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The passage states which of the following about the Mesopotamian statues?
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The author of the passage mentions “numerous ancient texts” primarily in order to
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In his 2005 book. Americas Constitution A Biography. Akhil Reed Amar offers a radically democratic rationale for the legitimacy of the United States Constitution as the country's paramount legal authority. In Amar's eyes, the legitimacy of law is a function of its process of enactment; the more democratic the process, the more authoritative the law. Thus he contends that if a federal statute in the United States conflicts with the provisions of a treaty between the United States and a foreign country, the statute should prevail because, while treaties are made by the assent of the president and the United States Senate alone, statutes also require the concurrence of the House of Representatives, a larger legislative body closer to the people themselves. By the same logic, the greatest of all authorities in the United States is the Constitution, which was enacted more democratically than any other law. Unlike laws, which are passed by the people's elected representatives, the Constitution-so the story goes-was adopted directly by the people themselves.
It would be naive, of course, to imagine that the process by which the United States Constitution was written and ratified in the 1780s was democratic as we understand democracy. The restriction of the vote almost exclusively to White men, to say nothing of the existence of slavery, would mock such a claim. Amar is keenly aware of these deficiencies, and he does not minimize them. In fact, throughout his discussion of the original Constitution, Amar exposes the corrosive influence of slavery at almost every turn. And unlike many writers before him, Amar does not protest that at least the Constitution laid the seeds of slavery's eventual destruction in the United States: it would be comforting, he says, to believe that it did, but it didn't. Yet alongside his relentless exposition of slavery's role, he describes little-noticed ways in which the adoption of the Constitution was a remarkably democratic act. Amar notes that many states that ordinarily limited voting to propertied citizens relaxed their property qualifications when it came to constitutional ratification, thus allowing a broader-than-usual electorate to decide the country's most fundamental question. This piece of history is not part of the common knowledge of constitutional lawyers, and Amar deserves credit for bringing it to the foreground.
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The author notes that “treaties are made by the assent of the president and the United States Senate alone" in order to help
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The passage indicates which of the following about the ”relaxation of property qualifications"?
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According to the passage, the idea that the Constitution “laid the seeds of slavery's eventual destruction" represents
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In Amar's argument, the fact that many states “relaxed their property qualifications" serves primarily as
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Sunlight is composed of different colors of light, which differ in how far they penetrate a given medium. Seawater is most deeply penetrated by blue light, and at depths near 1,000 meters the sunlight is almost entirely blue. However, a few fish species living at such depths have eyes with lenses tinted so that they filter out blue light but not light of any other color.
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Which of the following, if true, most helps to explain why those fish species benefit from having such lenses?
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A significant proportion of meteorites contain chondrules, small, glassy silicate spheres. The importance of chondrules is that they show that at some time the temperature was so high that the chondrule material was vaporized. The vapor then cooled quickly and the liquid silicates, condensing out of the vapor, formed small silicate spheres under the influence of surface tension. When these spheres solidified, they were incorporated into silicate fragments, and the material was eventually compressed into rock by gravitational forces. The fact that the chondrules cooled very quickly is revealed by the composition of the minerals within them. In the vapor phase, whole minerals would not have existed, but there would have been components that, combined in various ways, can form different minerals. Combinations of these components produced an initial collection of minerals within chondrules when they formed and, while the silicate was hot, the components changed partners to form more stable minerals一meaning ones of lower energy. Given enough time, the minerals in chondrules would have had the lowest possible energy consistent with using all available components; the mixture of minerals would then be equilibrated. However, the mixtures of minerals in chondrules are nonequilibrated-corresponding to a total energy far greater than the minimum possible. This shows that the chondrules became solid and cooled so quickly that the nonequilibrated state became frozen in, since individual components did not have enough energy to jostle their way through the material to form more stable minerals.
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It can be inferred from the passage that if a newly formed chondrule were to cool slowly, then
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According to the passage, chondrules are significant because they
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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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While buying and selling were the primary interests of people who gathered at flourishing medieval markets, these were not the only activities people engaged in there. Trips to the market were also social occasions, providing a good place to see and be seen, as indirectly attested by texts deriding those who adorned themselves more elegantly to visit a market than to visit a church. Markets also provided a good place to hear and be heard. As venues for royal proclamations, markets' chief advantage lay in their popularity with the peasantry. In theory, parish churches were equally suitable in this respect; but in practice, royal administrators found that markets better enabled them to integrate rural areas into institutional chains of communication.
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Which of the following conclusions regarding royal proclamations can reasonably be drawn from the passage?
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In the context in which it appears, “attested” most nearly means
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In recent years, revisionist Rembrandt scholars have opposed nineteenth-century Romanticism and what they claim was its fanciful vision of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter. Pulled from his pedestal, the solitary genius has been situated instead within the collective institution of the "workshop" where he employed and trained students and artists. Revisionist scholarship has recovered no timeless, universalizing Rembrandt, but a figure anchored in time and place. The revised Rembrandt is no longer the autodidact child of nature who answered only perfunctorily to his patrons, but a painter who responded to their demands and used his powers of invention to fatter not confound. Rembrandt ultimately preferred candid naturalism to decorous classicism not, we are instructed magisterially, because he was hostile to classicism's norms, but because he saw no special conflict between the two visual idioms. And unlike the Romantics, who embraced the famous 1681 description of Rembrandt as "the first heretic of painting, revisionists view him as obsessed with emulating一and perhaps surpassing-the great Renaissance masters.
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The author of the passage is primarily concerned with
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The author refers to the 1681 description of Rembrandt primarily in order to
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The author of the passage suggests that the Romantics believed which of the following about Rembrandfs relationship with his patrons?
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