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Sensations of nausea in people are accompanied by higher-than-normal blood levels of a particular hormone, vasopressin. Therefore, either nausea triggers the production of vasopressin or abnormally high levels of vasopressin cause nausea.
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Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument relies?
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According to one current hypothesis, the typical evolutionary history of a species involves a quick origin, followed by a long period of stability of form, or stasis, and then rapid disappearance. The sudden appearance of new species, once attributed to supposed gaps in the fossil record, is thought to represent accurately the histories of species.
There is, however, doubt about some of the scientific evidence for this evolutionary pattern, particularly the extent to which species exhibit stasis. For example, species with a large population are more likely to exhibit relative stasis, but they are also more likely to be found in the fossil record. Moreover, it is invariably only the hard body parts of any organism that are fossilized.Variations over time in soft body parts, in biochemistry, and in behavior largely escape the fossil record; thus, fossil traces preserve only a minute portion of a species' traits. Furthermore,since so few individual organisms leave fossils, the record of a species is likely to understate variation in that species.
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Regarding the "doubt" mentioned in the passage, the author would probably agree that it
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The author of the passage provides evidence to refute which of the following aspects of the hypothesis described in the first paragraph?
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In the context in which it appears, “pattern” most nearly means
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The significance of the end of the Cold War is obviously greatest for people in Eastern Europe, who experienced socialism's failures first-hand. In Western Europe, by contrast, the exhaustion of the socialist project is obviously less wrenching. But it does change the political landscape in those societies and effectively removes what once provided both a compelling vision and an occasionally inspiring political rhetoric. It must also change, sooner or later, the intellectual framework within which both scholars and the public operate. In discussing society, Western scholars often act as if trapped in discourses that derive from the past, and they fail to take recent history seriously.
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According to the passage, the source of the “compelling vision" and “inspiring political rhetoric" was
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Which of the following statements about Western European scholarly activity can be inferred from the passage?
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In reviewing an anthology of literary works by women writers, novelist Gail Godwin lamented that the editors were excessively concerned with identifying thematic and stylistic connections among the works they had collected. Godwin claims that drawing such matrilineal connections between literary "mothers" and "daughters" results in forcing a single interpretation on the works and obscuring their individuality. Yet the theme of connections between mothers and daughters-both literary and literal--is ubiquitous in Godwin's own work.
Indeed, Godwin's career has been heavily influenced by a literary mother. In Godwin's novel The Odd Woman (1974), for example, the main character ponders the work of Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), mentioned by name as a prolific novelist of the early-twentieth-century literary renaissance of the Southern United States. This reference reveals Godwin's conscious attempt to place herself in the tradition of Southern women writers. Several of Godwin's novels not only pay homage to Glasgow but also reveal the two authors' common preoccupation with the mother-daughter relationship. Both writers portray mothers as advocates of Southern culture who attempt to teach their daughters to conform to that culture. The responses of the daughters vary from abject compliance to violent rebellion.
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The passage is primarily concerned with
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According to the passage, Godwin has expressed which of the following views about the “matrilineal connections"?
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It can be inferred that the author of the passage regards each of the following as a point of similarity between Gail Godwin and Ellen Glasgow EXCEPT
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It is often said that art forgery has existed as long as has the demand for artwork, but this is not strictly true. There is no clear evidence that art forgeries as such existed in antiquity. There were many collectors, but they seem to have found copies as desirable as originals. Even the presence of a signature was not necessarily taken as an indication that the object in question was made by that artist. The notion of art forgery, as we understand it today, seems to require the idea that originals possess certain qualities not found even in the best copies. It also requires the presence of an expert who can distinguish between the two; but such expertise seems not to have existed in antiquity.
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The passage suggests which of the following about art collectors in antiquity?
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The author mentions “many collectors" primarily to
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Between 2500 and 2000 B.C. numerous statues representing real, historical people were produced in southern Mesopotamia. In the standard Western division of genres, mimetic resemblance is the first criterion of portraiture. However, the Mesopotamian images are portraits in that they represent individuals, even though they do not mimetically imitate the individual's features. These statues were to be placed in temples where they stood in for the individual as a worshipper and could function as a form of presence of that individual. They were therefore linked to the person in ways even closer than the modern notion of portrait, since the person's essence continued to exist in the image: numerous ancient texts demonstrate that images, for the Mesopotamians, had agency and were therefore powerful objects.
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The passage states which of the following about the Mesopotamian statues?
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The author of the passage mentions “numerous ancient texts” primarily in order to
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In his 2005 book. Americas Constitution A Biography. Akhil Reed Amar offers a radically democratic rationale for the legitimacy of the United States Constitution as the country's paramount legal authority. In Amar's eyes, the legitimacy of law is a function of its process of enactment; the more democratic the process, the more authoritative the law. Thus he contends that if a federal statute in the United States conflicts with the provisions of a treaty between the United States and a foreign country, the statute should prevail because, while treaties are made by the assent of the president and the United States Senate alone, statutes also require the concurrence of the House of Representatives, a larger legislative body closer to the people themselves. By the same logic, the greatest of all authorities in the United States is the Constitution, which was enacted more democratically than any other law. Unlike laws, which are passed by the people's elected representatives, the Constitution-so the story goes-was adopted directly by the people themselves.
It would be naive, of course, to imagine that the process by which the United States Constitution was written and ratified in the 1780s was democratic as we understand democracy. The restriction of the vote almost exclusively to White men, to say nothing of the existence of slavery, would mock such a claim. Amar is keenly aware of these deficiencies, and he does not minimize them. In fact, throughout his discussion of the original Constitution, Amar exposes the corrosive influence of slavery at almost every turn. And unlike many writers before him, Amar does not protest that at least the Constitution laid the seeds of slavery's eventual destruction in the United States: it would be comforting, he says, to believe that it did, but it didn't. Yet alongside his relentless exposition of slavery's role, he describes little-noticed ways in which the adoption of the Constitution was a remarkably democratic act. Amar notes that many states that ordinarily limited voting to propertied citizens relaxed their property qualifications when it came to constitutional ratification, thus allowing a broader-than-usual electorate to decide the country's most fundamental question. This piece of history is not part of the common knowledge of constitutional lawyers, and Amar deserves credit for bringing it to the foreground.
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