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Recently, controversial findings were released that suggest that the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by United States forests might be greater than the amount emitted by the nation's fossil-fuel combustion. This conclusion has two astonishing implications. First, the United States may not be directly contributing to rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. Second, the atmosphere seems to be benefiting from young forests, which are particularly efficient at absorbing carbon dioxide. But these young forests exist only because old-growth forests were clear-cut in earlier centuries. The possibility that the United States absorbs more carbon dioxide than it produces thus does not reflect efforts to protect the environment; rather, it reflects a history of deforestation and development.
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Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the author's argument that the ability of the United States to absorb more carbon dioxide than it produces is not a result of efforts to protect the environment?
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It can be inferred from the passage that the author assumes which of the following about United States carbon dioxide emissions?
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Looking back on a project that they had approached with both great________ and considerable aspirations, they were amused to recognize that neither the fears nor the hopes had been at all realistic.
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Recent discoveries suggest that mathematical techniques developed by ancient Babylonian astronomers________ those of medieval European scholars: Babylonian trapezoid procedures can be viewed as a concrete example of graphical methods devised by fourteenth-century philosopher Nicole Oresme.
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Which of the following would it be most useful to establish in order to evaluate the argument?
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Few topics engender more controversy among musicologists than the "authentic" performance of music of earlier periods. At issue are claims made by partisans of the early music movement that their performances represent a re-creation of history and that the historical information on which such performances are based provide a sure foundation for performances that accurately reflect the composer's original intentions. Taruskin has been the most powerful critic of this view, arguing that so-called authentic performances do not reveal any concrete truth of how the music of earlier times "should" sound. Instead, these performances reflect our contemporary taste for this repertoire's sound and offer a twentieth-century interpretation that, while based on certain historical facts, is encumbered with the unconscious biases inherent in any interpretive endeavor.
Yet, despite their flaws, historical investigations and interpretations remain an indispensable part of music scholarship. Indeed, Taruskin is not engaged in a wholesale crusade against the early music movement or against performance-practice research; rather, he is calling for intellectual honesty. His arguments are important because they help clarify the thin line between historical facts, on the one hand, and, on the other, musical interpretations based not only on those facts but also on imaginative, well-founded speculation.
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The passage indicates that Taruskin and the partisans mentioned would both agree with which of the following statements regarding "authentic" performances of early music?
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Which of the following best describes the function of the highlighted sentence?
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A bag contains 8 pounds of nuts, and $$\frac{1}{3}$$ of the nuts, by weight, are walnuts. If 3 pounds of walnuts are added to the bag, what will be the fraction of the nuts in the bag, by weight, that are walnuts?
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Proponents of the legislation argued that its critics` valid but minor points did not________ the assertion that the bill would be far more beneficial than hurtful to the nation's citizens.
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The singer did not perform at full volume during the opera's opening act, but that may have been because she was________ her voice for the two difficult and lengthy subsequent acts.
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Start with a basic point: reading is a fundamentally (i)________ act. Anyone who has ever taught a child to read will remember the difficulty involved in distinguishing, for instance, between lowercase b, d, and p. After all, if you move them around or flip them over, they (ii)________. And we have to be taught also to (iii)________ not just a few of these odd marks but the thousands that go into telling even the simplest children's story.
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Throughout human history, intelligence and consciousness have been________ concepts: those possessing much of the former are assumed, in some ill-defined way, to be more conscious than those less astute.
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While there is no evidence that Bigfoot is real, several well-known species were once thought to be________; the okapi, for instance, was known as the “African unicorn" until explorers obtained proof of its existence.
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Guy takes a characteristically________ approach in his biographical narrative of Queen Elizabeth I, taking nothing at face value and believing that no accepted view is beyond scrutiny.
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Hubbert's 1956 prediction that peak oil output in the United States would occur in or around 1970 was met with little (i)________ at the time, but daily output did peak in 1970,and since then Hubbert's calculations have been viewed as extraordinarily (ii)________.
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Not only did observers report fraud at some polling stations, but the official vote count itself was_________.
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Some historians claim that geography and climate shaped the course of history, an assertion that implies a fairly________ role for individuals as agents of historical change.
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