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Centuries ago, the Maya of Central America produced elaborate, deeply cut carvings in stone. The carvings would have required a cutting tool of hard stone or metal. Deposits of iron ore exist throughout Central America, but apparently the Maya never developed the technology to use them and the metals the Maya are known to have used, copper and gold, would not have been hard enough. Therefore, the Maya must have used stone tools to make these carvings.
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Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument?
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This passage is adapted from an essay published in 2010.
As I write, the Large Hadron Collider, the world`s biggest atom- smasher at CERN in Geneva, has switched on with almost unprecedented media jamboree. Asked about the practical value of it all. Stephen Hawking has said that "modern society is based on advances in pure science that were not foreseen to have practical applications." It's a common claim, and it subtly reinforces the hierarchy that Medawar identified: technology and engineering are the humble offspring of pure science, the casual cast-offs of a more elevated pursuit.
I don't believe that such pronouncements are intended to denigrate applied science as an intellectual activity; they merely speak into a culture in which that has already happened. Pure science undoubtedly does lead io applied spin-offs. but this is not the norm. Rather, most of our technology has come from explicit and painstaking efforts to develop it. And this is simply a part of the scientific enterprise. A dividing line between pure and applied science makes no sense at all, running as it does in a convoluted path through disciplines, departments, even individual scientific papers and careers. Research aimed at applications fills the pages of the leading journals in physics, chemistry, and the life and Earth sciences; curiosity-driven research with no real practical value is abundant in the "applied" literature of the materials, biotechnological, and engineering sciences. The fact that "pure'" and "applied" science are useful and meaningful terms seduces us sometimes into thinking that they are real, absolute, and distinct categories.
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In the context of the passage, the mention of the Large Hadron Collider primarily serves to
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According to the passage, the "explicit and painstaking efforts" are
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The passage implies that the statement made by Stephen Hawking has which shortcoming?
A. It overstates the importance of technology for modem society.
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Before feminist literary criticism emerged in the 1970s, the nineteenth-century United States writer Fanny Fem was regarded by most critics (when considered at all) as a prototype of weepy sentimentalism - a pious, insipid icon of conventional American culture. Feminist reclamations of Fern, by contrast, emphasize her "non-sentimental" qualities, particularly her sharply humorous social criticism. Most feminist scholars find it difficult to reconcile Fern's sardonic social critiques with her effusive celebrations of many conventional values. Attempting to resolve this contradiction, Harris concludes that Fern employed "flowery rhetoric," strategically to disguise her subversive goals beneath apparent conventionality. However, Tompkins proposes an alternative view of sentimentality itself suggesting that sentimental writing could serve radical, rather than only conservative, ends by swaying readers emotionally, moving them to embrace social change.
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It can be inferred that the author of the passage mentions Fern's "sharply humorous social criticism'" primarily in order to
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In the context in which it appears, "reclamations" most nearly means
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Educated people in the Renaissance learned their Latin from contemporary collections, like Erasmus' Adages and Ravisius Textor's Epitheta, that grouped pithy expressions not by author or period but by subject. Thus Renaissance students encountered the many variations ancient Roman writers (ca. 100 B.C.-ca. A.D. 200) had for maxims like "War is pleasant to those who haven`t tried it." They could even use these sayings flawlessly themselves, for example, urging friends who worked too long on one book to "take your hand off the writing tablet." But they had no sense of context; instead they associated the quotations not with the original sources, but with the other identical, similar, or opposite sayings cited in their textbooks. Modem scholarship has explored this point to explain the idiosyncratic nature of most Renaissance allusions to classical texts. The prevalence of this sort of secondhand classical culture in the Renaissance should figure in any effort to assess the degree and kind of influence that Roman writers had on the educated class of the sixteenth century in Europe.
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The term "idiosyncratic", is used by the author of the passage to characterize the
manner in which educated people of Renaissance Europe learned Latin
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The author of the passage suggests that when a Renaissance student quoted a Latin expression, that student would typically
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With which of the following views of modem scholarship on the Renaissance period would the author of the passage most likely agree?
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James: Why is it that fish living iii the ocean's dark depths do not swim around very much? It must be that the scarcity of food available there prevents them from having much energy for swimming.
Marie: But fish swim around only to approach or avoid other creatures that they can see. and in such conditions of darkness, almost nothing can be seen.
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Marie responds to James by
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The decline of the heath hen began when the first Europeans arrived on the East Coast of North America. Before European settlement, Native Americans used fire to maintain a mosaic of forests, shrublands, agricultural fields, and grasslands. After European diseases decimated Native American populations, the formerly open habitats of the Northeast became largely forested, resulting in major changes to bird communities and probably reducing habitat. Although the clearing of forests by European settlers probably once again increased heath hen habitat, hunting pressure was extreme, and by 1821 the formerly common bird was rare in New England. The last reports of heath hens in Pennsylvania and New Jersey are from 1869, and it is doubtful that the heath hen survived much after that on mainland North America.
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Which of the following can be inferred about the action mentioned in the highlighted portion of the passage?
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Which of the following statements about the impact of European settlers on the heath hen is supported by the passage?
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Academics have been reconsidering the meaning of "wilderness" and its usefulness to conservation strategies. The idea of pristine wilderness is historically inaccurate, argue scholars of Native American history, who have demonstrated that Native Americans shaped their environments with their agricultural practices and residential patterns. Other scholars argue that wilderness is simply a cultural construct created in opposition to modem society, not a real place untouched by humans. Scientists, in turn, have argued that the goal of wilderness preservation is based on a model in which ecosystems progress toward a stable equilibrium state, a model replaced in the 1970s with one stressing constant change. These insights complicate wilderness management, which critics charge aims to preserve a supposedly stable environment that existed prior to human disturbance.
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Which of the following statements best describes the function of the highlighted sentence?
A. It undermines a claim made in the previous sentence.
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