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Which of the following can be substantiated based on information found in the passage?
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The idea that all mental functions are derived from the brain originated with Hippocrates, but it was largely neglected until the late 18th century, when Franz Gall attempted to link psychology and brain science. Gall took advantage of what was already known about the cerebral cortex. He was aware that it was bilaterally symmetrical and subdivided into four lobes. However, he found that these four lobes were, by themselves, inadequate to account for the forty-odd distinct psychological functions that psychologists had characterized by 1790. As a result he began to analyze the heads of hundreds of musicians, actors, etc., relating certain bony elevations or depressions under the scalp to the predominant talent or defects of their owners. Based on his skull palpitation, Gall subdivided the cortex into roughly forty regions, each of which served as an organ for a specific mental function.
While Gall`s theory that all mental processes derive from the brain proved to be correct, his methods for localizing specific functions were deeply flawed because they were not based on what we would now consider valid evidence. Gall did not test his ideas empirically by performing autopsies on the brains of patients and correlating damage to specific regions with defects in mental attributes; he distrusted the diseased brain and did not think it could reveal anything about normal behavior. Instead, he developed the notion that as each mental function is used, the particular area of the brain responsible for that function becomes enlarged. Eventually, a given area may become so bulky that it pushes out against the skull and produces a bump on the head.
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The author considers Gall`s methodology to be unscientific for which of the following reasons?
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The ponerines are the most diverse of all the ant groups and are global in distribution. They cannot really be thought of as sophisticated superorganisms, though, for they tend to live in small colonies of a few tens to a few thousand individuals, with one Australian species living in colonies of just a dozen. Like Stone Age human hunters who specialized in killing woolly mammoths, the ponerines tend to specialize in hunting one or a few kinds of prey. That the great success of the ponerines is achieved despite their primitive social organization presents entomologists with what is known as the ponerine paradox. It lacks a widely accepted solution, but researchers suspect that the ponerines` predilection to seek specialized types of prey limits their colony size (for such specialized hunters cannot gather enough food to develop large and sophisticated colonies). If this is the case, then the very characteristic that helps the ponerines to diversify and survive in a wide variety of environments also prevents them from attaining superorganism status
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According to the passage, ponerines` tendency to seek specialized prey helps to account for which of the following?
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As to when the first people populated the American subcontinent is hotly debated. Until recently, the Clovis people, based on evidence found in New Mexico, were thought to have been the first to have arrived, some 13,000 years ago. Yet evidence gathered from other sites suggest the Americas had been settled at least 1,000 years prior to the Clovis. The"Clovis first" idea, nonetheless, was treated as gospel, backed by supporters who, at least initially, outright discounted any claims that suggested precedence by non-Clovis people. While such a stance smacked of fanaticism, proponents did have a solid claim: if the Clovis peoples crossed the Bering Strait 13,000 years ago, only after it had become ice-free, how would a people have been able to make a similar trip but over ice?
A recent school of thought, backed by Weber, provides the following answer: pre-Clovis people reached the Americas by relying on a sophisticated maritime culture, which allowed them to take advantage of refugia, or small areas in which aquatic life flourished. Thus they were able to make the long journey by hugging the coast as far south as to what is today British Columbia. Additionally, they were believed to have fashioned a primitive form of crampon so that they would be able to dock in these refugia and avail themselves of the microfauna. Still, such a theory begs the question as to how such a culture developed.
The Solutrean theory has been influential in answering this question, a fact that may seem paradoxical--and startling--to those familiar with its line of reasoning: the Clovis people were actually Solutreans, an ancient seafaring culture along the Iberian peninsula, who had--astoundingly given the time period--crossed into the Americas via the Atlantic ocean. Could not a similar Siberian culture, if not the pre-Clovis themselves, have displayed equal nautical sophistication?
Even if one subscribes to this line of reasoning, the"Clovis first" school still have an objection: proponents of a pre-Clovis people rely solely on the Monte Verde site in Chile, a site so far south that its location begs yet another question: What of the 6,000 miles of coastline between the ice corridor and Monte Verde? Besides remains found in network of caves in Oregon, there has been scant evidence of a pre-Clovis peoples. Nonetheless, Meade and Pizinsky claim that a propitious geologic accident could account for this discrepancy: Monte Verde was located near a peat bog that essentially fossilized the village. Archaeologists uncovered two wooden stakes, which, at one time, were used in twelve huts. Furthermore plant species associated with areas 150 miles away were found, suggesting a trade network. These findings indicate that the Clovis may not have been the first to people the Americas, yet more excavation, both in Monte Verde and along the coast, must be conducted in order to determine the extent of pre-Clovis settlements in the Americas.
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It can be most reasonably inferred from the passage that in regard to the manner in which the Monte Verde village was preserved that
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In Don Giovanni, what is perhaps Mozart`s best-known opera, there exist two distinct endings, a phenomenon not entirely unknown during the composer`s time, but one that invites the obvious question: Why did Mozart decide to include alternate endings for Don Giovanni, when he did not do the same with his other famous operas, Die Zauberfl?te and Le Nozze di Figaro. Another question, and one not so obvious, is: Why was Mozart himself uncertain as to which of the two endings to choose, as is evidenced in his correspondence with Lorenzo Da Ponte, the opera`s librettist?
A common answer is to treat both these questions as one: Mozart was uncertain as to which ending to provide, so he wrote both endings. Such a reply ignores an important consideration: Why did Mozart decide to provide these specific endings? Libard provides a reasonable answer: The traditional ending-in the sense that it is the one that was popular during the composer`s day, and continues to be so today-is clearly more palatable for audiences. The hero, Don Giovanni, is chided for his libertine ways and then the cast appears in tutti, bellowing a merry chorus as the curtain falls. The audience is left having a light dose of entertainment, which, after all, was the aim of many of the operas of Mozart`s time. Fine, but then what of the tragic ending? Libard-trading the sensible for the pat-offers little more than that such an ending reflects the political climate of the day.
This alternate ending-Don Giovanni is suddenly cast down to Hell, and instead of being redeemed, the hero emerges from the underworld chastened, and the curtain falls-was interpreted by the critics of the day as heavy-handed didacticism. While such a view is not entirely without merit-Mozart ultimately aimed to impart some lesson for his incorrigible Lothario-it still leaves the questioned unanswered as to why two endings, and what exactly did Mozart aim to communicate that could not be housed in a traditional ending.
One answer offered recently by musicologist Gustavo Lucien is that Mozart balked at including a traditional ending, feeling that it was incongruous with the serious tone of most of the opera. Indeed, Don Giovanni falls more under the rubric of opera serie than opera buffo, the latter typically featuring light endings in which the entire cast sings in an upbeat, major key. Da Ponte, however, insisted that forthwith casting Don Giovanni to Hell, and offering him scant opportunity for redemption, would likely leave the audience feeling ambivalent. Such an ending would also suggest that the librettist had been unable to think of a tidy resolution. Da Ponte, then, was not so much against a tragic ending as he was an abrupt tragic ending. Perhaps, even Mozart was unsure of what to do with Don Giovanni once he was in Hell, and may have even been working out a different ending, using the light ending as a stopgap till he achieved such an aim. In that case the fate of Don Giovanni can best be answered by the fact that Mozart-through debts, ill-health, and the composer`s obligation to compose works for his patrons –was unable to return to a work he had tabled.
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The author of the passage would take exception to all of the following statements regarding Libard`s response to the existence of dual endings to Don Giovanni EXCEPT?
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Sleep-learning experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct. For one thing, one must be sure that the subjects are actually asleep and stay that way during the lessons. The most rigorous trials of verbal sleep learning have failed to show any new knowledge taking root. While more and more research has demonstrated the importance of sleep for learning and memory consolidation, none had managed to show actual learning of new information taking place in an adult brain during sleep.
Recently, however, researchers chose to experiment with a type of conditioning that involves exposing subjects to a tone followed by an odor, so that they soon exhibit a similar response to the tone as they would to the odor. The pairing of tones and odors presented several advantages. Neither wakes the sleeper (in fact, certain odors can promote sound sleep), yet the brain processes them and even reacts during slumber. Moreover, the sense of smell holds a unique non-verbal measure that can be observed -- namely sniffing. The researchers found that, in the case of smelling, the sleeping brain acts much as it does when awake: We inhale deeply when we smell a pleasant aroma but stop our inhalation short when assaulted by a bad smell. This variation in sniffing could be recorded whether the subjects were asleep or awake. Finally, this type of conditioning, while it may appear to be quite simple, is associated with some higher brain areas -- including the hippocampus, which is involved in memory formation.
In the experiments, the subjects slept in a special lab while their sleep state was continuously monitored. As they slept, a tone was played, followed by an odor -- either pleasant or unpleasant. Then another tone was played, followed by an odor at the opposite end of the pleasantness scale. Over the course of the night, the associations were partially reinforced, so that the subject was exposed to just the tones as well. The sleeping volunteers reacted to the tones alone as if the associated odor were still present -- by either sniffing deeply or taking shallow breaths. The next day, the now awake subjects again heard the tones alone -- with no accompanying odor. Although they had no conscious recollection of listening to them during the night, their breathing patterns told a different story. When exposed to tones that had been paired with pleasant odors, they sniffed deeply, while the second tones -- those associated with bad smells -- provoked short, shallow sniffs.
The team then asked whether this type of learning is tied to a particular phase of sleep. In a second experiment, they divided the sleep cycles into rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep, and then induced the conditioning during only one phase or the other. Surprisingly, they found that the learned response was more pronounced during the REM phase, but the transfer of the association from sleep to waking was evident only when learning took place during the non-REM phase. The researchers suggest that during REM sleep we may be more open to influence from the stimuli in our surroundings, but so-called dream amnesia -- which makes us forget most of our dreams -- may operate on any conditioning occurring in that stage of sleep. In contrast, non-REM sleep is the phase that is important for memory consolidation, so it might also play a role in this form of sleep-learning.
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Which of the following is NOT supported by the passage?
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To describe a style as Faulknerian or Beckettian or Nabakovian conjures up a host of literary moods, dispositions, and temperaments that coalesce to form an imprint as distinctive as a genetic code. This imprint, a trace-code of the authorial DNA, is our primary way of distinguishing the focused person who writes from that"bundle of accidents and incoherence that sits down at breakfast,"as Yeats somewhat comically described the writer of prose.
Yet however expert we become in deciphering the authorial code, we can never know the person who writes directly through her writing. This is an odder claim than it may initially appear, when you consider that the writer may divulge the most intimate secrets of her inner life through the very things she chooses to write about and by the way she writes about them. I want to make an even odder claim and insist that the person who writes never appears to us except as a figment of our imagination.
So this is what I am conveying in the case of Virginia Woolf, when I say I am"imagining"Virginia Woolf. I do not mean by this that I am making her up or attributing qualities to her that she may not indeed possess. Quite the opposite. It is Woolf who makes things up, who makes herself up-that is what it means, at a very fundamental level, to have an imagination and to use it in your writing. What I fabricate is an image of her that has slowly formed in my mind-a figment I call it-from the impressions, some more concrete than others, that I collect as I am reading her. This figment of the author may coexist with, but should never be mistaken for, the "figure of the author." I suspect it matters little to most readers whether the author as a literary figure is dead or alive or temporarily missing in action. On the other hand, the figment, being a subjective creation and not a rhetorical or literary personification, has a different reality and possesses a different importance in the mind of the reader. The figment of the author that attends us in our reading tends to be evanescent, but is never insubstantial in its impact upon us.
It was Woolf who alerted me to the inevitability of these figments, of their power to shadow and ultimately affect our intellectual and emotional relation to what we are reading. The first concrete piece of advice she gives the reader in "How Should One Read a Book?"is to try to become the author, but then, in a reversal that becomes more and more typical of her as she becomes confident in her own opinions that she can afford to qualify and, when necessary, disregard, she admits her inability to follow her own advice.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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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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Constitutional scholars of both the traditionalist and liberal views would agree that Ninth Amendment rights
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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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Regarding the hierarchical subdivision of color, which of the following does the passage support?
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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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The author implies which of the following about Geology as a science?
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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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