|
The primary purpose of the passage is to
|
|
According to the passage, feminist literary scholars of the Female Wits have a tendency to
|
|
The author's reference to Pix's "addressing contemporary social issues such as class upheaval" serves primarily to
|
|
In European lowland heathlands, heather bushes, grasses, and bracken compete with one another for the sandy soil's scarce nutrients, with none acquiring permanent dominance. In Dutch heathlands, however, atmospheric nitrogen pollution produced by intensive animal farming has turned heathlands into grassland, the result of an interaction between nitrogen pollution and heather-eating beetles. Additional nitrogen usually increases growth of both grass and heather, and at first heather usually thrives because the grasses cannot penetrate the canopy of its bushes. Heather beetle population size, like that of many herbivorous insects, varies from year to year. When heather beetles are abundant, their larvae grow particularly well on the nitrogen-enriched heather shoots. Voraciously feeding larvae and adults then defoliate the bushes, tipping the competitive balance between heather and grasses irrevocably.
|
|
It can be inferred from the passage that an abundance of heather beetles in Dutch heathlands
|
|
Which of the followings best describes the function of the highlighted sentence in the author's explanation?
|
|
To evaluate any given intellectual property policy, we must weigh the costs and benefits of awarding copyright protection. If an innovation and the benefits of the protection are nonexistent, then, by the cost-benefit criterion, it is unwarranted. Such a situation arose in 1998, when the United States Congress extended the term of copyright from 50 years after an author's death to 70. Book buyers are harmed by this. A book's price is higher under copyright because the publisher continues to owe royalties to the author's heirs and does not compete with others printing the same book. Against that drawback, there is no countervailing benefit. Authors are hardly likely to find motivation in the prospect of earnings that will arrive more than 50 years after their death. Moreover, the extension was applied retroactively to existing copyrights一but authors do not need incentives to write books they have already written.
|
|
The primary purpose of the passage is to
|
|
The author mentions “royalties” primarily in order to identify
|
|
It can be inferred that which of the following assumptions underlies the statement in the highlighted sentence?
|
|
Mayor: Vehicle exhaust produces dangerously high ozone levels in our city in hot, humid weather. As an incentive for people to commute by bus rather than by car, special free commuter buses will be scheduled on hot, humid days. Since a bus can carry about 40 people but produces only about 20 times as much exhaust as a car, ozone levels will be lower as long as the buses are more than half full.
|
|
Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument?
|
|
Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we think of them as pollution crisis zones. Ecology-minded discussions often focus on ways to make cites seem somewhat less oppressively man-made, such as increasing the area devoted to parks or easing the intensity of development. But most such changes would actually undermine cities' extraordinary energy efficiency. Per unit of area, cities in the United States generate more greenhouse gases, use more energy, and produce more solid waste than most other American regions of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, cities would look like intense hot spots. If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or household, however, the reverse would hold.
|
|
Which of the following best expresses the main idea of the passage?
|
|
The passage implies that in the United States relatively sparsely populated areas exceed cities in per capita rate of
|
Woman suffragists in the early-twentieth-century United States rarely engaged in militant activities, striving instead to win support through persuasive arguments. These arguments were of two types: justice arguments and reform arguments. In using the justice argument, suffragists relied on democratic ideals that had permeated the culture since America's revolutionary years. They cited the Declaration of Independence, claiming that women had the same inalienable or natural right to political liberty as did men. But as suffragists drew on these ideals, they also redefined the rules of democracy by introducing a set of oppositional ideas: they argued that women should have the same political rights as men, a notion not widely accepted at the time. As these suffragists called for an end to male dominance and female dependence in politics, they argued that democracy itself was inherently harmed by the exclusion of women.
The reform rational, on the other hand, was made not on the grounds that women were equal to men but, rather, on the grounds that women and men were different and that this difference justified women's participation in politics. Suffragists making this argument claimed that women took a more nurturing approach to those around them, especially children and the poor. In this sense the reform arguments were more conservative than justice arguments in that they were based on traditional gender roles. But they, like the justice arguments, also had oppositional elements. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the far-reaching impact of urbanization and industrialization had resulted in a growing role for government, which increasingly entered what had been regarded as "women's sphere" by regulating aspects of life that directly affected the home, such as food production, water purity, public sanitation, and education. The suffragists who made reform arguments contended that these changes necessitated a new political role for women, but in their traditional capacities as mothers and wives. As one early- twentieth-century suffragist put it, "The whole progress of this century has been to put the home within the government... When the government touches [a woman], should [she] not have a share in [government]?", The reform argument, then, not only espoused a traditional view of women's place in the world but simultaneously modified that view. It expanded women's sphere to include politics, because politics had changed. Excluding women and their special insights from politics then, would not harm the integrity of democracy so much as it would harm the home and the lives of children and families.
|
|
The passage suggests that the point of view expressed in justice arguments differed from that expressed in reform arguments in that justice arguments
|
|
The passage suggests that woman suffragists who made reform arguments maintained that if women were able to vote, woman voters would make voting decisions that
|
|
The author mentions “the far-reaching impact of urbanization and industrialization” primarily in order to
|
|
The author mentions “the integrity of democracy" primarily in order to
|
