The historical basis for the King Arthur legend has long been debated by scholars. One school of thought, citing entries in the History of the Britons and Welsh Annals, sees Arthur as a genuine historical figure, a Romano-British leader who fought against the invading Anglo-Saxons sometime in the late 5th to early 6th century. The other text that seems to support the case for Arthur's historical existence is the 10th-centuryAnnales Cambriae. The latest research shows that theAnnales Cambriae?was based on a chronicle begun in the late 8th century in Wales. Additionally, the complex textual history of the?Annales Cambriae?precludes any certainty that the Arthurian annals were added to it even that early. They were more likely added at some point in the 10th century and may never have existed in any earlier set of annals.
This lack of convincing early evidence is the reason many recent historians exclude Arthur from their accounts of post-Roman Britain. In the view of historian Thomas Charles-Edwards there may well have been an historical Arthur, but that a historian can as yet say nothing of value about him. These modern admissions of ignorance are a relatively recent trend; earlier generations of historians were less skeptical. Historian John Morris made the putative reign of Arthur the organizing principle of his history of post-Roman Britain and Ireland. Even so, he found little to say about a historical Arthur. Partly in reaction to such theories, another school of thought emerged which argued that Arthur had no historical existence at all. Morris's Age of Arthur prompted archaeologist Nowell Myres to observe that no figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian's time. Arthur is not mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or named in any surviving manuscript written between 400 and 820. He is absent from Bede's early-8th-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People, another major early source for post-Roman history.
Some scholars argue that Arthur was originally a fictional hero of folklore - or even a half-forgotten Celtic deity - who became credited with real deeds in the distant past. They cite parallels with figures such as the Kentish totemic horse-gods Hengest and Horsa, who later became historicized. Bede ascribed to these legendary figures a historical role in the 5th-century Anglo-Saxon conquest of eastern Britain.
Historical documents for the post-Roman period are scarce. Of the many post-Roman archeological sites and places, only a handful have been identified as "Arthurian", and these date from the 12th century or later. Archaeology can confidently reveal names only through inscriptions found in reliably dated sites. In the absence of new compelling information about post-Roman England, a definitive answer to the question of Arthur's historical existence is unlikely.
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Which of the following best parallels the relationship between Charles-Edwards's and John Morris's interpretations regarding the existence of King Arthur?
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Montaigne`s pursuit of the character he called Myself-"bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful;?prating, silent;?laborious, delicate; knowing, ignorant"-lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision. When he died, he was still revising and, apparently, not at all surprised, since Myself was a?protean?creature, impossible to anticipate but also, being always at hand, impossible to ignore.
I like to think of the essays as a kind of thriller; with Myself, the elusive prey, and Montaigne, the sleuth, locked in a battle of equals who were too close for dissimulation and too smart for satisfaction. And it may be that Montaigne did, too, because he often warned his readers that nothing he wrote about Myself was likely to apply for much longer than it took the ink he used, writing it, to dry.
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As used in the passage, the word "dissimulation" connotes a sense of
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There has always been controversy over the nature of poetic language. To some, poetic language should be special, removed from the language of everyday (thus, the dictum, `The language of the age is never the language of poetry`). To others, it should be closely in touch with everyday, or, perhaps, be `current language heightened.`
To Ralph Waldo Emerson, the whole language is in any case `fossil poetry.` Statements of this kind to some extent miss the point, which is to stress the enormous range of linguistic expression that is found under the heading poetry. At one extreme, there are poems that are as far removed from everyday speech as it is possible to imagine; at the other, there are poems that, if it were not for the division into lines, would closely resemble prose.
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"As far removed from daily speech as possible" most closely parallels which of the following?
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Unlike Mercury and Mars, Venus has a dense, opaque atmosphere that prevents direct observation of its surface. For years, surface telescopes on Earth could glean no information about the surface of Venus. In 1989, the Magellan probe was launched to do a five-year radar-mapping of the entire surface of Venus. The data that emerged provided by far the most detailed map of the Venusian surface ever seen.
The surface shows an unbelievable level of volcanic activity: over one hundred large shield volcanoes, many more than Earth has, and a solidified river of lava longer than the Nile. The entire surface is volcanically dead, with not a single active volcano. This surface is relatively young in planetary terms, about 300 million years old. The whole surface, planet-wide, is the same age: the even pattern of craters, randomly distributed across the surface, demonstrates this.
To explain this puzzling surface, Turcotte suggested a radical model. The surface of Venus, for a period, is as it is now, a surface of uniform age with no active volcanism. While the surface is fixed, volcanic pressure builds up inside the planet. At a certain point, the pressure ruptures the surface, and the entire planet is re-coated in lava in a massive planet-wide outburst of volcanism. Having spent all this thermal energy in one gigantic outpouring, the surface cools and hardens, again producing the kind of surface we see today. Turcotte proposed that this cycle repeated several times in the past, and would still repeat in the future.
To most planetary geologists, Turcotte's model is a return to catastrophism. For two centuries, geologist of all kinds fought against the idea of catastrophic, planet-wide changes, such as the Biblical idea of Noah's Flood. The triumph of gradualism was essential to the success of geology as a serious science. Indeed, all features of Earth's geology and all feature of other moons and planets in the Solar System, even those that are not volcanically active, are explained very well by current gradualist models. Planetary geologists question why all other objects would obey gradualist models, and only Venus would obey a catastrophic model. These geologists insist that the features of Venus must be able to be explained in terms of incremental changes continuously over a long period.
Turcotte, expecting these objections, points out that no incremental process could result in a planet-wide surface all the same age. Furthermore, a slow process of continual change does not well explain why a planet with an astounding history of volcanic activity is now volcanically dead. Turcotte argues that only his catastrophic model adequately explains the extremes of the Venusian surface.
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Which of the following would constitute evidence against Turcotte's model?
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The example of Winston Churchill siding with Joseph Stalin best serves to undermine which of the following views?
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In the 1860s, the German philologist Lazarus Geiger proposed that the subdivision of color always follows the same hierarchy. The simplest color lexicons (such as the DugermDani language of New Guinea) distinguish only black/dark and white/light. The next color to be given a separate word by cultures is always centered on the red part of the visible spectrum. Then, according to Geiger, societies will adopt a word corresponding to yellow, then green, then blue. Lazarus`s color hierarchy was forgotten until restated in almost the same form in 1969 by Brent Berlin, an anthropologist, and Paul Kay, a linguist, when it was hailed as a major discovery in modern linguistics. It showed a universal regularity underlying the apparently arbitrary way language is used to describe the world.
Berlin and Kay`s hypothesis has since fallen in and out of favor, and certainly there are exceptions to the scheme they proposed. But the fundamental color hierarchy, at least in the early stages (black/white, red, yellow/green, blue) remains generally accepted. The problem is that no one could explain why this ordering of color exists. Why, for example, does the blue of sky and sea, or the green of foliage, not occur as a word before the far less common red?
There are several schools of thought about how colors get named. "Nativists," who include Berlin and Kay, argue that the way in which we attach words to concepts is innately determined by how we perceive the world. In this view our perceptual apparatus has evolved to ensure that we make "sensible"-that is, useful-choices of what to label with distinct words: we are hardwired for practical forms of language. "Empiricists," in contrast, argue that we don`t need this innate programming, just the capacity to learn the conventional (but arbitrary) labels for things we can perceive.
In both cases, the categories of things to name are deemed "obvious": language just labels them. But the conclusions of Loreto and colleagues fit with a third possibility: the "culturist" view, which says that shared communication is needed to help organize category formation, so that categories and language co-evolve in an interaction between biological predisposition and culture. In other words, the starting point for color terms is not some inevitably distinct block of the spectrum, but neither do we just divide up the spectrum in some arbitrary fashion, because the human eye has different sensitivity to different parts of the spectrum. Given this, we have to arrive at some consensus, not just on which label to use, but on what is being labeled.
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In the context in which it is used, "hailed" most nearly means?
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Most educated people of the eighteenth century, such as the Founding Fathers, subscribed to Natural Rights Theory, the idea that every human being has a considerable number of innate rights, simply by virtue of being a human person. When the US Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, many at that time felt that the federal government outlined by the Constitution would be too strong, and that rights of individual citizens against the government had to be clarified. This led to the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, which were ratified at the same time as the Constitution. The first eight of these amendments list specific rights of citizens. Some leaders feared that listing some rights could be interpreted to mean that citizens didn't have other, unlisted rights. Toward this end, James Madison and others produced the Ninth Amendment, which states: the fact that certain rights are listed in the Constitution shall not be construed to imply that other rights of the people are denied.
Constitutional traditionalists interpret the Ninth Amendment as a rule for reading the rest of the constitution. They would argue that "Ninth Amendment rights" are a misconceived notion: the amendment does not, by itself, create federally enforceable rights. In particular, this strict reasoning would be opposed to the creation of any new rights based on the amendment. Rather, according to this view, the amendment merely protects those rights that citizens already have, whether they are explicitly listed in the Constitution or simply implicit in people's lives and in American tradition.
More liberal interpreters of the US Constitution have a much more expansive view of the Ninth Amendment. In their view, the Ninth Amendment guarantees to American citizens a vast universe of potential rights, some of which we have enjoyed for two centuries, and others of which the Founding Fathers could not possibly have conceived. These scholars point out that some rights, such as voting rights of women or minorities, were not necessarily viewed as rights by the majority of citizens in late eighteenth century America, but are taken as fundamental and unquestionable in modern America. While those rights cited are protected specifically by other amendments and laws, the argument asserts that other unlisted right also could evolve from unthinkable to perfectly acceptable, and the Ninth Amendment would protect these as-yet-undefined rights.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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Freudianism sits alongside Marxism and Darwinism in the pantheon of modern theories held to be so revelatory that they not only gained the adherence of Western intelligentsia but shaped the broader culture. During the first half of the twentieth century, an air of intrigue and mystery hovered around Freud`s newly anointed practitioners: psychotherapists. They occupied a strange universe, speaking in a language so incomprehensible but seemingly authoritative that it alternately awed and scared the average man on the street. Psychotherapy is no longer an intellectual movement today as it once was. But in the form of modern professional "caring," it has assumed a new role, which is to provide a peculiar sort of substitute friendship - what we might call "artificial friendship" - for lonely people in a lonely age.
To understand why this occurred and what it means for American culture, one must study the fractious history of the mental health field over the last six decades. It is a complicated story, with a staggering variety of terms, schools, leaders, and techniques, so any overview must necessarily leave out many important details. But from even just a synopsis of the conflicts that gave rise to today`s culture of psychotherapy - battles over who would hold the truest title to physician of the mind, tensions between scientists and clinicians, academics and professionals, elites and the public - we can see more clearly how psychotherapy has profoundly shaped the American conception of what happiness is and how we can achieve it.
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That some dinosaurs could fly has long been established. That these very same species may have been able to walk--using their wings no less--has been far more controversial. However, the latest computer simulations suggest that the Pteranodon, a pterosaur with a wingspan of up to 25-feet long, while no rapid runner, was able to walk by retracting its wrists so as to walk on its palms. As to why the Pteranodon did so still remains unanswered.
One theory is that walking allowed it to forage for food on the ground. While this idea is enticing, proponents of this theory have yet to propose a reasonable answer as to what led to such a dramatic change in both physiology and locomotion. Another explanation is that flying was the evolutionary advantage conferred upon these creatures: in times of scarcity, a flying creature has access to a far greater abundance of fauna than does one limited to terrestrial movement.
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Originally, scientists predicted small asteroids to be hard and rocky, as any loose surface material (called regolith) generated by impacts was expected to escape their weak gravity. Aggregate small bodies were not thought to exist, because the slightest sustained relative motion would cause them to separate. But observations and computer modeling are proving otherwise. Most asteroids larger than a kilometer are now believed to be composites of smaller pieces. Those imaged at high-resolution show evidence for copious regolith despite the weak gravity. Most of them have one or more extraordinarily large craters, some of which are wider than the mean radius of the whole body. Such colossal impacts would not just gouge out a crater-they would break any monolithic body into pieces. In short, asteroids larger than a kilometer across may look like nuggets of hard rock but are more likely to be aggregate assemblages-or even piles of loose rubble so pervasively fragmented that no solid bedrock is left.
The rubble hypothesis, proposed decades ago by scientists, lacked evidence, until the planetologist Shoemaker realized that the huge craters on the asteroid Mathilde and its very low density could only make sense together: a porous body such as a rubble pile can withstand a battering much better than an integral object. It will absorb and dissipate a large fraction of the energy of an impact; the far side might hardly feel a thing. At first, the rubble hypothesis may appear conceptually troublesome. The material strength of an asteroid is nearly zero, and the gravity is so low one is tempted to neglect that too. The truth is neither strength nor gravity can be ignored. Paltry though it may be, gravity binds a rubble pile together. And anybody who builds sandcastles knows that even loose debris can cohere. Oft-ignored details of motion begin to matter: sliding friction, chemical bonding, damping of kinetic energy, etc. We are just beginning to fathom the subtle interplay of these minuscule forces.
The size of an asteroid should determine which force dominates. One indication is the observed pattern of asteroidal rotation rates. Some collisions cause an asteroid to spin faster; others slow it down. If asteroids are monolithic rocks undergoing random collisions, a graph of their rotation rates should show a bell-shaped distribution with a statistical "tail" of very fast rotators. If nearly all asteroids are rubble piles, however, this tail would be missing, because any rubble pile spinning faster than once every two or three hours would fly apart. Recently, several astronomers discovered that all but five observed asteroids obey a strict rotation limit. The exceptions are all smaller than about 150 meters in diameter, with an abrupt cutoff for asteroids larger than 200 meters. The evident conclusion-that asteroids larger than 200 meters across are rubble piles-agrees with recent computer modeling of collisions. A collision can blast a large asteroid to bits, but those bits will usually be moving slower than their mutual escape velocity (the lowest velocity that a body must have in order to escape the orbit of a planet). Over several hours, gravity will reassemble all but the fastest pieces into a rubble pile.
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Which of the following, if true, most strongly indicates that the logic of the prediction is flawed?
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According to futuristic writings in the 1960s, robots would soon drastically reduce crime. With night vision and ability to detect the chemicals involved in ballistics, such robots could be programed to paralyze anyone roaming the street at night with a gun: virtually all criminals fit that description. These criminals would be incapacitated and thus unable to resist an easy arrest.
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Which of the following, if true, most strongly indicates that the logic of the prediction is flawed?
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Freudianism sits alongside Marxism and Darwinism in the pantheon of modern theories held to be so revelatory that they not only gained the adherence of Western intelligentsia but shaped the broader culture. During the first half of the twentieth century, an air of intrigue and mystery hovered around Freud`s newly anointed practitioners: psychotherapists. They occupied a strange universe, speaking in a language so incomprehensible but seemingly authoritative that it alternately awed and scared the average man on the street. Psychotherapy is no longer an intellectual movement today as it once was. But in the form of modern professional "caring," it has assumed a new role, which is to provide a peculiar sort of substitute friendship - what we might call "artificial friendship" - for lonely people in a lonely age.
To understand why this occurred and what it means for American culture, one must study the fractious history of the mental health field over the last six decades. It is a complicated story, with a staggering variety of terms, schools, leaders, and techniques, so any overview must necessarily leave out many important details. But from even just a synopsis of the conflicts that gave rise to today`s culture of psychotherapy - battles over who would hold the truest title to physician of the mind, tensions between scientists and clinicians, academics and professionals, elites and the public - we can see more clearly how psychotherapy has profoundly shaped the American conception of what happiness is and how we can achieve it.
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