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The scientific method is not radically different from the rational attitude in everyday life or in other domains of human knowledge. Historians, detectives, and plumbers-indeed, all human beings-use the same basic methods of induction, deduction, and assessment of evidence as do physicists or biochemists. Modern science tries to carry out these operations in a more careful and systematic way by using controls and statistical tests, insisting on replication, and so forth. Moreover, scientific measurements are often much more precise than everyday observations; they allow us to discover hitherto unknown phenomena, and they often lead to discoveries that conflict with "common sense.” But the conflict is at the level of conclusions, not the basic approach.
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The passage implles that one difference between modern science and "the rational attitude in everyday life" is that modern science
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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 large merchants who dominated long-distance trade in the Spanish empire for the better part of three centuries have been traditionally depicted by historians as a privileged group that used its political and financial clout to protect its interests while engaging in uncompetitive economic practices, largely to the detriment of Spain and its colonies. This image suggested specifically that the colonial commercial system was irrationally organized, choked Spain's economic progress, and generated unwarranted monopoly rents [profits], all for the benefit of the privileged traders of the merchant guilds.
None of these conclusions are wholly incorrect, but they largely fail to appreciate the unpredictable environment in which these traders engaged. Without having adequately reflected on the role of risk in oceanic commerce, historians have tended to paint an overly one-dimensional portrait of the large merchants and their commercial practices. Long-distance traders responded to conditions of poor information, tremendous uncertainty, and endemic risk by adopting defensive strategies and embracing risk-reducing institutions. Avoiding risk, however, neither meant that the Spanish merchants lacked entrepreneurial spirit nor that they were somehow the precapitalist rentiers that historians sometimes imply. To the contrary, no merchant could operate in the highly risky Atlantic world trade without constantly anticipating and taking active measures to avoid catastrophe.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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Which of the following can be inferred from the passage about the "defensive strategies" ?
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The author and the historians mentioned in the first sentence would probably agree on which of the following issues?
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Historical preservation societies preserve old structures to educate visitors about local history. These groups generally choose to preserve old houses that are considered beautiful, leaving less aesthetically pleasing structures to be demolished. Thus, by giving visitors the impression that all old buildings are beautiful, the groups systematically misrepresent history.
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Which of the following, if true, casts the most doubt on the argument?
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That the narrator in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch (completed 1871) displays an astonishing breadth of knowledge may be partly explained by Eliot's reaction to a specializing division of labor that threatened an extinction of generalists. Some of Eliot's contemporaries attributed the nineteenth century's rapid specialization to an accelerating pace of knowledge production. But specialization, Eliot recognized, was not simply an effect of proliferating Information. The notion that specialization was essential to an individual's credibility was also an ideological product of professionalization. Nineteenth-century professional organizations actively fostered public distrust of nonprofessionals, an effect, Eliot feared, that might pressure laypersons, confronted with unfamiliar fields, to resign their curiosity and abdicate moral authority, conceding decision-making to professionals. Eliot's narrator serves as her rejoinder: an ideal of intellectual expansiveness.
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According to the passage, Eliot differed from some of her "contemporaries" in that she
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The author mentions the "extinction" primarily to
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From a biological perspective, culture may be broadly defined as shared variation in behavior that is generated and maintained by social learning-through imitation or teaching, for example. Social learning in animals is often difficult to demonstrate directly. But the presence of culture can be established by observation and deduction: when behavioral differences exist that cannot be accounted for by genetic or environmental factors, cultural transmission must be occurring. Critics respond that it is often difficult to rule out hypotheses that genes or learned individual responses to differing environments are responsible for behavioral patterns. Often implicit in this argument is the notion that social learning, considered a more complex and more cognitively demanding phenomenon than individual learning, should be invoked only as an explanation of last resort.
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According to the passage, the occurrence of social learning can be established by
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The passage suggests which of the following about individual learning?
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Studies show that liking increases with familiarity for many classes of objects but not for representational paintings. Representational paintings have meaning, a factor that might idiosyncratically affect one's liking for an artwork independent of its familiarity. A person who does not like flowers might not like van Gogh' s paintings of sunflowers no matter how familiar they are. Thus, preference for a painting's content might conceal the effects of familiarity. Furthermore, art is embedded in a cultural context that might contribute to the effects of individual taste and general knowledge on judgments of liking. Some people might dislike the famous van Gogh paintings because they think the paintings are commercially exploited or because they've heard the paintings are fakes.
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The highlighted sentence performs which of the following functions in the passage?
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he author mentions the possibility that van Gogh' s famous paintings are commercially exploited primarily in order to
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Though respectful of the groundbreaking work in translating Native American oral narratives done by Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock in the 1970s, Robert Parker notes that their work emerged when "Romanticized ideas of 'the Indian' ... and of poetry "converged to
create a surprisingly uncritical reception of their claim that Native American stories are in fact poetry. Parker objects that by claiming to discover poetry as the true nature of Native American narrative and asserting the value of such narrative on that ground, Hymes and
Tedlock "misconstrue the social relation between power genre, and value." Parker' s own position is that Native American literature, on its own terms, matches the best canonical literature in the European tradition and need not be validated by that tradition's notions of value.
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