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Which of the following issues would it be most helpful to resolve in order to choose between the two explanation offered?
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The hypothesis that paranormal phenomenon are real but lie outside the limits of science is supported by considerable evidence. The society of Psychical Research has collected stories of ordinary people apparently demonstrating paranormal abilities. Entirely anecdotal, this evidence has nothing to do with science, since it cannot be reproduced under controlled conditions. But the society took great trouble to interview first-hand witnesses and to document the stories carefully. One fact that emerges clearly from the stories is that paranormal events occur, if they occur at all, only when people are experiencing strong emotion. This would immediately explain why paranormal phenomena are not observable under the conditions of a well-controlled scientific experiment. Strong emotion is inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures.
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Regarding the evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research, which of the following can properly be concluded from the passage?
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It can be inferred that the author of the passage would agree with which of the following descriptions of the evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research?
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The traditional picture of planet formation starts with small grains that collide and build into boulders, then larger and larger objects. If this is correct, the Kuiper Belt, an outer region of the solar system that exists beyond the planets, should hold leftover planetary building blocks. But that idea is undermined by Jupiter`s moon Europa. One would expect that over millions of years Europa could have been repeatedly impacted by small comets formed from leftover planetary material in the Kuiper Belt. In fact, Europa`s surface reveals very few small comet impact craters. Perhaps the comets disappear when they enter the inner solar system and are heated by the Sun. Or perhaps the Kuiper Belt contains no leftover planetary material from which comets could have formed.
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The argument anticipated in the highlighted sentence depends on which of the following assumptions?
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The author suggests that if the traditional picture of planet formation were correct
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The Wall Street millionaire Alfred Loomis was an amateur physicist who made significant contributions to scientific research. In 1928 he purchased three identical clocks, the most accurate available at that time. Loomis set up the clocks in a triangular orientation to one another, to break the gravitationally induced synchronic action among their pendulums, and by analyzing their minute variations, verified a theoretically predicted tidal effect of the Moon on clocks. These results later contributed to the development of LORAN (Long-Range Navigation), which triangulates the positions of ships and aircraft by comparing the difference in arrival times of signals coming from multiple radio beacons at various groundbased locations, a calculation that depends on accurate timekeeping
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It can be inferred from the passage that the development of LORAN was made possible in part by
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According to the passage, Loomis' clock experiment accomplished which of the following?
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The shop-floor struggles and wildcat strikes of United States auto workers during the Second World War have received a substantial amount of scholarly attention in recent years. Once dismissed by labor historians as little more than the undisciplined behavior of workers unwilling to abide by union rules, this wartime militancy has been portrayed recently as playing a significant role in an extended conflict with management over distribution of power in the factory.
The revisionist historians who subscribe to this recent view have argued that auto workers, under the direction of militant shop stewards, took advantage of wartime conditions to extend workers` degree of control of the shop floor. Although often devoid of overt political content workers' wartime job actions, according to this view, had the potential to reshape the politics and power structure of the American factory, challenging the centralized, highly bureaucratic union organization and giving workers a more direct voice in determining shop-floor policy. These actions thus created the possibility, according to historian Nelson Lichtenstein, "for a decentralized system of postwar industrial relations in the auto industry." But this potential for change, this argument continues, was undercut by a number of forces. One of these forces-the government`s patriotic wartime rhetoric, which presented a vision of a unified America in which those from different classes came together in a common effort-undermined the auto workers' sense of class aggrievement. This government propaganda, according to this view, made it all but impossible for the workers to frame their conflicts with management as a class struggle, depriving their job
actions of a potential source of ideological legitimacy.
The historical evidence, however, suggests a substantially different interpretation, both of workers' motivation for militancy and of the role that patriotic rhetoric played in their struggle. Undoubtedly, there were shop-floor activists who hoped that the workers' job actions could be transformed into a broader struggle against management and union policies. A good deal of evidence indicates, however, that for workers, the factory-level conflicts of the Second world war were generally defensive maneuvers, designed not to extend the boundaries of worker control but rather to prevent erosion of workers nights that had been recently won in prewar union actions but were now threatened by union leaderships wartime no-strike policy. Moreover, the patriotic rhetoric of the period, far from undercutting that defense, actually served as a tool to legitimize workers' reaction to managements pressure. Specifically, many workers. framed their conflicts with management over their newly won right such as seniority and grievance procedures, as a struggle to secure their basic rights as Americans--nights of self-government and freedom from tyranny By employing this patriotic rhetorical tradition, the workers were able to imbue their newly won rights with a profound ideological legitimacy. These newly won rights were not simply the result of union power, the auto workers' patriotic rhetoric implied. They were, rather, a natural extension of the auto workers` birthright as Americans.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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The passage suggests that the labor historians viewed the wartime militancy of auto workers as
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The author quotes Nelson Lichtenstein primarily in order to
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It can be inferred from the passage that the “revisionist historians” believe that the government's patriotic wartime rhetoric influenced labor-management conflicts in the auto industry by
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People who suffer a heart attack on an airplane are at particular risk because of the relatively long time it takes to get them to a hospital. Last year Minerva Airlines trained its cabin crews in the use of on-board defibrillators to restart the heart. Since then the survival rate for passengers who suffer heart attacks on Minerva flights has increased. Even so, the training might not have contributed to this increase because ________________.
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Which of the following most logically completes the passage?
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While Gayl Jones's fiction has received significant critical attention, her comparably quiet, yet formidable, corpus of poetry has been virtually ignored by scholars. Significantly, Jones's first a publication appeared in verse, and her literary production from 1969 through the early 1980s includes nearly as many poems as short stories, betraying a formative and consistent involvement with poetry. Jones's lack of critical recognition as a poet is at least partially traceable to her documented ambivalence regarding genre boundaries and artistic identity: "I've never really considered myself a poet. I've written what I call poetry but I've always thought of myself as primarily a fiction writer and so I write poetry from the viewpoint and interest of a storyteller." Consistent with this self-conceptualization, Jones's critical observations regarding the work of other poets often focus on techniques traditionally associated with fiction writing: narrative and its rendering usually appear to outweigh the various poetic conventions of prosody and form. While reviewing the work of Sterling Brown, Jones provides a checklist of what chiefly attracts her in poetry: characterization and narrative voice are foregrounded, accompanied by such structural concerns of fiction as dramatic forms and scenes, all of which combine to reveal a sensibility interested primarily in formulating a poetics of effective storytelling.
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According to the passage, the “checklist" provides a record of which of the following?
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Which of the following can be inferred from the passage regarding the nature of Jones's poetry?
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