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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?
A. It overstates the importance of technology for modem society.
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Before feminist literary criticism emerged in the 1970s, the nineteenth-century United States writer Fanny Fem was regarded by most critics (when considered at all) as a prototype of weepy sentimentalism - a pious, insipid icon of conventional American culture. Feminist reclamations of Fern, by contrast, emphasize her "non-sentimental" qualities, particularly her sharply humorous social criticism. Most feminist scholars find it difficult to reconcile Fern's sardonic social critiques with her effusive celebrations of many conventional values. Attempting to resolve this contradiction, Harris concludes that Fern employed "flowery rhetoric," strategically to disguise her subversive goals beneath apparent conventionality. However, Tompkins proposes an alternative view of sentimentality itself suggesting that sentimental writing could serve radical, rather than only conservative, ends by swaying readers emotionally, moving them to embrace social change.
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It can be inferred that the author of the passage mentions Fern's "sharply humorous social criticism'" primarily in order to
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In the context in which it appears, "reclamations" most nearly means
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The author of the passage suggests that when a Renaissance student quoted a Latin expression, that student would typically
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With which of the following views of modem scholarship on the Renaissance period would the author of the passage most likely agree?
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James: Why is it that fish living iii the ocean's dark depths do not swim around very much? It must be that the scarcity of food available there prevents them from having much energy for swimming.
Marie: But fish swim around only to approach or avoid other creatures that they can see. and in such conditions of darkness, almost nothing can be seen.
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Marie responds to James by
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The decline of the heath hen began when the first Europeans arrived on the East Coast of North America. Before European settlement, Native Americans used fire to maintain a mosaic of forests, shrublands, agricultural fields, and grasslands. After European diseases decimated Native American populations, the formerly open habitats of the Northeast became largely forested, resulting in major changes to bird communities and probably reducing habitat. Although the clearing of forests by European settlers probably once again increased heath hen habitat, hunting pressure was extreme, and by 1821 the formerly common bird was rare in New England. The last reports of heath hens in Pennsylvania and New Jersey are from 1869, and it is doubtful that the heath hen survived much after that on mainland North America.
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Which of the following can be inferred about the action mentioned in the highlighted portion of the passage?
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Which of the following statements about the impact of European settlers on the heath hen is supported by the passage?
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Academics have been reconsidering the meaning of "wilderness" and its usefulness to conservation strategies. The idea of pristine wilderness is historically inaccurate, argue scholars of Native American history, who have demonstrated that Native Americans shaped their environments with their agricultural practices and residential patterns. Other scholars argue that wilderness is simply a cultural construct created in opposition to modem society, not a real place untouched by humans. Scientists, in turn, have argued that the goal of wilderness preservation is based on a model in which ecosystems progress toward a stable equilibrium state, a model replaced in the 1970s with one stressing constant change. These insights complicate wilderness management, which critics charge aims to preserve a supposedly stable environment that existed prior to human disturbance.
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Which of the following statements best describes the function of the highlighted sentence?
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The author suggests that the model "stressing constant change" is significant because it
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Early scholars described square dances as a type of ancient English country dance carried to the southern Appalachian Mountains and preserved unchanged for generations. However, while the Appalachian fiddle repertoire does include traditional reels that can be traced back to the British Isles, it also includes breakdowns, rags, and other musical features native to America. Appalachian songs similarly range from British ballads to African American blues. Given this musical diversity-not to mention the iconic presence of the banjo, an instrument with African roots-it would be naive to think the accompanying dances are purely English forms. While sections of Appalachia are relatively isolated, trade, travel, and immigration have continually introduced new cultural elements, including innovations in social dances, into the region's rural traditions.
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Based on the passage, it can be inferred that Appalachian square dancing
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The author mentions "social dances " primarily to
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In his 1836 landscape The Oxbow, Thomas Cole provided viewers with a grand portrayal of' American wilderness on the canvas's left, which he sharply juxtaposed with a scene of modern human "improvement" of the land on the right. Scholars have been struck by the very distinctive markings on the distant mountain in The Oxbow. It has been argued that these marks can be read as Hebrew letters: when looking directly at the mountain, the Hebrew equivalent for "Noah" is seen, and if viewed from above (by God), the markings spell "Shaddai" or "the Almighty". There are a number of reasons to question such a literal interpretation of the markings: the underdrawings for both the oil study and the finished canvas show no sign of lettering on the mountain, and Hebrew scholars who have carefully examined the markings do not accept this reading.
Moreover, by the 1830s, the Oxbow region of the Connecticut River valley was plagued by rapid clearing of forests including on the sides of mountains. In her watercolor of the site at this time, View of Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, and the Connecticut River, artist Eliza Goodridge indicated selective clear-cut areas on the mountain Cole had become increasingly alarmed by this development, and he began to depict the effects of clear-cutting in his landscapes in the ears leading up to The Oxbow, as seen in his 1833 View of Hoosac Mountain and Pontoosuc Lake near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in which areas of deforestation are visible on the distant mountain. Similar clear-cut sections appear on the mountain in his on-site drawing for The Oxbow, highlighting the importance of this transformation of the natural environment.
Yet that Cole might decide, as he was finishing the painting, to draw attention to this area of deforestation by including markings that roughly form a pattern or an inscription, not to be read literally is in keeping with the artist's practice of embedding his compositions with symbols and moral messages. In addition, deforestation had been on his mind for some time as a sign of man's destructive alteration of nature for financial "utilitarian" gain. A possible inspiration for these markings are the works of John Martin as seen in his painting Belshazzar 's Feast, which includes Hebraic letters Cole's constant references to mountains as pyramidal forms, and the fact that he had painted an ancient pyramid that was inscribed with Latin lettering, suggest that Cole may have intended the viewer to read the pattern on the mountain as a biblical reference that alerted them to God' s judgment of humans' recent destruction of his pure creation. The mountain is defaced, just as all other areas of the landscape at right have been altered, by the hand of man.
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The passage is primarily concerned with
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