In his 1836 landscape The Oxbow, Thomas Cole provided viewers with a grand portrayal of' American wilderness on the canvas's left, which he sharply juxtaposed with a scene of modern human "improvement" of the land on the right. Scholars have been struck by the very distinctive markings on the distant mountain in The Oxbow. It has been argued that these marks can be read as Hebrew letters: when looking directly at the mountain, the Hebrew equivalent for "Noah" is seen, and if viewed from above (by God), the markings spell "Shaddai" or "the Almighty". There are a number of reasons to question such a literal interpretation of the markings: the underdrawings for both the oil study and the finished canvas show no sign of lettering on the mountain, and Hebrew scholars who have carefully examined the markings do not accept this reading.
Moreover, by the 1830s, the Oxbow region of the Connecticut River valley was plagued by rapid clearing of forests including on the sides of mountains, In her watercolor of the site at this time, View of Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, and the Connecticut River, artist Eliza Goodridge indicated selective clear-cut areas on the mountain Cole had become increasingly alarmed by this development, and he began to depict the effects of clear-cutting in his landscapes in the ears leading up to The Oxbow, as seen in his 1833 View of Hoosac Mountain and Pontoosuc Lake near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in which areas of deforestation are visible on the distant mountain. Similar clear-cut sections appear on the mountain in his on-site drawing for The Oxbow, highlighting the importance of this transformation of the natural environment.
Yet that Cole might decide. as he was finishing the painting. to draw attention to this area of deforestation by including markings that roughly form a pattern or an inscription, not to be read literally is in keeping with the artist's practice of embedding his compositions with symbols and moral messages. In addition, deforestation had been on his mind for some time as a sign of man's destructive alteration of nature for financial "utilitarian" gain. A possible inspiration for these markings are the works of John Martin as seen in his painting Belshazzar 's Feast, which includes Hebraic letters Cole's constant references to mountains as pyramidal forms, and the fact that he had painted an ancient pyramid that was inscribed with Latin lettering, suggest that Cole may have intended the viewer to read the pattern on the mountain as a biblical reference that alerted them to God' s judgment of humans' recent destruction of his pure creation. The mountain is defaced, just as all other areas of the landscape at right have been altered, by the hand of man.
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It can be inferred that the author of the passage would agree with which of the following statements about the "grand portrayal of American wilderness" in Cole's The Oxbow?
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In the context in which it appears, "indicated " most nearly means
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The passage mentions "artist Eliza Goodridge" primarily to
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Most of the studies of the effect of aging on short-term memory have led researchers to conclude that younger adults perform short-term-memory tasks better than people over the age of 65. But these studies were all conducted in afternoon sessions. In a recent study conducted both in morning and in afternoon sessions. the older participants performed much better in morning sessions than in afternoon sessions. The younger participants did not, however, perform any better in the morning.
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The statements given are structured to lead to which of the following conclusions
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This passage is adopted from material published in 2005
Given that ants and aphids are both abundant insect groups that often share the same habitats, that aphids excrete energy-rich honeydew, and that ants aggressively defend resources, it is difficult to understand why so few species of aphid have evolved a close relationship with ants. For example, only a quarter of the aphid species in the Rocky Mountain region are attended by ants, and in Central Europe, about one third are obligate myrmecophile [animals that closely associate with ants]. More than a dozen hypotheses have been proposed to account for the variability in aphid-ant relationships and the low proportion of attended species. First among them is the plant permissive hypothesis, which suggests that host-plant quality plays a critical role in determining the attractiveness of aphids for ants. Both variation in the quality of different hosts or different parts of the same host plant may affect the quality of honeydew, which is either more or less attractive to ants. However, this hypothesis ignores the fact that several species of aphids may feed on the same host plant or even plant organ but have very different degrees of associations with ants and assumes that the quality of phloem sap determines that of the honeydew. Recent studies have found that feeding on woody plant parts is positively associated with ant attendance, whereas mobility, feeding in isolation, and having winged adults are negatively associated with ant attendance.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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The author mentions "energy-rich honey dew primarily to
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If the plant permissive hypothesis is correct, it can be inferred from information presented in the passage that
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Astronomers can measure any given star's radial velocity by examining its spectrum-light spread out into its constituent wavelengths. If an object is moving toward us,its spectral lines shift to shorter wavelengths; if it's moving away, the lines swing to longer wavelengths. The higher the velocity, the greater the shift. Although this sort of spectral analysis is straightforward for nearby stars. it becomes far more difficult for distant stars in the Milky Ways outer halo. Even large telescopes can't gather enough of the light. For this reason, astronomer Ulrich Heber conjectures that there are probably several low-mass hypervelocity stars yet to be discovered. Although these diminutive objects live longer than B type stars, which are extremely luminous and blue,they radiate
much less light.
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Which of the following best describes the function of the highlighted sentence in the context of the passage as a whole?
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The passage suggests that Heber would be most likely to agree with which statement about low-mass hypervelocity stars?
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Despite winning several prestigious literary awards of the day, when it first appeared, Alice Walker`s The Color Purple generated critical unease over puzzling aspects of its compositions. In what, as one reviewer put it, was "clearly intended to be a realistic novel," many reviewers perceived violations of the conventions of the realistic novel form, pointing out variously that late in the book, the narrator protagonist Celie and her friends are propelled toward a happy ending with more velocity than credibility, that the letters from Nettie to her sister Celie intrude into the middle of the main action with little motivation or warrant, and that the device of Celie`s letters to God is especially unrealistic in as much as it forgoes the concretizing details that traditionally have given the epistolary novel (that is, a novel composed of letters) its peculiar verisimilitude: the ruses to enable mailing letters, the cache, and especially the letters received in return.
Indeed, the violations of realistic convention are so flagrant that they might well call into question whether The Color of Purple is indeed intended to be a realistic novel, especially since there are indications that at least some of those aspects of the novel regarded by viewers as puzzling may constitutes its links to modes of writing other than Anglo-European nineteenth-century realism. For example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has recently located the letters to God within an African American tradition deriving from slave narrative, a tradition in which the act of writing is linked to a powerful deity who "speaks" through scripture and bestows literacy as an act of grace. For Gates, the concern with finding a voice, which he sees as the defining feature of African American literature, links Celie`s letters with certain narrative aspects of Zora Neale Hurston`s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the acknowledged predecessor of The Color Purple.
Gates`s paradigm suggests how misleading it may be to assume that mainstream realist criteria are appropriate for evaluating The Color Purple. But in his preoccupation with voice as a primary element unifying both the speaking subject and the text as a whole Gates does not elucidate many of the more conventional structural features of Walker`s novel. For instance, while the letters from Nettie clearly illustrate Nettie`s acquisition of her own voice, Gates`s focus on "voice" sheds little light on the place that these letters occupy in the narrative or on why the plot takes this sudden jump into geographically and culturally removed surroundings. What is needed is an evaluative paradigm that, rather than obscuring such startling structural features (which may actually be explicitly intended to undermine traditional Anglo-European novelistic conventions), confronts them, thus illuminating the deliberately provocative ways in which The Color Purple departs from the traditional models to which it has been compared.
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The author of the passage would be most likely to agree with which of the following statements about the letters from Nettie to Celie?
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In the second paragraph, the author of the passage is primarily concerned with
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According to the passage, an evaluative paradigm that confronts the startling structural features of The Color Purple would accomplish which of the following?
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The author of the passage suggests that Gates is most like the reviewers mentioned in the first paragraph in which of the following ways?
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Crows, herring gulls, and sparrows all live on the island of Firsten. Crows feed on sparrow eggs and the therefore pose a threat to the sparrow population. Although gulls are not nearly as good at finding sparrow nests as crows are, sparrows typically also lose some eggs to gull predation. Nevertheless, sparrows that nest near gull nests tend to lose fewer eggs to predators than sparrows nesting far away from gull nests, since ________ .
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Which of the following most logically completes the argument?
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