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All the music from fourteenth-century Europe for which written scores survive is so complex and is written in such difficult notation that it could have been played only by musicians whose lives were dedicated solely to such performance. Yet fourteenth-century European accounts, which in this respect probably give accurate portrayals of their times, describe many members of the nobility who excelled not only in musical performance, but also in dancing poetry, and painting.
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The statements given, if true, most strongly support which of the following?
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More appropriate water pricing would promote the treatment and reuse of urban wastewater for agricultural irrigation and also encourage improvements in irrigation efficiency. Treatment and reuse is more expensive than most irrigation-related conservation and efficiency measures but often less expensive than developing new water sources. Wastewater contains nitrogen and phosphorus which can be pollutants when released to lakes and rivers but are nutrients when applied to farmland. Moreover, unlike many other water sources, treated wastewater will be both an expanding and fairly reliable supply, since urban water use will likely double by 2025. Many large cities located along coastlines currently dump their wastewater treated or untreated, into the ocean, rendering it unavailable for any other purpose and harming coastal marine life.
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Which of the following does the author suggest as an incentive to the development of more efficient irrigation?
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Which of the following does the author present as generally the most cost-effective way of meeting demand for water for irrigation?
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In A Fine Brush on Ivory, his appreciation of novelist Jane Austen, Richard Jenkyns remarks that in Austen scholarship there are pressures that cause ordinary critical circumspection to break down. Principal among those pressures is the peculiar affection in which the person of Jane Austen is held by many readers. This affection is not altogether explained by admiration for her genius, nor is it entirely a symptom of nostalgia for her orderly decorous, vanished world. The impulse to know personally this elusive, even mysterious, writer has led critics to approach her work in mostly biographical or historical ways, often in defiance of other critical fashions, especially the various formal approaches that have dominated modern literary criticism.
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According to the passage, critics approach Jane Austen`s work in biographical or historical ways for which of the following reasons?
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In the context in which it appears, "appreciation of" most nearly means
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African American painter MaIvin Gray Johnson (1896-1934) grew up in urban environments, including New York City, but in 1934 visited and painted scenes from the small town of Brightwood, Virginia. Some critics have celebrated the Brightwood paintings, which depict a vibrant natural landscape and close-knit Black community, as Johnson's discovery of an "authentic" African American life in the rural South. This view, which reflects a common tendency to regard African American artists, imagery as unmediated documentation of direct experience, overlooks Johnson`s interpretive thinking. In truth, Johnson's conceptualization of the South was largely formed before he left New York, where he had studied the French expressionist Paul Cezanne. Johnson's Brightwood paintings reflect Cezanne's stylistic influence and tendency to present rural life as an idyllic alternative to modern industrialism.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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The author suggests which of the following about "some critics" mentioned in the passage?
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The importance of the Bill of Rights in twentieth-century United States law and politics has led some historians to search for the original meaning" of its most controversial clauses. This approach, known as "originalism, " presumes that each right codified in the Bill of Rights had an independent history that can be studied in isolation from the histories of other rights, and its proponents ask how formulations of the Bill of Rights in 1791 reflected developments in specific areas of legal thinking at that time. Legal and constitutional historians, for example, have found originalism especially useful in the study of provisions of the Bill of rights that were innovative by eighteenth-century standards, such as the Fourth Amendment`s broadly termed protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Recent calls in the legal and political arena for a return to a "jurisprudence of original intention. "however, have made it a matter of much more than purely scholarly interest when originalists insist that a clause's true meaning was fixed at the moment of its adoption, or maintain that only those rights explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution deserve constitutional recognition and protection. These two claims seemingly lend support to the notion that an interpreter must apply fixed definitions of a fixed number of rights to contemporary issues, for the claims imply that the central problem of rights in the Revolutionary era was to precisely identify, enumerate, and define those rights that Americans felt were crucial to protecting their liberty.
Both claims, however, are questionable from the perspective of a strictly historical inquiry, however sensible they may seem from the vantage point of contemporary jurisprudence. Even though originalists are correct in claiming that the search for original meaning is inherently historical, historians would not normally seek to determine exactly what a specific clause or right meant when the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, because historians would not normally feel compelled to support attempts to make that "original meaning" binding today. The strictly historical purpose for an inquiry into the original meaning of specific rights would be to determine why a particular clause was adopted and to establish a baseline from which its subsequent evolution could be traced and evaluated.
Because of its proponents' pressing need to find determinate meaning at a fixed historical moment, originalism cannot capture everything that was dynamic and creative-thus uncertain and problematic-in Revolutionary constitutionalism, nor can it easily accommodate the diversity of views that explains why the debates of the Revolutionary era were so lively. A strictly historical approach, on the other hand. makes it clear that the framers and ratifiers of the Bill of Rights were struggling with complex questions, the novelty of which had carried them away from the received wisdom of their time and was forcing their ideas about rights and the protection of those rights to continually evolve.
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It can be inferred that the author of the passage would be most likely to agree with which of the following statements about the Bill of Rights?
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It can be inferred from the passage that a jurisprudence of original intention is based on which of the following assumptions about the Bill of Rights?
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The passage suggests that a historian conducting a strictly historical inquiry would make which of the following assumptions when studying the Bill of rights?
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Which of the following historical documents, if they existed, would most strengthen the author's characterization of Revolutionary constitutionalism?
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Centuries ago, the Maya of Central America produced elaborate, deeply cut carvings in stone. The carvings would have required a cutting tool of hard stone or metal. Deposits of iron ore exist throughout Central America, but apparently the Maya never developed the technology to use them and the metals the Maya are known to have used, copper and gold, would not have been hard enough. Therefore, the Maya must have used stone tools to make these carvings.
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Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument?
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This passage is adapted from an essay published in 2010.
As I write, the Large Hadron Collider, the world`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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Before feminist literary criticism emerged in the 1970s, the nineteenth-century United States writer Fanny Fern 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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