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In the argument given, the two highlighted portions play which of the following roles?
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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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Federal courts in the United States, especially before the famous 1962 case of Baker v. Carr, were often thought to be powerless in the area of election law, voting rights, and other legal questions clearly bearing on politics. This perception was not entirely correct, of course, as pre-1962 Supreme Court decisions such as that in the case of Smith v. Allwright demonstrated in the wake of that decision, voting participation among African Americans in the South increased substantially. However, political rights had not always been so clearly championed by the Supreme Court as they were in Smith v. Allwright. Indeed, the transformations between the Civil War and 1962 were such that, in reviewing voters` rights cases over the intervening decades, one feels like an archaeologist cutting through distinct layers in which the judicial decisions uncovered reveal a pattern of ideological and societal change.
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The author of the passage uses the analogy of the archaeologist most probably in order to
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Which of the following can be inferred regarding the case of Baker v. Carr?
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Tropical forests typically have many more species of plants and animals than do temperate forests of comparable size. During the Ice Age, forests in temperate regions were destroyed, while those in the tropics were not. Accordingly, one proposed explanation of this difference in the number of species is that tropical forests typically had a much longer period than temperate forests in which different species could take hold.
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Which of the following, if true, most strongly supports the proposed explanation?
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Some studies have shown that red-backed salamanders (RBS) are scarce in areas with acidic soils and that those present in such conditions have smaller-than-average bodies. Explanations have included the possibility that young RBS are adversely affected by acidic soil, that adult RBS can sense and may avoid acidic soil conditions, or that loss of RBS prey populations due to acidic soil could result in reduced RBS populations. Yet researchers found fairly high densities of large-bodied RBS at Lake Claire Watershed, where soil conditions are acidic. One hypothesis is that intraspecific geographical variation in acidity tolerance (i.e., local adaptation to an acidic environment) could exist for RBS. Previous studies showed potential local adaptation of some salamander species to acidity.
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Which of the following can be inferred about the studies mentioned in the highlighted portion of the passage?
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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United State women won the vote in 1920 after decades of campaigning. Yet, the impact on women`s status was more limited than women`s rights activists had anticipated. Women were granted suffrage at a historical point when voting was no longer a significant political activity for many Americans. In the mid-nineteenth century, when women first sought suffrage rights, voter turnout rates were unprecedentedly high, elections in much of the country very competitive, and political parties important. But when women finally received the vote in 1920, electoral politics was largely noncompetitive, with virtual one-party rule in many areas, and voter turnout had slipped to its all-time low. Nonetheless, the vote still mattered enough for women to seek it and for conservatives to try to restrict its availability.
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The author of the passage discusses voter turnout rates primarily in order to
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The author of the passage mentions conservatives in the highlighted sentence primarily in order to
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Unlike the static, classically composed portraits produced by her mentor Walker Evans, twentieth-century New York photographer Helen Levitt`s photographs seem candid and spontaneous. Whereas Evans` subjects look directly into the camera, so that photographer and subject conspire in the making of a portrait, Levitt`s subjects seem caught unawares. As a "street" photographer, before the term`s invention, Levitt has claimed to have attempted to capture life as she found it. But there is a paradox to her technique. Her off-the-cuff aesthetic seemingly guarantees objectivity, since she was recording street scenes she happened upon, yet her photographs could be said to be highly subjective, to be reflections of Levitt`s own distinctive preoccupations and ways of seeing. Unlike Evans` images, Levitt`s are solely the products of the photographer without the conscious participation of their subjects. The repetitions evident in Levitt`s choices of subjects, for example, her many photographs of children in masks and disguises, reveal more about Levitt herself than about those subjects.
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According to the passage, which of the following appears to ensure the objectivity of Levitt`s photographs?
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The passage asserts which of the following about Evans` portrait photographs?
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The passage suggests which of the following about street photography?
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The expectation that science is a stable body of relatively objective knowledge on which the law can draw to settle legal controversies may seem benign. However, this expectation often corresponds to a romantic notion of the scientific enterprise and thereby eclipses not only the instabilities and controversies within science itself, but also the social and rhetorical aspects of even the best science. We see the idealization of science in law whenever there is a presumption that if two scientific experts disagree, one of them must be a "junk scientist". This presumption ignores the theoretical presuppositions and limitations of data that lead to genuine scientific disputes. We also see the idealization of science in law whenever we associate "bias, interest, and motivation" with unreliable expertise. This association missed the practical advances made by scientists who have strong theoretical biases, institutional interests, and financial motivations. Finally, we see the idealization of science in law whenever a legislator, administrator, or judge demands certainty from science, not recognizing its probabilistic nature and dynamic history. It is neither a critique of scientific progress nor an exaggeration to acknowledge scientific debates, the conventional aspects of scientific methodology, the importance of networking and "social capital" with respect to publications and grants, and the persuasive elements in scientific discourse. To think that these features are somehow markers of bad science is to idealize science.
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