|
The author mentions Medea primarily in order to
|
|
Some historians have recently challenged the "party period paradigm," the view, advanced by McCormick and others, that political parties--especially the two major parties--in the United States between the years 1835 and 1900 evoked extraordinary loyalty from voters and dominated political life. Voss-Hubbard cites the frequency of third-party eruptions during the period as evidence of popular antipathy to the two-party regime. He correctly credits third parties with helping generate the nineteenth century`s historically high rates of voter turnout by forcing major parties to bolster supporters' allegiance, lest minor parties siphon off their votes, and with pushing policy demands that the major parties ignored. Formisano stresses the pervasive record of nonpartisan and anti-party governance at the local level, and women` s frequent participation in nineteenth-century public life, prior to their enfranchisement, in nonpartisan and antiparty ways as evidence of the limitations of the party period paradigm. Yet McCormick would deny that the existence of antiparty sentiment during the period undermined the paradigm, since he has always acknowledged the residual strength of such sentiment during the nineteenth century. In any case, the strength of the paradigm is its comparative thrust: the contrast it draws between the period in question and earlier and later political eras.
|
|
The primary purpose of the passage is to
|
|
Soil communities are dependent on plants for organic matter. Plants provide organic matter for soil communities through the decomposition of leaf litter, by oozing nutrients from roots, or through other methods of deposition of organic compounds into the soil environments. As a result of these diverse methods by which plants supply resources, unique soil communities form under different plant species and under plant communities that differ in composition. If a nonnative plant species invades an above-ground community of flora and fauna, it can alter links between the native above-ground community and the below-ground soil community. For example, an invading nonnative plant could alter the quantity of leaf litter production, which would alter nutrient contributions to the soil.
|
|
According to the passage, plants supply resources to soil communities by which of the following methods?
|
Consider each of the choices separately and select all that apply.
Which of the following statements about the connection between above-ground plants and below-ground soil communities can be inferred from the passage?
|
|
Recent studies of the Philippine fruit bat fauna have confirmed some previous hypotheses regarding bats on oceanic islands: for example, species richness[ the number of different species in a particular area] and abundance are generally highest in the lowlands and decrease with increasing elevation. With few exceptions, each endemic species [species native to a particular place] is restricted to the modern islands that made up a single island during periods of low sea level, and genetic differentiation has been influenced by the ecology of the species and the current and past geographic and geological conditions. However, far more previous hypotheses have been overturned than supported. Some endemic Philippine species use disturbed habitat as extensively as nonendemic species that are widespread in Southeast Asia. Levels of genetic variation within all species are high, not low, and rather than showing evidence of an intrinsic vulnerability to extinction from natural causes, independent lineages of these bats have persisted in rather small areas for very long periods of time(often millions of years) in spite of frequent typhoons and volcanic eruptions. While colonization from outside areas has clearly contributed to the high species richness, speciation within the archipelago has contributed at least a quarter of the total species richness, including many of the most abundant species.
|
|
The primary purpose of the passage is to
|
|
Select the sentence in the passage that offers a possible explanation for a trend.
|
|
Recent studies of ancient Maya water management have found that the urban architecture of some cities was used to divert rainfall runoff into gravity-fed systems of interconnected reservoirs. In the central and southern May Lowlands, this kind of water control was necessary to support large populations throughout the year due to the scarcity of perennial surface water and the seasonal availability of rainfall. Some scholars argue that the concentration of water within the urban core of these sites provided a centralized source of political authority for Maya elites based largely on controlled water access. Such an argument is plausible; however, it is less useful for understanding the sociopolitical implications of water use and control in other, water-rich parts of the Maya region.
|
