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Select the sentence that describes the evidence from which the argument derives an explanation of a phenomenon.
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In the mid-1970s, historians often debated the motives of the American Revolutionaries. For neo-Progressive scholars, the Revolution was rooted in the experience of social inequity and in a democratic striving against privilege. These scholars focused less frequently on great men of the Revolution than on ordinary people-farmers, artisans, and laborers-and marginalized groups.
Conversely, neo-Whig scholars believed that republican political ideas determined the actions of the Revolutionaries. Their Revolution followed from the shared belief that powerful men had always sought, and would always seek, to deprive their fellow citizens of liberty and property. Ironically, in the conservative act of defending their own liberties and estates, the decidedly elitist gentlemen who articulated revolutionary ideals also liberated egalitarian impulses that would produce a democratic society.
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According to the passage, which of the following details regarding the lotus-shaped ewer supports the claim of the "other authorities" about the dating of that ewer?
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The primary function of the highlighted sentence is to
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Until around 1930 few United States Civil War historians paid much attention to Southerners who opposed the 1861-1865 secession from the United States by a confederacy of Southern states. Southern historians clung instead to a notion of the South`s unanimity in the face of Northern aggression. Only when scholars such as Lonn decided to examine this side of the war did historian of the Confederacy begin to recognize the existence of Southerners loyal to the Union (Unionists). While these early historians of Southern dissent broke new ground, they also reproduced Confederate authoritie`s negative view of loyalists as shady characters driven by dubious motives. Even Tatum, who took a largely sympathetic attitude toward loyalists, tended to lump them into nebulous categories, offering broad generalizations that ignored the particulars of Unionists` identities and experiences.
This early-twentieth-century historiography nonetheless represented the leading research on dissent in the South until the 1960s and 1970s. Spurred by the advent of social historical methods, a new generation of historians found Unionists interesting as manifestations of the Confederacy`s internal weaknesses. Focusing on the Appalachian Mountain and upper South regions of the Confederacy, these scholars argued that there was a profound divide among Southern Whites between those who benefited economically from slave-run plantations and those who did not. One such historian was Escott, who emphasized regional and economic conflict among Southerners. Escott cast Unionists and other dissenters as antiplanter mountaineers who could not, by reason of economic and social alienation, identify with the proslavery Southern cause. This theme has heavily influenced the work of subsequent scholars, who commonly place Unionists at the extreme end of a continuum of class-based Confederate disaffection that was ultimately responsible for the South`s collapse. Because the driving force behind such inquiries into loyalist history has been a desire to explain Confederate ideology, politics, and defeat, emphasis has been placed on the ways loyalist Southerners diverged from the political and economic mainstream of Confederate nationalism.
Only recently have some Civil War historians begun to make Unionists and their experiences, rather than the Confederate state, the center of inquiry. These scholars have done intensive community and local studies of dissenting groups that take into account a range of social and cultural, as well as military and political, factors at work on the Southern home front. Hoping to better understand who remained loyal to the Union during the war, these historians have sought to explain the Civil War`s underlying character, dimensions, and impact in particular counties or towns, especially in the upper South and Appalachia. This relatively new trend has stressed the particular, delved into the complexities of political allegiances on the home front, and, as Sutherland notes, highlighted "the gritty experience of real people".
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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The passage suggests that Escott differed from both Lonn and Tatum in that Escott
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The passage suggests that Lonn and Tatum differed from one another in
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Which of the following best describes the function of the highlighted sentence?
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Potatoes are naturally rich in salicylates, substances believed to reduce the risk of heart attack. Although fried potatoes contain fats and substantially increase the risk of heart attack, boiled potatoes turned out to be prepared without any fats at all. Therefore, if what is commonly believed about salicylates is in fact true, boiled potatoes would be a useful addition to the diet of anyone who wants to reduce his or her risk of heart attack.
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Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument depends?
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Nature is rarely as simple as we might like it to be. The idea that shells are variations on the theme of the logarithmic spiral is so elegant in its simplicity and in its power to explain the diversity of shell shapes that we have trouble modifying it, much less abandoning it. However, the inescapable problem is that as they grow, most shells change shape in ways that do not conform precisely to logarithmic-spiral form. This imprecision might be interpreted as resulting from external conditions. If external conditions did not interfere with orderly shell deposition, for example, mollusks might be able to build their shells "correctly" in accordance with the logarithmic-spiral model. A contrasting way of looking at these deviations is to think of them as normal expressions of additional principles of form that apply to all shells and that show our conception of shells as logarithmic spirals to be inadequate because incomplete.
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Elizabeth Bishop`s Complete Poems, 1927-1979 has come to seem to most readers so achieved and sufficient 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 the size and pace of her output were always in her own eyes a failing (vaguely moral in complexion) for which she apologized throughout her career. The small, manageable size of Bishop`s body of work has facilitated its extraordinary critical reception since her death. 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.
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The passage indicates that the small size of Bishop`s body of work contributed to bringing about which of the following?
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In the context in which it appears, "complexion" most nearly means
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Educated people in the Renaissance learned their Latin from contemporary collections, like Erasmus` Adages and Ravisius Textor's Epitheta, that grouped pithy expressions not by author or period but by subject. Thus Renaissance students encountered the many variations ancient Roman writers (ca. 100 B.C. - ca A.D. 200) had for maxims like"War is pleasant to those who haven`t tried it."
They could even use these sayings lawlessly themselves, for example, urging friends who worked too long on one book to"take your hand off the writing tablet." But they had no sense of context; instead they associated the quotations not with the original sources, but with the other identical, similar, or opposite sayings cited in their textbooks. Modern scholarship has explored this point to explain the idiosyncratic nature of most Renaissance allusions to classical texts. The prevalence of this sort of secondhand classical culture in the Renaissance should figure in any effort to assess the degree and kind of influence that Roman writers had on the educated class of the sixteenth century in Europe.
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The term “idiosyncratic” is used by the author of the passage to characterize the
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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 modern scholarship on the Renaissance period would the author of the passage most likely agree?
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Muskmelons harvested immediately after several days of heavy rain are generally less sweet, and thus less flavorful, than are muskmelons harvested after drier weather. The traditional explanation holds that excess water in the fruit dilutes the sugar. A recently proposed explanation is that excess water in the soil interferes with the plant`s normal ability to produce sugar. Thus, to satisfy its energy needs, the plant draws off sugar it had previously stored in its fruit.
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