Question 1:
A. Literature is uncanny. What does this mean? To try to define the uncanny is immediately to encounter one of its decisive paradoxes, namely that ' the uncanny ' has to do with a troubling of definitions, with a fundamental disturbance of what we think and feel.
B. The uncanny is not just a matter of the weird or spooky, but has to do more specifically with a disturbance of the familiar.
C. The uncanny has to do with a sense of strangeness, mystery or eeriness.
D. More particularly it concerns a sense of unfamiliarity which appears at the very heart of the familiar, or else a sense of familiarity which appears at the very heart of the unfamiliar.
E. Such a disturbance might be hinted at by way of the word ' familiar ' itself.
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Question 2:
A. But in each of these exchanges we are also presented with a kind of strangeness as well: in the context of Eliot ' s novel, for example, we may reflect on the irony of the fact that what the mother recognizes in her children, what it is in their voice that confirms the persistence of their identity, is something that cannot be heard, a lisp perceived only by the mother.
B. In both of these examples we have what appear to be confirmations of the persistence of identity, expressed in the singular or peculiar nature (the ' trick ' ) of a person ' s voice.
C. Nothing is stranger, or more familiar, than the idea of a voice.
D. In George Eliot ' s Daniel Deronda (1876), a character called Mrs Meyrick observes that ' A mother hears something like a lisp in her children ' s talk to the very last ' .
E. In Shakespeare ' s King Lear (1605), the blinded Gloucester recognizes Lear from his voice: ' The trick of that voice I do well remember;/ Is ' t not the King? ' .
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Question 3:
A. Charlotte Bronta? ' s Jane Eyre (1847) is one of the classic nineteenthcentury novels in English.
B. It describes a love affair between the eponymous heroine, a governess, and her aristocratic master, Rochester.
C. The novel ends with the marriage of Jane and Rochester after Jane has become both professionally and economically independent.
D. Jane ' s struggle for independence marks the novel as centrally engaged with the oppression of women in nineteenth-century England and with the possibility of their liberation from constricting roles of subservience to their male ' masters ' .
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Question 4:
A. In the Preface to this book we remark that theory – particularly when it takes the form of isms – can seem intimidating or simply boring; deeply desiring to be neither, we also have good theoretical reasons for feeling wary of isms.
B. Colonialism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism: three isms that depend upon the figure of the colony.
C. As Martin Heidegger put it: ' Every mere ism is a misunderstanding and the death of history ' .
D. But saying this of course does not make isms go away; isms are convenient, as well as deadly.
E. This assertion draws attention to the ways in which isms inevitably encourage generalization, abstractness, a lack of critical clarity and of historical awareness.
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Question 5:
A. This is what is implied by the term ' consumer-fiction ' : to read a novel is to consume it; if a good novel is like a good meal, some novels are no doubt easier to chew and swallow than others.
B. They are looking for a good story line – something to get their teeth into on a long train-journey, for example, something which has a strong sense of what Kermode calls ' narrative sequence ' .
C. Most people, according to Kermode, read novels in the hope of reading something that adds up to a complete whole – a story with a clear structure and ' message ' .
D. In an essay entitled ' Secrets and Narrative Sequence ' , Frank Kermode writes: ' To read a novel expecting the satisfactions of closure and the receipt of a message is what most people find enough to do; they are easier with this method because it resembles the one that works for ordinary acts of communication ' .
E. Why do we read works of literature? What do we hope to get out of reading a novel, for example?
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Question 6:
A. In closed texts, the murderer is found, the mystery resolved, the ghost exposed as a mechanical illusion, or the lovers are able to consummate their love.
B. In a moment, we shall say something that may be rather shocking.
C. The Italian novelist and literary theorist Umberto Eco uses the term ' closed texts ' for such narratives, as contrasted with ' open texts ' which leave the reader in doubt or uncertainty.
D. In the meantime, we propose to describe two kinds of suspense, resolved and unresolved.
E. ' Resolved ' suspense is usually associated with thrillers, detective stories, gothic novels, tales of mystery and the supernatural, and romances.
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Question 7:
A. We may talk about things we enjoy in a work of literature – the gripping narrative, the appealing characters, the power of the language, the comedy and pathos – but we do not very often talk about the enjoyment itself, about what enjoyment or pleasure is.
B. There are at least two reasons for this; in the first place, pleasure, enjoyment, emotional and indeed erotic excitement are extremely difficult, or even impossible, to talk about; secondly, and no doubt related to this, such pleasures tend to border on the transgressive or taboo.
C. Whether in a seminar or at the pub, often the first thing that gets asked about a book is: Did you enjoy it?
D. This is not just a way of making conversation, but also suggests the fundamental importance of pleasure when it comes to reading.
E. In fact, the question ' Did you enjoy it? ' far from breaking the ice and starting a passionate discussion, is generally followed by a terse ' Yes ' or ' No ' and then forgotten.
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Question 8:
A. These renamings of Presley and Clapton, then, involve the kind of exaggeration or verbal extravagance known as hyperbole.
B. They may believe that his guitar-playing is transplendent, but even those whose judgement is blurred by an unholy mixture of illegal substances and Clapton ' s heavenly guitar solos are unlikely to take him for the Almighty Himself.
C. No one, not even the most loyal of fans, believes that Eric Clapton created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.
D. No one supposes that the United States has become a monarchy and put Elvis Presley on the throne.
E. But the force of these acts of renaming depends on the assumption that no one takes them literally.
F. It ' s not for nothing that they call Elvis Presley ' The King ' and Eric Clapton ' God ' .
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Question 9:
A. In fact, creative writing appears to have been institutionalized, in more than one sense of that word, since the incorporation of ' creative writing courses ' within educational institutions is inevitably a form of appropriation and control.
B. Definitions, as we know, are never ' merely academic ' : they are forms and conduits of power.
C. As the deceptive simplicity of the OED definition is perhaps beginning to make clear, ' creative writing ' has a strange relation to the academy and to the academic.
D. We might note one further intriguing detail in this dictionary definition, namely the scare quotes around ' academic ' .
E. ' Creative writing ' , this might suggest, is both ' academic ' and non-academic.
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Question 10:
A. The very phrase ' the text and the world ' , however, immediately presents a questionable distinction: its very formulation presupposes a difference between a text on the one hand and the world on the other.
B. All of these ways of thinking about literary texts start from an assumed separation of the literary work, the text, from the world.
C. The relation between literary texts and the world has been a central problem in criticism and theory at least since Plato banished poets from his imaginary Republic for allegedly misrepresenting the world.
D. This distinction is, of course, a very common way of thinking about literature: it is implicit in a certain understanding of mimesis or imitation, and in notions of realism and naturalism, and of representation, as well as in metaphors which figure literary texts as offering a window on to the world or (in Hamlet ' s words) as holding a mirror up to nature.
E. They imply that a literary text is not, in essence, part of the world.
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Question 11:
A. More ' s most important work was his ' Utopia, ' published in 1516; the name, which is Greek, means No-Place, and the book is one of the most famous of that series of attempts to outline an imaginary ideal condition of society which begins with Plato ' s ' Republic ' and has continued to our own time.
B. ' Utopia, ' broadly considered, deals primarily with the question which is common to most of these books and in which both ancient Greece and Europe of the Renaissance took a special interest, namely the question of the relation of the State and the individual.
C. It consists of two parts. In the first there is a vivid picture of the terrible evils which England was suffering through war, lawlessness, the wholesale and foolish application of the death penalty, the misery of the peasants, the absorption of the land by the rich, and the other distressing corruptions in Church and State.
D. In the second part, in contrast to all this, a certain imaginary Raphael Hythlodaye describes the customs of Utopia, a remote island in the New World, to which chance has carried him.
E. To some of the ideals thus set forth More can scarcely have expected the world ever to attain; and some of them will hardly appeal to the majority of readers of any period; but in the main he lays down an admirable program for human progress, no small part of which has been actually realized in the four centuries which have since elapsed.
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Question 12:
A. It is hard for us to-day to realize the meaning for the men of the fifteenth century of this revived knowledge of the life and thought of the Greek race.
B. The intellectual life, also, nearly restricted to priests and monks, had been formalized and conventionalized, until in spite of the keenness of its methods and the brilliancy of many of its scholars, it had become largely barren and unprofitable.
C. The Renaissance movement first received definite direction from the rediscovery and study of Greek literature, which clearly revealed the unbounded possibilities of life to men who had been groping dissatisfied within the now narrow limits of medieval thought.
D. The medieval Church, at first merely from the brutal necessities of a period of anarchy, had for the most part frowned on the joy and beauty of life, permitting pleasure, indeed, to the laity, but as a thing half dangerous, and declaring that there was perfect safety only within the walls of the nominally ascetic Church itself.
E. Before Chaucer was dead the study of Greek, almost forgotten in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, had been renewed in Italy, and it received a still further impulse when at the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 Greek scholars and manuscripts were scattered to the West.
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Question 13:
A. His wide experience of men and things is manifest in the life-likeness and mature power of his poetry, and it accounts in part for the broad truth of all but his earliest work, which makes it essentially poetry not of an age but for all time.
B. Chaucer ' s personality stands out in his writings plainly and most delightfully.
C. Something of conventional medievalism still clings to Chaucer in externals, as we shall see, but in alertness, independence of thought, and a certain directness of utterance, he speaks for universal humanity.
D. It must be borne in mind that, like some others of the greatest poets, he was not a poet merely, but also a man of practical affairs, in the eyes of his associates first and mainly a courtier, diplomat, and government official.
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Question 14:
A. ' From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us! ' was a regular part of the litany of the unhappy French.
B. The Normans who conquered England were originally members of the same stock as the ' Danes ' who had harried and conquered it in the preceding centuries—the ancestors of both were bands of Baltic and North Sea pirates who merely happened to emigrate in different directions; and a little farther back the Normans were close cousins, in the general Germanic family, of the Anglo-Saxons themselves.
C. In the ninth and tenth centuries they mercilessly ravaged all the coasts not only of the West but of all Europe from the Rhine to the Adriatic.
D. They settled Iceland and Greenland and prematurely discovered America; they established themselves as the ruling aristocracy in Russia, and as the imperial body-guard and chief bulwark of the Byzantine empire at Constantinople; and in the eleventh century they conquered southern Italy and Sicily, whence in the first crusade they pressed on with unabated vigor to Asia Minor.
E. The exploits of this whole race of Norse sea-kings make one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of medieval Europe.
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Question 15:
A. If there are several of them it is a further question whether the author properly contrasts them in such a way as to secure interest. And a main requisite is that he shall properly motivate their actions, that is make their actions result naturally from their characters, either their controlling traits or their temporary impulses.
B. It may also be asked whether the characters are simple, as some people are in actual life, or complex, like most interesting persons; whether they develop, as all real people must under the action of significant experience, or whether the author merely presents them in brief situations or lacks the power to make them anything but stationary.
C. But with secondary characters the principles of emphasis and proportion generally forbid very distinct individualization; and sometimes, especially in comedy (drama), truth of character is properly sacrificed to other objects, such as the main effect.
D. Of course in the case of important characters, the greater the genuine individuality the greater the success.
E. We should consider whether he makes them (1) merely caricatures, or (2) type characters, standing for certain general traits of human nature but not convincingly real or especially significant persons, or (3) genuine individuals with all the inconsistencies and half-revealed tendencies that in actual life belong to real personality.
F. There is, generally speaking, no greater test of an author ' s skill than his knowledge and presentation of characters.
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Question 16:
A. A man who teaches political economy and sociology must read the most recent books on these themes both in Europe and America—nay, he must read the newspapers and study the markets, or he will be outstripped by his own pupils.
B. And yet, when the teacher of literature devotes a small portion of the time of his pupils to the contemplation of contemporary poets, novelists, and dramatists, he is not only blamed for doing so, but some teachers who are ignorant of the writers of their own day boast of their ignorance with true academic pride.
C. A man who teaches drawing and painting should not only know the history of art, but its latest developments.
D. A man who teaches physics and chemistry is supposed to be familiar not only with the history of his subject, but its latest manifestations; with the work of his contemporaries.
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Question 17:
A. If we are to imitate them, let us imitate their virtues and not their defects, even though the task in this case may be infinitely more difficult.
B. The reason why French plays and French novels are generally superior to American is not because they are indecent; and we shall never raise our standard merely by copying foreign immorality.
C. They excel us in literary style.
D. The superiority of the French is an intellectual and artistic superiority.
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Question 18:
A. The personality of Mr. Howells, as shown both in his objective novels and in his subjective literary confessions, is one that irresistibly commands our highest respect and our warmest affection.
B. He has had more influence on the output of fiction in America than any other living man.
C. It is exceedingly fortunate for America that such a man has for so many years by common consent, at home and abroad, been regarded as the Dean of American Letters.
D. A simple, democratic, unaffected, modest, kindly, humorous, healthy soul, with a rare combination of rugged virility and extreme refinement.
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Question 19:
A. Perhaps it is tacitly assumed that those who become captains of industry achieve prominence without divine assistance;
B. Born in a little village in Ohio over seventy years ago, and growing up with small Latin and less Greek, Mr. Howells may fairly be called a self-educated man.
C. Just why the epithet "self-made" should be applied to those non-college-graduates who succeed in business, and withheld from those who succeed in poetry and fiction, seems not entirely clear.
D. whereas men of letters, with or without early advantages, and whether grateful or not, have unconscious communication with hidden forces.
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Question 20:
A. Had Lorna Doone appeared toward the end of the century, when the Romantic Revival was in full swing, it would have received a royal welcome.
B. Possibly one of the reasons why Lorna Doone made so small an impression was because it appeared at an unpropitious time.
C. These two novelists were in full action; and they kept the public busy; realism was strong in the market; people did not know then, as we do now, that The Cloister and the Hearth was worth all the rest of Charles Reade put together.
D. The sower sowed the seed; but the thorns of Reade and Trollope sprang up and choked them.
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Question 21:
A. But all these latter-day pamphlets, good as they are, fail to reach the excellence of Bob, Son of Battle. It is the best dog story ever written, and it inspires regret that dogs cannot read.
B. During the last half-century, since the publication of Dr. John Brown ' s Rab and his Friends (1858), the dog has approached an apotheosis.
C. One of the most profoundly affecting incidents in the Odyssey is the recognition of the ragged Ulysses by the noble old dog, who dies of joy.
D. Among innumerable sketches and stories with canine heroes may be mentioned Bret Harte ' s brilliant portrait of Boonder; Maeterlinck ' s essay on dogs; Richard Harding Davis ' s The Bar Sinister; Stevenson ' s whimsical comments on The Character of Dogs; Kipling ' s Garm; and Jack London ' s initial success, The Call of the Wild.
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Question 22:
A. Sceptics are warned to remain silent, lest they become unpleasantly conspicuous.
B. When Lady Rose ' s Daughter appeared, the critic of a great metropolitan daily remarked that whoever did not immediately recognise the work as a masterpiece thereby proclaimed himself as a person incapable of judgement, taste, and appreciation.
C. It is high time that somebody spoke out his mind about Mrs. Humphry Ward; her prodigious vogue is one of the most extraordinary literary phenomena of our day.
D. Even professional reviewers lose all sense of proportion when they discuss her books, and their so-called criticisms sound like publishers ' advertisements.
E. A roar of approval greets the publication of every new novel from her active pen, and it is almost pathetic to contemplate the reverent awe of her army of worshippers when they behold the solemn announcement that she is "collecting material" for another masterpiece.
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Question 23:
A. The lack of charm that I always feel in reading Mrs. Ward ' s books (and I have read them all) is owing not merely to the lack of humour. It is partly due to what seems to be an almost total absence of freshness, spontaneity, and originality.
B. Mrs. Ward works like a well-trained and high-class graduate student, who is engaged in the preparation of a doctor ' s thesis.
C. Her discussions of socialism, her scenes in the House of Commons and on the Terrace, her excursions to Italy, her references to political history, her remarks on the army, her disquisitions on theology, her pictures of campaign riots, her studies of defective drainage, her representations of the labouring classes,—all these are "worked up" in a scholarly and scientific manner; there is the modern passion for accuracy, there is the German completeness of detail,—there is, in fact, everything except the breath of life.
D. She works in the descriptive manner, from the outside in—not in the inspired manner which goes with imagination, sympathy, and genius.
E. She is not only a student, she is a journalist; she is a special correspondent on politics and theology; but she is not a creative writer, or she has the critical, not the creative, temperament.
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Question 24:
A. His popularity with the general mass of readers has been sufficient to satisfy the wildest dreams of an author ' s ambition; and his fame is, in a way, officially sanctioned by the receipt of honorary degrees from McGill University, from Durham, from Oxford, and from Cambridge; and in 1907 he was given the Nobel Prize, with the ratifying applause of the whole world.
B. There is no indication that either the shouts of the mob or the hoods of Doctorates have turned his head; he remains to-day what he always has been—a hard, conscientious workman, trying to do his best every time.
C. He has not yet attained the age of forty-five; but his numerous stories, novels, and poems have reached the unquestioned dignity of "works," and in uniform binding they make on my library shelves a formidable and gallant display.
D. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is in the anomalous and fortunate position of having enjoyed a prodigious reputation for twenty years, and being still a young man.
E. Foreigners read them in their own tongues; critical essays in various languages are steadily accumulating; and he has received the honour of being himself the hero of a strange French novel.
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Question 25:
A. It is pleasant to remember, however, that in these early years he translated Vergil ' s Georgics; combining his threefold love of the classics, of poetry, and of gardening.
B. Like many successful novelists, Mr. Blackmore began his literary career by the publication of verse, several volumes of poems appearing from his pen during the years 1854-1860.
C. Of how much practical agricultural value he found the Mantuan bard, we shall never know.
D. Although he never entirely abandoned verse composition, which it was only too apparent that he wrote with his left hand, the coolness with which his Muse was received may have been a cause of his attempting the quite different art of the novel.
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Question 26:
A. The one thing in which Scott really excelled Stevenson was in the depiction of women.
B. This extraordinary absence of sex-interest is a notable feature, and many have been the reasons assigned for it.
C. There is perhaps some truth in this; for the presence of a girl might have ruined Treasure Island, as it ruined the Sea Wolf.
D. The latter has given us no Diana Vernon or Jeannie Deans. For the most part, Stevenson ' s romances are Paradise before the creation of Eve. The snake is there, but not the woman.
E. Her fuss and feathers bring in all sorts of bothersome problems to distract a novelist, bent on having a good time with pirates, murders, and hidden treasure.
F. If he had not tried at all, we should be safe in saying that, like a small boy, he felt that girls were in the way, and he did not want them mussing up his games.
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Question 27:
A. I do not believe there is a single large town in our country where the book is unknown, or where a reference to it fails to bring to the faces of intelligent people that glow of reminiscent delight aroused by the memory of happy hours passed in the world of imagination.
B. It became one of the "best sellers"; unlike its companions, it has not vanished with the snows of yesteryear. At this moment it is being read and reread all over the United States.
C. Unheralded by author ' s fame or by the blare of advertisement, it was at first unnoticed; but in about a twelvemonth everybody was talking about it.
D. In the month of September, 1898, there appeared in America a novel with the attractive title, Bob, Son of Battle.
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Question 28:
A. It is a permanent picture of a certain period of American history, and this picture is made complete, not so much by the striking portraits of individuals placed on the huge canvas, as by the vital unity of the whole composition.
B. Children devour it, but they do not digest it.
C. If one wishes to know what life on the Mississippi really was, to know and understand the peculiar social conditions of that highly exciting time, one has merely to read through this powerful narrative, and a definite, coherent, vivid impression remains.
D. Huckleberry Finn, is really not a child ' s book at all.
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Question 29:
A. The former is one of those books—of which The Pilgrim ' s Progress, Gulliver ' s Travels, and Robinson Crusoe are supreme examples—that are read at different periods of one ' s life from very different points of view; so that it is not easy to say when one enjoys them the most—before one understands their real significance or after.
B. Yet it is impossible to outgrow the book. The eternal Boy is there, and one cannot appreciate the nature of boyhood properly until one has ceased to be a boy.
C. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are prose epics of American life.
D. Nearly all healthy boys enjoy reading Tom Sawyer, because the intrinsic interest of the story is so great, and the various adventures of the hero are portrayed with such gusto.
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Question 30:
A. The speaker told us that we should all live longer than Methuselah; fifty years of Europe are better than a cycle of Cathay, and twenty years of modern American life are longer and richer in content than the old patriarch ' s thousand.
B. Ours will be the true age in which to live, when more will happen in a day than in a year of the flat existence of our ancestors.
C. When I was a child at the West Middle Grammar School of Hartford, on one memorable April day, Mark Twain addressed the graduating-class.
D. I was thirteen years old, but I have found it impossible to forget what he said; the subject of his "remarks" was Methuselah; he informed us that Methuselah lived to the ripe old age of nine hundred and sixty-nine.
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Question 31:
A. He firmly believes that the sport of shooting is wicked, and he has repeatedly joined in practical measures to waken the public conscience on this subject.
B. As a spectator of human history, he sees life as a vast tragedy, with men and women emerging from nothingness, suffering acute physical and mental sorrow, and then passing into nothingness again.
C. To venture a guess, I think his pessimism is mainly caused by his deep, manly tenderness for all forms of human and animal life and by an almost abnormal sympathy. His intense love for bird and beast is well known; many a stray cat and hurt dog have found in him a protector and a refuge.
D. Mr. Hardy ' s pessimism is not in the least personal, nor has it risen from any sorrow or disappointment in his own life.
E. It is both philosophic and temperamental. He cannot see nature in any other way.
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Question 32:
A. Without wishing to make any invidious comparisons, I cannot refrain from commenting on the statement that it would be "ridiculous" to maintain that Mark Twain takes rank with Oliver Wendell Holmes.
B. Still, guesses are not prohibited; and I think it not unlikely that the name of Mark Twain will outlast the name of Holmes.
C. Who now reads Cowley? Time has laughed at so many contemporary judgements that it would be foolhardy to make positive assertions about literary stock quotations one hundred years from now.
D. It is, of course, absolutely impossible to predict the future; the only real test of the value of a book is Time.
E. Literary opinions change as time progresses; and no one could have observed the remarkable demonstration at the seventieth birthday of our great national humourist, Mark Twain, without feeling that most of his contemporaries regarded him, not as their peer, but as their Chief.
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Question 33:
A. Two architects appear in his first novel. In A Pair of Blue Eyes Stephen Smith is a professional architect, and in coming to restore the old Western Church he was simply repeating the experience of his creator.
B. Not one of Mr. Hardy ' s novels contains more of the facts of his own life than A Laodicean, which was composed on what the author then believed to be his death-bed; it was mainly dictated, which I think partly accounts for its difference in style from the other tales.
C. Mr. Hardy ' s work as an ecclesiastical architect laid the real foundations of his success as a novelist; for it gave him an intimate familiarity with the old monuments and rural life of Wessex, and at the same time that eye for precision of form that is so noticeable in all his books.
D. He has really never ceased to be an architect; Architecture has contributed largely to the matter and to the style of his stories.
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Question 34:
A. Mr. Hardy may believe that Jude the Obscure represents his zenith as a novelist, and that his poems are still greater literature; but one reading of Jude suffices, while we never tire of rereading Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native.
B. It is pleasant to remember that a man ' s opinion of his own work has nothing to do with its final success and that his best creations cannot be injured by his worst.
C. We may honestly think that we should be ashamed to put our own names to such stuff as Little Dorrit, but that does not prevent us from admiring the splendid genius that produced David Copperfield and Great Expectations.
D. Tolstoy may be ashamed of having written Anna Karenina, and may insist that his sociological tracts are superior productions, but we know better; and rejoice in his powerlessness to efface his own masterpieces.
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Question 35:
A. His perseverance was equalled only by his bad luck, as so often happens in Mr. Hardy ' s stories. And yet, with a plot that would wreck any other novelist, the author constructed a powerful and beautifully written novel.
B. The Well-Beloved, published in 1897, but really a revision of an earlier tale, is in a way a triumph of Art.
C. When her daughter reaches maturity, he tries the third woman in line and without success.
D. A man proposes to a young girl and is rejected; when her daughter is grown, he proposes to the representative of the second generation, and with the same ill fortune.
E. The plot is simply absurd, almost as whimsical as anything in Alice in Wonderland.
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[4] BEDCA
Question 36:
A. There has, however, always been a certain cold, mathematical precision in Mr. Hardy ' s way of thought that would have made him as uncomfortable in the pulpit as he would have been in an editor ' s chair, writing for salary persuasive articles containing the exact opposite of his individual convictions.
B. He became an ecclesiastical architect, and for some years his delight was in the courts of the Lord.
C. But, although the beauty of holiness failed to impress his mind, the beauty of the sanctuary was sufficiently obvious to his sense of Art.
D. The father of Thomas Hardy wished his son to enter the church, and this object was the remote goal of his early education.
E. This absence of religious belief has proved no obstacle to many another candidate for the Christian ministry, as every habitual church-goer knows; or as any son of Belial may discover for himself by merely reading the prospectus of summer schools of theology.
F. At just what period in the boy ' s mental development Christianity took on the form of a meaningless fable, we shall perhaps never know; but after a time he ceased to have even the faith of a grain of mustard seed.
[1] DFABCE
[2] DFEACB
[3] DFACBE
[4] DACBEF
Question 37:
A. A disciple of this school insisted that it was more important to have an accurate sense of colour than to have a clear notion of right and wrong.
B. Now Zola declared that a novel could no more be called immoral in its descriptions than a text-book on physiology; the novelist commits a sin when he writes a badly constructed sentence.
C. Matthew Arnold spent his life fighting the Philistines; but when he said that art is more central to literature than morality, there was jubilation in the enemy ' s camp.
D. One reason for this lies in the fact that to the Anglo-Saxon mind, Morality has always seemed infinitely more important than Art.
E. As compared with French and Russian fiction, English novels from Fielding to De Morgan have unquestionably sounded a note of insincerity.
[1] CBEDA
[2] CDEBA
[3] EDCBA
[4] ECBDA
Question 38:
A. Thus no drollery or caricature, still less any barren mockery, which, in the hundred cases are all that we find passing current as Humour, discover themselves in Schiller; his works are full of laboured earnestness; he is the gravest of all writers.
B. He who wants it, be his other gifts what they may, has only half a mind; an eye for what is above him, not for what is about him or below him.
C. In his whole writings there is scarcely any vestige of it, scarcely any attempt that way; his nature was without Humour; and he had too true a feeling to adopt any counterfeit in its stead.
D. Now, among all writers of any real poetic genius, we cannot recollect one who, in this respect, exhibits such total deficiency as Schiller.
E. Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
[1] EDCAB
[2] EDCBA
[3] EBCDA
[4] EBDCA
Question 39:
A. Honest Scepticism, honest Atheism, is better than that withered lifeless Dilettantism and amateur Eclecticism, which merely toys with all opinions; or than that wicked Machiavelism, which in thought denying everything, except that Power is Power, in words, for its own wise purposes, loudly believes everything.
B. There is, doubtless, a time to speak, and a time to keep silence; yet Fontenelle ' s celebrated aphorism, I might have my hand full of truth, and would open only my little finger, may be practiced to excess, and the little finger itself kept closed.
C. A man ' s honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses: let him communicate this, if he is to communicate anything.
D. That reserve, and knowing silence, long so universal among us, is less the fruit of active benevolence, of philosophic tolerance, than of indifference and weak conviction.
[1] CBDA
[2] CDAB
[3] ADBC
[4] ACDB
Question 40:
A. In addition, most research focuses on either fathering or mothering, not considering both parents ' involvement simultaneously.
B. Early adolescence is a crucial period in development.
C. Fathers have important influences on adolescent children, but most research examining paternal effects on development, as well as research on the factors influencing father involvement, concerns the early period of the child ' s life.
D. Nonetheless parent-child relationships remain important social and emotional resources well beyond the childhood years despite these alterations in patterns of interaction.
E. It marks the decline of exclusive family influence/control and increased independence from family, greater involvement with peers, and more varied nonfamily influences.
[1] BECAD
[2] BEDAC
[3] BEDCA
[4] BCEDA
Question 41:
A. Both the impact of the military, and extended visits by the Tripolitania-born Emperor Septimius Severus (AD 208-211), and later Constantius I and Constantine the Great (AD 306), provide potential circumstances for immigration to York, and for the foundation of a multicultural and diverse community.
B. The Roman conquest incorporated Britain into an empire that comprised Europe, North Africa and the Near and Middle East, resulting in the extensive voluntary and forced movement of people.
C. The civilian settlement included the wives and families of the military personnel, and upon discharge, many soldiers simply continued to live where they had served.
D. Eboracum (York), founded in c. AD 71 and located in north-eastern England, was both a legionary fortress and civilian settlement, and functioned as one of the provincial capitals for much of the later Roman period.
[1] BDCA
[2] DCBA
[3] ABCD
[4] CDBA
Question 42:
A. This emphasis tended to stress the insular, conservative nature of both society and the church.
B. Inevitably, the structures which evolved were at variance with those present in the rest of Christianized Europe, and as a result much of the literature on the subject of the early Irish church has stressed these differences and the concept of the ' Celtic Church ' came to be commonly used.
C. It was also held that early Irish society somehow retained more of its Iron Age pagan Celtic background than anywhere else in Europe and was, in the words of the great Celtic scholar, Daniel Binchy ' tribal, rural and hierarchical ' .
D. Ireland was the first territory outside the Roman empire to be converted by missionary activity.
E. One of the consequences of this isolationist view was the concentration on those features which set the Irish church apart from its neighbours -- island hermitages, round towers, Insular illuminated manuscripts and high crosses.
[1] DCBAE
[2] DBCEA
[3] DEBAC
[4] DACEB
Question 43:
A. While it is true that all languages and cultures have historical antecedents, sociolinguistic processes can affect the relations between the two in many ways.
B. Linguistic variability gives speakers resources for expressing solidarity and distinction along many dimensions.
C. Speakers continually choose among alternative forms of speech, on scales from the inflection of a vowel to the adoption of a primary linguistic identity, and linguistic change results from the shifting balance of these choices.
D. Language as strategic choice thus responds not only to ethnicity but to political, economic and cultural factors as well.
[1] ABCD
[2] CBAD
[3] DCBA
[4] BDAC
Question 44:
A. China is home to over 30,000 types of vascular plants and 6,347 vertebrates, accounting for 10% and 14% of the world ' s totals, respectively.
B. The United States is similar to China in size and also offers a high level of biodiversity, but still is not as diverse as China.
C. China also has a wide variety of unique terrestrial habitat types.
D. Few other countries possess the same level of biodiversity as China.
[1] ADCB
[2] DACB
[3] ABCD
[4] DBCA
Question 45:
A. Although it spawns primarily in the spring, breeding can occur throughout the year.
B. The Borax Lake chub (Gila boraxobius) is a small fish (typically 1.3 to two inches in length) that is dark olive-green above and mostly silver below with a hint of purple iridescence.
C. The species reaches reproductive maturity within a single year.
D. It is an opportunistic omnivore, feeding on whatever comes its way: aquatic and terrestrial insects, spiders, mollusks and their eggs, aquatic worms, algae, and seeds.
[1] BACD
[2] BCAD
[3] BDAC
[4] BDCA
Question 46:
A. In contrast, how vast are the reaches of history which still remain obscure! And how recently acquired is most of our knowledge of the past! Almost everything we know about paleolithic and neolithic man, about the Sumerian, Hittite and Minoan civilizations, about pre-Buddhist India and pre-Columbian America, about the origins of such fundamental human arts as agriculture, metallurgy and writing, was discovered within the last sixty or seventy years.
B. Space has been explored, systematically and scientifically, for more than five centuries; time, for less than five generations.
C. Except in the Antarctic there is today no such thing as a terra incognita; all the corners of all the other continents have now been visited.
D. Modern geography began in the fourteen-hundreds with the voyages of Prince Henry the Navigator; Modern history and modern archeology came in with Queen Victoria.
[1] DBCA
[2] DCBA
[3] BDCA
[4] BCDA
Question 47:
A. It is only later, when my ignorance has lost its virgin freshness, that I begin to read what the intelligent tourist would have known by heart before he bought his tickets.
B. For though the light is good, though it is satisfying to be able to place the things that surround one in the categories of an ordered and comprehensible system, it is also good to find oneself sometimes in the dark, it is pleasant now and then to have to speculate with vague bewilderment about a world, which ignorance has reduced to a quantity of mutually irrelevant happenings dotted, like so many unexplored and fantastic islands, on the face of a vast ocean of incomprehension.
C. The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.
D. For me, one of the greatest charms of travel consists in the fact that it offers unique opportunities for indulging in the luxury of ignorance. I am not one of those conscientious travellers who, before they visit a new country, spend weeks mugging up its geology, its economics, its art history, its literature.
E. I prefer, at any rate during my first few visits, to be a thoroughly unintelligent tourist.
[1] CEABD
[2] CBDEA
[3] EACBD
[4] EABCD
Question 48:
A. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.
B. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes.
C. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word.
D. All historical experience confirms the truth--that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.
[1] DCBA
[2] DABC
[3] DACB
[4] DCAB
Question 49:
A. In academic and scholarly circles, vanity is a sort of occupational disease, but precisely with the scholar, vanity--however disagreeably it may express itself--is relatively harmless; in the sense that as a rule it does not disturb scientific enterprise.
B. Therefore, ' power instinct, ' as is usually said, belongs indeed to his normal qualities.
C. Vanity is a very widespread quality and perhaps nobody is entirely free from it.
D. With the politician the case is quite different. He works with the striving for power as an unavoidable means.
[1] ACDB
[2] CADB
[3] CDBA
[4] ADBC
Question 50:
A. This special sensibility was accompanied by a prodigious power of rendering the immediately experienced otherness in terms of literary art.
B. Lawrence ' s special and characteristic gift was an extraordinary sensitiveness to what Wordsworth called "unknown modes of being".
C. Lawrence could never forget, as most of us almost continuously forget, the dark presence of the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of man ' s conscious mind.
D. He was always intensely aware of the mystery of the world, and the mystery was always for him a numen, divine.
[1] DBCA
[2] ABCD
[3] CABD
[4] BDCA
Question 51:
A. He who strives to make politics a permanent source of income lives ' off ' politics as a vocation, whereas he who does not do this lives ' for ' politics.
B. He who lives ' for ' politics makes politics his life, in an internal sense. Either he enjoys the naked possession of the power he exerts, or he nourishes his inner balance and self-feeling by the consciousness that his life has meaning in the service of a ' cause. ' In this internal sense, every sincere man who lives for a cause also lives off this cause.
C. There are two ways of making politics one ' s vocation: Either one lives ' for ' politics or one lives ' off ' politics.
D. By no means is this contrast an exclusive one. The rule is, rather, that man does both, at least in thought, and certainly he also does both in practice.
E. The distinction hence refers to a much more substantial aspect of the matter, namely, to the economic.
[1] CBADE
[2] CDBEA
[3] ABCDE
[4] BCDAE
Question 52:
A. In the struggle of expropriation, they placed themselves at the princes ' disposal and by managing the princes ' politics they earned, on the one hand, a living and, on the other hand, an ideal content of life.
B. They arose first in the service of a prince.
C. During the process of political expropriation, which has occurred with varying success in all countries on earth, ' professional politicians ' in another sense have emerged.
D. They have been men who, unlike the charismatic leader, have not wished to be lords themselves, but who have entered the service of political lords.
[1] CADB
[2] CABD
[3] CBAD
[4] CBDA
Question 53:
A. We wish to understand by politics only the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of a political association, hence today, of a state.
B. The concept is extremely broad and comprises any kind of independent leadership in action.
C. Tonight, our reflections are, of course, not based upon such a broad concept.
D. What do we understand by politics?
[1] DBCA
[2] DACB
[3] DCAB
[4] DCBA
Question 54:
A. Most men and women are capable of feeling passion, but not of expressing it; their love letters (as we learn from the specimens read aloud at inquests and murder trials, in the divorce court, during breach of promise cases) are either tritely flat or tritely bombastic.
B. It is also vulgar (and this is the more common case) to have emotions, but to express them so badly, with so many too many protestings, that you seem to have no natural feelings, but to be merely fabricating emotions by a process of literary forgery.
C. It is vulgar, in literature, to make a display of emotions which you do not naturally have, but think you ought to have, because all the best people do have them.
D. Sincerity in art, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is mainly a matter of talent. Keats ' s love letters ring true, because he had great literary gifts.
[1] DBCA
[2] CBDA
[3] ABCD
[4] CDBA
Question 55:
A. But for the most part the poets do not concern themselves with fresh conquests; they prefer to consolidate their power at home, enjoying quietly their hereditary possessions; the entire world is potentially theirs, but they do not take it.
B. It should theoretically be possible to make poetry out of anything whatsoever of which the spirit of man can take cognizance.
C. The poets have claimed as their domain only a small province of our universe; one of them now and then, more daring or better equipped than the rest, sets out to extend the boundaries of the kingdom.
D. We find, however, as a matter of historical fact, that most of the world ' s best poetry has been content with a curiously narrow range of subject-matter.
[1] BCAD
[2] CBDA
[3] BDCA
[4] CBAD
Question 56:
A. Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
B. This is a subject to which, in our Western tradition, we have paid much too little attention. Indeed, it is only in very recent years that, thanks to the declining influence of the Judaeo-Christian ethic, we have been able to discuss it realistically.
C. The domestication of sex presents a problem whose solution must be attempted on two distinct levels of human experience, the psycho-physiological and the social.
D. Hundreds of volumes have been filled with accounts of these regulations, and it is unnecessary to do more than mention them in passing.
E. Our present concern is with the problem of domesticating sex at the source, of civilizing its manifestations in the individual lover.
F. On the social level the relations of the sexes have everywhere been regulated by law, by uncodified custom, by taboo and religious ritual.
[1] FBCEDA
[2] CBEFDA
[3] ECBFDA
[4] ACFDEB
Question 57:
A. He seemed to have a notion that there was some sort of esoteric cookery book, full of literary recipes, which you had only to follow attentively to become a Dickens, a Henry James, a Flaubert — "according to taste," as the authors of recipes say, when they come to the question of seasoning and sweetening.
B. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain.
C. I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist.
D. "The first thing," I said, "is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen; after that you merely have to write." But this was not enough for my young friend.
[1] CDAB
[2] CBDA
[3] CBAD
[4] CABD
Question 58:
A. But every epoch treats it in a different manner, just as every epoch cuts its unvarying cloth and silk and linen into garments of the most diverse fashion.
B. Love ' s psychological and physiological material remains the same.
C. The history of love, if it were ever written (and doubtless some learned German, unread, alas, by me, has written it, and in several volumes), would be like the current histories of art — a record of succeeding "styles" and "schools," of "influences," "revolutions," "technical discoveries."
D. Like all the other great human activities, love is the product of unchanging passions, instincts, and desires (unchanging, that is to say, in the mass of humanity; for, of course, they vary greatly in quantity and quality from individual to individual), and of laws and conventions, beliefs and ideals, which the circumstances of time and place, or the arbitrary fiats of great personalities, have imposed on a more or less willing society.
[1] DCBA
[2] DABC
[3] BACD
[4] BADC
Question 59:
A. The market at Solola? was a walking museum of fancy dress; unlike the Indians of Mexico, who have mostly gone into white cotton pajamas, with a blanket slung over the shoulder in lieu of great-coat, the Guatemaltecos of the highlands have kept their old costumes.
B. Nobody starves in this self-supporting agricultural community; but money is a great deal scarcer than it was a few years ago, when the coffee fincas were in full production and called, during the picking season, for whole armies of workers from the hills.
C. This conservatism has been to some extent affected by the slump and the persuasive salesmanship of shopkeepers and commercial travelers.
D. Those were the glorious times when a man could earn as much as twenty-five or thirty cents a day.
[1] ABDC
[2] ABCD
[3] ACBD
[4] ADBC
Question 60:
A. The animal descends very slowly and with an infinite caution, planting one huge foot deliberately before the other, and giving you time between each calculated step to anticipate the next convulsive spasm of movement — a spasm that seems to loosen from its place every organ in the rider ' s body, that twists the spine, that wrenches all the separate muscles of the loins and thorax.
B. Of all the animals I have ever ridden, the elephant is the most uncomfortable mount; on the level, it is true, the motion is not too bad.
C. But when it goes downhill, it is like the end of the world.
D. One seems to be riding on a small chronic earthquake; that is all; the earthquake becomes more disquieting when the beast begins to climb.
[1] BACD
[2] BCDA
[3] BDAC
[4] BDCA
Question 61:
A. It is only when protected by surrounding society from aggression, when freed by the organized labor of society from the necessity of hunting or digging for his food, it is only, that is to say, when society has tempered and to a great extent abolished the struggle for personal existence, that the man of talent can exercise his capacities to the full.
B. Any force that tends to the strengthening of society is, therefore, of the highest biological importance.
C. And it is only by a well-organized society that the results of his labors can be preserved for the enrichment of succeeding generations.
D. Man ' s progress has been contingent on his capacity to organize societies.
[1] DACB
[2] ABCD
[3] BCDA
[4] DBAC
Question 62:
A. They were dressed in liveries of green and yellow — yellow doublets slashed and tagged with green, parti-coloured hose and shoes, with feathered caps of the same colors.
B. One evening, toward the end of June, as I was sitting at the window looking at the wheeling birds, I heard through the crying of the swifts the sound of a drum; I looked down into the shadowy street, but could see nothing.
C. Their leader played the drum. The two who followed carried green and yellow banners.
D. Rub-a-dub, dub, dub, dub — the sound grew louder and louder, and suddenly there appeared round the corner where our street bent out of sight, three personages out of a Pinturicchio fresco.
[1] ABCD
[2] BCDA
[3] BDCA
[4] BDAC
Question 63:
A. What to put in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic style continually re-arising.
B. But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character from end to end—these, which taken together constitute technical perfection, are to some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage.
C. Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated.
D. Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may improve himself at will.
[1] DCAB
[2] DCBA
[3] DBCA
[4] DBAC
Question 64:
A. But even human ingenuity will find it hard to circumvent arithmetic; on a planet of limited area, the more people there are, the less vacant space there is bound to be.
B. In a completely home-made environment, such as is provided by any great metropolis, it is as hard to remain sane as it is in a completely natural environment such as the desert or the forest.
C. Over and above the material and sociological problems of increasing population, there is a serious psychological problem.
D. In his book, The Next Million Years, Sir Charles Darwin looks forward to thirty thousand generations of ever more humans pressing ever more heavily on ever dwindling resources and being killed off in ever increasing numbers by famine, pestilence and war.
E. He may be right; alternatively, human ingenuity may somehow falsify his predictions.
[1] DCEBA
[2] DBCEA
[3] DEACB
[4] CBDEA
Question 65:
A. The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction.
B. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn.
C. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.
D. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction.
[1] ABCD
[2] ADBC
[3] ADCB
[4] BCDA
Question 66:
A. And long before the coming of Christianity to the Thebaid, there had been Egyptian mystery religions, for whose followers God was a well of life, "closed to him who speaks, but open to the silent."
B. Like space and emptiness, it is a natural symbol of the divine.
C. In the Mithraic mysteries, the candidate for initiation was told to lay a finger to his lips and whisper: "Silence! Silence! Silence — symbol of the living imperishable God!"
D. Silence is the cloudless heaven perceived by another sense.
[1] DBAC
[2] DCBA
[3] DACB
[4] DBCA
Question 67:
A. These are the sufficient justifications for any young man or woman who adopts it as the business of his life; I shall not say much about the wages; a writer can live by his writing; if not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously.
B. There are two just reasons for the choice of any way of life: the first is inbred taste in the chooser; the second some high utility in the industry selected.
C. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner at night.
D. Literature, like any other art, is singularly interesting to the artist; and, in a degree peculiar to itself among the arts, it is useful to mankind.
[1] BDAC
[2] BDCA
[3] BCDA
[4] BCAD
Question 68:
B. The association of olive leaves with peace is like the association of the number seven with good luck, or the color green with hope.
C. That is why it has survived in the popular imagination down to the present day.
D. It is an arbitrary and, so to say, metaphysical association.
[1] BCDA
[2] BCAD
[3] ABCD
[4] BDCA
Question 69:
A. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.
B. In every properly constructed sentence there should be observed this knot or hitch; so that (however delicately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the successive phrases.
C. Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.
D. The pleasure may be heightened by an element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded.
E. Nor should the balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious neatness.
F. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; and between the implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly finished.
[1] CEFDBA
[2] CDFAEB
[3] CABDFE
[4] CBAFED
Question 70:
A. The farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels; but he is mistaken, unless he has a walker ' s appetite and imagination, neither of which can he have.
B. The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of November.
C. I make a great account of these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to gather--wild flavours of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting.
D. They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they are still, perhaps, as beautiful as ever.
[1] BCDA
[2] BDCA
[3] BDAC
[4] BCAD
Question 71:
A. That is the plane on which these sisters meet; it is by this that they are arts; and if it be well they should at times forget their childish origin, addressing their intelligence to virile tasks, and performing unconsciously that necessary function of their life, to make a pattern, it is still imperative that the pattern shall be made.
B. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.
C. Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts.
D. Each class, in right of this distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both may claim a common ground of existence, and it may be said with sufficient justice that the motive and end of any art whatever is to make a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of colours, of sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical figures, or imitative lines; but still a pattern.
[1] CBDA
[2] CBAD
[3] CDBA
[4] CADB
Question 72:
A. You have seen these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a vase; it is with blocks of just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is condemned to design the palace of his art.
B. The art of literature stands apart from among its sisters, because the material in which the literary artist works is the dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of address to the public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation.
C. Nor is this all; for since these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressions by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression, and convey a definite conventional import.
D. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller ' s clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words.
[1] DBCA
[2] BDAC
[3] DBAC
[4] BDCA
Question 73:
A. “Mathematical studies,” he said, “are of immense benefit to the student ' s education by habituating him to precision. It is one of the peculiar excellences of mathematical discipline that the mathematician is never satisfied with an a? peu pra?s.”
B. “He requires the exact truth…. The practice of mathematical reasoning gives wariness of the mind; it accustoms us to demand a sure footing.”
C. Mathematics beyond arithmetic is of no use to the historian and may be entirely discarded; I do not ignore John Stuart Mill ' s able plea for them, some words of which are worth quoting.
D. Mill, however, is no guide except for exceptionally gifted youth; he began to learn Greek when he was three years old, and by the time he had reached the age of twelve had read a good part of Latin and Greek literature and knew elementary geometry and algebra thoroughly.
[1] ACDB
[2] CBDA
[3] CBAD
[4] CABD
Question 74:
A. When four and a half years old he was asked if he had got over the toothache, to which question came this reply, “The agony is abated.”
B. Macaulay began the use of Latin words at an early age.
C. “He never wrote an obscure sentence in his life,” said John Morley; and this is partly due to his exact use of words; there is never any doubt about his meaning.
D. If I may depend upon a rough mental computation, no prose writer of the nineteenth century is so frequently cited.
E. In return for his mastery of the languages, the dictionaries are fond of quoting Macaulay.
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Question 75:
A. The name of the man whose genius had illuminated all the dark places of policy, and to whose patriotic wisdom an oppressed people had owed their last chance of emancipation and revenge, passed into a proverb of infamy.
B. Soon after his death monarchy was finally established, not such a monarchy as that of which Cosmo had laid the foundations deep in the institution and feelings of his countryman, and which Lorenzo had embellished with the trophies of every science and every art; but a loathsome tyranny, proud and mean, cruel and feeble, bigoted and lascivious.
C. Machiavelli lived long enough to see the commencement of the last struggle for Florentine liberty.
D. The character of Machiavelli was hateful to the new masters of Italy; and those parts of his theory which were in strict accordance with their own daily practice afforded a pretext for blackening his memory.
E. His works were misrepresented by the learned, misconstrued by the ignorant, censured by the Church, abused with all the rancour of simulated virtue by the tools of a base government, and the priests of a baser superstition.
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Question 76:
A. For in philosophy as in prophecy glimpses of the future may often be conveyed in words which could hardly have been understood or interpreted at the time when they were uttered (compare Symp.)—which were wiser than the writer of them meant, and could not have been expressed by him if he had been interrogated about them.
B. Yet Plato was not a mystic, nor in any degree affected by the Eastern influences which afterwards overspread the Alexandrian world.
C. Of all the works of Plato the Symposium is the most perfect in form, and may be truly thought to contain more than any commentator has ever dreamed of; or, as Goethe said of one of his own writings, more than the author himself knew.
D. And more than any other Platonic work the Symposium is Greek both in style and subject, having a beauty ' as of a statue, ' while the companion Dialogue of the Phaedrus is marked by a sort of Gothic irregularity.
E. He was not an enthusiast or a sentimentalist, but one who aspired only to see reasoned truth, and whose thoughts are clearly explained in his language.
F. There is no foreign element either of Egypt or of Asia to be found in his writings.
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Question 77:
A. Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual knowledge; and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit here. Exactly what do we mean by saying that we here know the tigers? What is the precise fact that the cognition so confidently claimed is known-as, to use Shadworth Hodgson ' s inelegant but valuable form of words?
B. There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively
C. Although such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically.
D. Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having them, however absent in body, become in some way present to our thought; or that our knowledge of them is known as presence of our thought to them.
E. At the very least, people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally pointing towards them as we sit here.
F. A great mystery is usually made of this peculiar presence in absence; and the scholastic philosophy, which is only common sense grown pedantic, would explain it as a peculiar kind of existence, called intentional inexistence of the tigers in our mind.
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Question 78:
A. I mean the profound secrecy with respect to Adam which was observed throughout the habitable earth, Palestine only excepted, until the time when the Jewish books began to be known in Alexandria, and were translated into Greek under one of the Ptolemies.
B. So much has been said and so much written concerning Adam, his wife, the pre-Adamites, etc., and the rabbis have put forth so many idle stories respecting Adam, and it is so dull to repeat what others have said before, that I shall here hazard an idea entirely new; one, at least, which is not to be found in any ancient author, father of the church, preacher, theologian, critic, or scholar with whom I am acquainted.
C. Still they were very little known; for large books were very rare and very dear.
D. Besides, the Jews of Jerusalem were so incensed against those of Alexandria, loaded them with so many reproaches for having translated their Bible into a profane tongue, called them so many ill names, and cried so loudly to the Lord, that the Alexandrian Jews concealed their translation as much as possible; it was so secret that no Greek or Roman author speaks of it before the time of the Emperor Aurelian.
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Question 79:
A. Abraham is one of those names which were famous in Asia Minor and Arabia, as Thaut was among the Egyptians, the first Zoroaster in Persia, Hercules in Greece, Orpheus in Thrace, Odin among the northern nations, and so many others, known more by their fame than by any authentic history.
B. We have to do here only with the Arabs; they boast of having descended from Abraham through Ishmael, believing that this patriarch built Mecca and died there.
C. I speak here of profane history only; as for that of the Jews, our masters and our enemies, whom we at once detest and believe, their history having evidently been written by the Holy Ghost, we feel toward it as we ought to feel.
D. Both races, it is true, have produced robbers; but the Arabian robbers have been prodigiously superior to the Jewish ones; the descendants of Jacob conquered only a very small country, which they have lost, whereas the descendants of Ishmael conquered parts of Asia, of Europe, and of Africa, established an empire more extensive than that of the Romans, and drove the Jews from their caverns, which they called The Land of Promise.
E. The fact is, that the race of Ishmael has been infinitely more favored by God than has that of Jacob.
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Question 80:
B. Able is an adjective term, which, like almost all others, has different acceptations as it is differently employed.
C. In general it signifies more than capable, more than well-informed, whether applied to an artist, a general, a man of learning, or a judge.
D. A man may have read all that has been written on war, and may have seen it, without being able to conduct a war.
E. He may be capable of commanding, but to acquire the name of an able general he must command more than once with success; a judge may know all the laws, without being able to apply them. A learned man may not be able either to write or to teach.
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[4] BDCEA