokia, the large archaeological site by the Mississippi River, as a state rather than a chiefdom. First, finds at Cahokia are essentially similar to finds at other Mississippian chiefdoms, except that the amount of earth moved in building the mounds at Cahokia was greater than elsewhere. Second, fewer people lived at Cahokia than is commonly estimated (Milner estimates that there were only a few thousand inhabitants, more common estimates are 10,000 or 20,000 inhabitants); therefore, extensive taxes, trade, and tribute were not necessary to support them. Finally, while there is evidence of extensive earth movement, craftwork, trade, and elite at Cahokia, this does not indicate that Cahokia was politically centralized, economically specialized, or aggressively expansionistic.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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