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According to the author of the passage, Temoshotka, in her estimation of Nabokov, does which of the following?
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Was T.S. Eliot a great letter writer? Not on the evidence gathered in a recently emerged folio of letters penned during his tenure as the chief editor of?Criterion, a once popular literary publication. Although we are offered a vivid picture of the single-handed daily management of a high-minded literary magazine, few of the?Criterion?letters are riveting or revelatory, and they are couched in a scrupulously courteous register that becomes wearisome when read in quantity. But the dazzling roster of correspondents makes even the most humdrum exchanges of interest. The big names - Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf and W B Yeats - are well represented, along with an illustrious cast of literary worthies from Auden (his first appearance in the letters being a courteous rejection note) to Gertrude Stein (another rejection, rather less courteous), Robert Graves (a quarrel) and Thomas McGreevy, Criterion contributor and close friend of Samuel Beckett, whose recently published letters vie with Eliot's as essential purchases for anyone with an interest in modern writing
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In the context in which it appears"register"most nearly means
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What little scholarship has existed on Ernest Hemingway--considering his stature--has focused on trying to unmask the man behind the bravura. Ultimately, most of these works have done little more than to show that Hemingway the myth and Hemingway the man were not too dissimilar (Hemingway lived to hunt big game so should we be surprised at his virility, not to mention that of many of the author`s--chiefly male--protagonists?). In the last few years, several biographies have reversed this trend, focusing on Hemingway near the end of his life: isolated and paranoid, the author imagined the government was chasing him (he was not completely wrong on this account). Ironically, the hunter had become the hunted, and in that sense, these latest biographers have provided--perhaps unwittingly--the most human portrait of the writer yet.
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With which of the following would the author of the passage agree?
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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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It can be inferred from Emerson`s quote that he implied which of the following?
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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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Montaigne`s relationship to"Myself"is most similar to that of
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If you look out from an empty field into a dark sky, you will get the impression that you are standing on a flat plate, enclosed by a giant dome. Depth perception fails us for the distant objects we see in the sky. This creates the appearance that all of the stars have the same distance. The stars all appear to move together across the sky during the night, rising in the east and setting in the west, as if they are affixed to the inside of the dome.
Because of this phenomenon, many ancient civilizations believed that a dome really did enclose the Earth. Only a few centuries ago astronomers realized that the stars are actually very far away, scattered throughout the Milky Way Galaxy, rather than attached to the inside of a vast sphere. The old idea remains useful, however. The concept of the celestial sphere provides a simple way of thinking about the appearance of the stars from Earth without the complication of a realistic model of the universe.
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Which of the following are consistent with a principle elucidated upon in the passage above?
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The American colonists were less interested in maple syrup than in granular sugar. The pure, white, crystallized product of sugar cane was still an expensive luxury, imported from plantations in the West Indies. Maple sugar offered an accessible and affordable substitute.?These colonists, out on the imperial periphery, wanted to demonstrate that their fledgling society was just as sophisticated and elegant as that of England. They took the concentrated maple sap and poured it into conical molds, refining it into white sugar-loaves like those produced in Britain from cane syrup.?Maple sugar, a distinctively American product, was touted as the equal of the sugar served in the most elegant Old World salons. The clearest syrups and whitest sugars, which betrayed the least hint of their rustic origins, commanded premium prices.
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Which of the following is best supported by the passage?
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Demotic Greek (language of the people) is the modern vernacular form of the Greek language, and refers particularly to the form of the language that evolved naturally from ancient Greek, in opposition to the artificially archaic Katharevousa, which was the official standard until 1976. The two complemented each other in a typical example of diglossia, or the existence of two forms of a language (usually a "high" and a "low") employed by the same speaker depending on the social context, until the resolution of the Greek language question in favor of Demotic.
Demotic is often thought to be the same as the modern Greek language, but these two terms are not completely synonymous. While Demotic is a term applied to the naturally evolved colloquial language of the Greeks, the modern Greek language of today is more like a fusion of Demotic and Katharevousa; it can be viewed as a variety of Demotic which has been enriched by educated elements. Therefore, it is not wrong to call the spoken language of today Demotic, though such a terminology ignores the fact that modern Greek contains - especially in a written or official form - numerous words, grammatical forms and phonetical features that did not exist in colloquial speech and only entered the language through its archaic variety. Additionally, even the most archaic forms of Katharevousa were never thought of as ancient Greek, but were always called modern Greek, so that the phrase modern Greek applies to Demotic, Standard Modern Greek and even Katharevousa.
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Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
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More capacious than ponderous, the most recent incarnation in a line of Melville biographies, Philbrick`s"Moby Dick"(a barefaced titular homage to Melville`s iconic novel on a white whale) has the wild and unpredictable energy of the great white whale itself, more than enough to heave its significance out of what Melville called "the universal cannibalism of the sea"and into the light.
According to Philbrick, Melville, in his rightly lionized novel,"Moby Dick",challenged the form of the novel decades before James Joyce, and a century before Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. Calling for tools befitting the ambition of his task - "Give me a condor`s quill! Give me Vesuvius`s crater for an ink stand!"- Melville substituted dialogue and stage direction for a chapter`s worth of prose. He halted the action to include a parody of the scientific classification of whales, a treatise on the whale as represented in art, a meditation on the complexity of rope, whatever snagged his attention.
Reporting the exact day and time of his writing in a parenthetical aside, he"pulled back the fictive curtain and inserted a seemingly irrelevant glimpse of himself in the act of composition,"the moment Philbrick identifies as his favorite in the novel. Melville may not have called this playfulness metafiction, but he defied strictures that shaped the work of his contemporaries.
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Which of the following does the passage NOT suggest?
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Researchers, investigating the link between daily coffee consumption and learning, claim that subjects who consumed one cup of coffee a day for one week (the equivalent of 50 mg per day) exhibited improvements in declarative memory. Furthermore, the study revealed that such improvements were longer-lasting than those witnessed in a control group served decaffeinated coffee (decaffeinated contains negligible amounts of caffeine). After a week of learning a list of facts, the subjects who consumed one cup of coffee were able to recall these facts with significantly more accuracy.
While daily coffee consumption may aid in the process of forming a greater number of short-term memories, and increase the likelihood that these memories will be stored in long-term memory, the study glosses over an important fact. Many exhibit sensitivities to caffeine, including headaches (both migraine and non-migraine), sleeplessness, heightened anxiety and any number of factors that, when working either alone or in tandem, may actually lead to a decrease in the observed link between caffeine and learning. Nonetheless, despite the fact that the study represents a random sampling-and thus any number of subjects can exhibit any number of reactions to caffeine-if enough subjects continue to display signs of improvements in learning, then this result would not be inconsistent with the study`s findings. Still, until the researchers either release more details of this study, or subsequent studies are conducted, the extent to which those with caffeine sensitivity influenced the observed link between coffee consumption and memory will not be fully known.
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Regarding coffee`s effectiveness on memory amongst those who do not display "sensitivities to caffeine,"the author assumes that
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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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