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Which of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the mystery of the source of vitamin C in the traditional lnuit diet?
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The following passage comes from a study of gull bill markings.
Some species of gulls have uniformly colored bills, but many (62 percent in our sample) have beaks with differently colored tips, stripes, or spots that act as a focus for the pecking of newly hatched chicks as they beg for food. In an attempt to understand why, we determined whether adult gulls of those species with newly hatched chicks that are small in relation to the size of the adult are more likely to have such patterned beaks. This work is based on Hailman' s (1967) suggestion that gulls with greater bill depths (large species) tend to have only a restricted area of red on the bill (i.e., a red tip or spot), whereas smaller-billed species have uniform bills. We suggest that the most plausible reason for any size-related difference is that concentrating a small chick's pecking on a particular part of the bill is more effective than is unfocused pecking in stimulating the adult to regurgitate food. As well as encouraging the chick to peck, the tip of the bill, or the gonys (where stripes and spots are located), might be more sensitive than are other parts of the beak to the feeble pecking of a small chick, or a small chick might more effectively occupy the parent's visual field when
pecking there.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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In the context of the passage, the reference to "the
parent's visual field" serves primarily to
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The passage suggests which of the following about
unfocused chick pecking?
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What changed, in Jane Austen's art, in the years between Susan and Mansfield Park? Attempts to differentiate Austen's later novels from her earlier ones have yielded only a disconnected series of distinctions: one critic sees a more thoroughgoing social critique in the later novels, another, a new insistence on the claims of desire, yet another, a new consciousness of the Napoleonic War. While these characterizations are unobjectionable, they fail to provide a coherent account of how Austen's art matured. Nor do they explain our common readerly intuitions about the later novels' higher merits-their greater emotional depth and artistic complexity-or the thematic and attitudinal developments that mark those novels as belonging to the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century.
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The author notes the "thematic and attitudinal developments" primarily in order to
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The author of the passage suggests which of the following
about the "common readerly intuitions”?
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Determining which of the following would be most relevant to evaluating the argument given?
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Scientists have long debated the exact timing of the lunar cataclysm, a period approximately 4 billion years ago when Earth and the Moon were pummeled with asteroids. A clue to this puzzle may come from spherules, millimeter-sized droplets of molten rock formed after an asteroid collides explosively with a planet. Upon impact, the asteroid vaporizes both itself and the target rock, producing a vapor plume that condenses into spherules. These form a layer preserved in rock, whose age can be estimated using radiometric dating. Scientists know of fourteen of these spherule layers scattered across Earth, but none dates to the theorized lunar cataclysm time period. Four layers. however, are from between 3.47 and 3.24 billion years ago, indicating perhaps a slow decline in collisions.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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Which of the following might plausibly account for the findings in the highlighted sentence?
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Ethel Waters was a musical pioneer and brilliant performer whose natural yet exacting phrasing sounds modern even today. Yet she never quite became an icon. The reason may lie in the nature of her art: she didn't impose a signature style on her singing. She wasn't enough of a jazz singer to find herself in the jazz pantheon, or enough of a blues artist to become an idol of later rock singers. Furthermore, her singing fame came primarily from the 1920s and early 1930s, before the LP record era, and later generations remembered her more as an actress than as a singer. Finally, her life story lacked the tragic denouement characteristic of such legendary singers as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.
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Which of the following statements best describes the
purpose of the first sentence of the passage?
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The author of the passage would be most likely to agree with which of the following claims about Ethel Waters?
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Nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt's remarkable assertion that "women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men in sixteenth-century Italy resulted from his close identification with the early Humanists a small, elite group in Renaissance Italy. Ironically, as Margaret King has shown, humanist texts actually reflect inequalities between men and women; one example is the programs of study recommended for girls. A pedagogic imperative like Leonardo Bruni' s that women should study the liberal arts as men did with the exception of rhetoric, which “lies wholly outside the province of women" -went unnoticed by Burckhardt because he shared the humanist assumption that women's province was the private sphere rather than the public sphere. The relegation of women to a "private" sphere was a complex historical phenomenon that should be analyzed in light of other social and economic changes occurring during the Renaissance. Historians desirous of understanding women's experience cannot view the period, as
Burckhardt did, through the lens provided by the humanists.
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It can be inferred from the passage that Leonardo Bruni most likely believed which of the following?
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Which of the following is a criticism the author of the
passage makes of Burckhardt's work?
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Which of the following, if true, would cast the most serious doubt on the position taken by the author of the passage regarding Burckhardt's evaluation of historical evidence?
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