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Aristotle (384-322 BC) was admired in the ancient world for the clarity of his style. Unfortunately, the writings that earned him this esteem have not survived. What we read today are not the books Aristotle prepared for publication, but lecture notes complied for his own use. These have one great advantage making no concessions to a lay readership, the Aristotelian works available to us are the ones that intellectually sophisticated commentators in late antiquity (A.D.300-600) found philosophically most rewarding. But they also have disadvantages. These texts were not designed for public consumption and are consequently often difficult to understand. The process by which they took their present form is unclear: in some cases there are signs of editorial activity either by Aristotle or by a later hand, so different versions of the same text may have been spliced together. In general their style is cryptic, condensed, and allusive, the Poetic , in particular, is frequently very obscure.
This obscurity has created difficulties for later readers of Aristotle. The Poetics, though not widely known in antiquity, became extraordinarily influential beginning around 1500 in the Renaissance, especially among literary critics. Yet the text`s obscurities have left it open to conflicting interpretations. There are still fundamental disagreements about the meaning even of key concepts, such as katharsis.
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Although a dedicated reader of the book can _____ a brief of chronology of Chapelle's life, the book is nevertheless not a real biography of Chapelle.
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The passage suggests which of the following about the "commentators"?
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The passage indicates which of the following about the highlighted "writings"?
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In their quest for kinder cutting, physicians increasingly rely on endoscopic surgery, replacing large scalpels and clamps with cameras and _____ tools that snake into the body through tiny holes.
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The author of the passage mentions "editorial activity" primarily in order to
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Politician: The number of traffic deaths in our region has increased over the past several years. Because the poor condition of our roads and highways has caused a number of fatal accidents, the road commission recommends that, to reduce traffic deaths, the budget for road maintenance should be increased. Many more traffic deaths, however, are attributable to traffic congestion than to poor road conditions, and better roads will encourage people to drive more, worsening traffic congestion. So a better strategy for the road commission to recommend would be to reduce traffic congestion, though the best means for doing so remain to be determined.
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In the politician`s argument, the two highlighted portions play which of the following roles?
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In the mid-seventeenth century, some Native Americans in colonial New England started to keep and manage livestock for the first time, doing so according to their own cultural priorities and interests. Several factors influenced their decision to keep animals, including threats to their land base and to the productivity of their hunting. It might appear that animal husbandry as practiced by Europeans would have posed an insurmountable sociocultural challenge for Indians. Scholars studying the issue have argued that livestock would have compromised the mobility needed for winter hunting, destroyed crops, competed with wild game for resources, and violated prevailing conceptions of property and of human-animal interconnectedness. Such obstacles were indeed difficult, but creative ways to overcome them were found.
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Which of the following best describes the primary function of the highlighted sentence?
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It can be inferred that the author would agree with which of the following statements about animal husbandry by Native Americans in colonial New England?
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For good reasons, economists prefer to study people`s revealed preferences; that is, to look at individuals` actual choices and decisions rather than their (sometimes deceptive) stated intentions or their subjective reports of likes and dislikes. Yet people`s choices often bear a mixed relationship to their own happiness. Studies from behavioral economics and psychology find that people depart from the standard model of the rational economic agent in various ways; they make inconsistent choices, fail to learn from experiences, and base their own satisfaction on how their situation compares with that of others. If people display bounded rationality when it comes to maximizing utility, then their choices do not necessarily reflect their "true" preferences, and an exclusive reliance on choices to infer what people desire loses some appeal.
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Why does the author note that people "make inconsistent choices"?
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In the context in which it appears, "mixed" most nearly means?
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At first place, the constitutional bases of social change for women in the United States appear to rest on the civil rights delegation and Supreme Court decisions that took place between 1980 and 1990. Before then, for the long balance of its existence, the United States Constitution seems to have meted out justice to women with either indifference or paternalism. Gender is barely addressed in the vast historical landscape of the Constitution.
There is much to support this view of gender and the Constitution. The original language of the Constitution could be strikingly neutral with respect to gender precisely because the states would continue to regulate political and civil rights as well as much domestic issues as marital property rights. To be sure, the persistence of terms such as "person" in this eighteenth-century document suggests that the framers of the Constitution left the door open for persons, in all their legal and political manifestations, to include females. If they did so consciously, however, they were secure in the knowledge that the states were closing the door by employing the term "males" in their own statutes and constitutions. Federalism, then, helps to account for the Constitution`s silence on gender. Only when the Reconstruction amendments reshaped relations between the citizen, the states, and the federal government, and delineated distinctions between male citizen and female citizen, did gender work its way into the formal language of the Constitution, with negative consequences for the legal status of women.
Considering, then, the apparently sparse role of gender in much of the evolution of the Constitution, it is not at all surprising that scholars who are interested in the role of women in relation to the Constitution have riveted their attention on the years between 1960 and 1990. Notwithstanding the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, it helped women advanced farther toward achieving legal equality within the 30 years before 1990 than in the preceding 170 years of concentrated efforts by the Women`s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Having said this, it needs to be emphasized that we have scarcely identified or connected the skeletal framework of a women`s legal history, much less than the lucid discourse over the political and social radiation of changes in the legal status of women. Our understanding of women`s legal rights in relation to the Constitution would be greatly enhanced if contemporary course about women and the Constitution took place within a well reconsidered historical context and if, in general, discourse on gender became just of the Constitutional mainstream. In order to understand the history of the very real but changing legal marginality of women, it is first necessary to fully identify not only context but events that have shaped women`s legal rights.
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The passage is primarily concerned with doing which of the following?
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According to the passage ,which of the following was a result of the Reconstruction amendments to the United states Constitution?
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Which of the following best describes the function of the first sentence in the context of the passage as a whole?
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The author would most likely agree with which of the following statements regarding the efforts to achieve legal equality for women in the United States during the period from 1960 to 1990?
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Insect predators usually keep the number of aphids in crop fields low. However, sometimes the aphid population explodes in size, causing major damage. Much explosions happen when unusually cold weather keeps the number of aphids low in the spring. One possible explanation is that, with fewer aphids to feed on, the predator population also drop, and in summer when the aphid population starts to grow there are not enough predators to keep it in check.
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