- (Topic 2)

A)

B)

C)

D)

E)

Correct Answer:A

- (Topic 3)
A divide between aesthetic and technical considerations has played a crucial role in mapmakiug and cartographic scholarship. Some nineteenth-century cartographers, for instance, understood themselves as technicians who did not care about visual effects, while others saw themselves as landscape painters. That dichotomy structured the discipline of the history of cartography. Until the 1980s, in what Blakemore and Harley called "the 'Old is Beautiful' paradigm." scholars largely focused on maps made before 1800. marveling at their beauty and sometimes regretting the decline of the pre-technical age. Early mapmaking was considered art while modem cartography was located within the realm of engineering utility. Alpers. however, has argued that this boundary would have puzzled mapmakers in the seventeenth century, because they considered themselves to be visual engineers.
It can be inferred from the passage that, beginning in the 1980s. historians of cartography

Correct Answer:B

- (Topic 3)
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the period of the American Revolution and the early republic, political poems appeared regularly in newspapers and pamphlets. commenting on the issues and controversies engaging the new nation. Given the sheer number of poems that engaged explicitly with politics, one might wonder why the form has remained largely ignored by scholars of early American literature even as many other once obscure forms—sentimental novels, diaries, travelogues, belles letters—have enjoyed unprecedented scholarly interest in recent decades. Part of the reason may stem from frustrations involved with reading poems that are so highly topical—often requiring, even as a condition of first-level comprehension, a familiarity with names and references that, while wholly recognizable in their own time, are obscure to modem readers. Yet beyond this is the fact that American political verse from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has never fully shaken off the verdict, delivered by its earliest
generation of scholarly readers. that it is simply unworthy of serious attention as literature. Even the term commonly used to describe it—"verse." as opposed to "poetry"— suggests an occasional or forgettable, rather than enduring, form of expression, not quite deserving the designation of poetry. Nor was such verse considered by early critics as worthy of the designation "American." as the tendency of eighteenth-century American poets to model their works on those of British precursors suggested an unforgivable failure, as one critic described it. to declare their "literary independence" from Britain.
The passage suggests which of the following about the "earliest generation**?

Correct Answer:C

- (Topic 3)
Writing for the New York Times in 1971. Saul Braun claimed that - todays superhero is about as much like his predecessors as today's child is like his parents." In an unprecedented article on the state of American comics, "Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant. Braun wove a story of an industry whose former glory producing jingoistic fantasies of superhuman power in the 1930s and 1940s had given way to a canny interest in revealing the power structures against which ordinary people and heroes alike struggled following World War II Quoting a description of a course on •Comparative Comics" at Brown University, he wrote, 'New heroes are different—they ponder moral questions, have emotional differences, and are just as neurotic as real people. Captain America openly sympathizes with campus radicals.. Lois Lane apes John Howard Griffin and turns herself black to study racism, and everybody battles to save the environment."" Five years earlier. Esquire had presaged Braun s claims about comic books: generational appeal, dedicating a spread to the popularity of superhero comics among university students in their special 'College Issue." As one student explained. "My favorite is the Hulk. I identify with him, he's the outcast against the institution.'1 Only months after the NW York Times article saw print. Rolling Stone published a six-page expose on the inner workings of Marvel Comics, while Ms. Magazine emblazoned Wonder Woman on the cover of its premier issue—declaring s Wonder Woman for President'?? no less—and devoted an article to the origins of the latter- day feminist superhero.
Where little more than a decade before comics had signaled the moral and aesthetic degradation of American culture, by 1971 they had come of age as America's "native art::: taught on Ivy League campuses, studied by European scholars and filmmakers, and translated and sold around the world, they were now taken up as a new generation's critique of American society. The concatenation of these sentiments among such diverse publications revealed that the growing popularity and public interest in comics (and comic- book superheroes) spanned a wide demographic spectrum, appealing to middle-class urbamtes, college-age men. members of the counterculture, and feminists alike. At the heart of this newfound admiration for comics lay a glaring yet largely unremarked contradiction: the cultural regeneration of the comic-book medium was made possible by the revamping of a key American fantasy figure, the superhero, even as that figure was being lauded for its realism"" and social relevance."" As the title of Braun's article suggests, in the early 1970s, "relevance" became a popular buzzword denoting a shift in comic-book content from oblique narrative metaphors for social problems toward direct representations of racism and sexism, urban blight, and political corruption.
The author of the passage talks about Wonder Woman primarily to

Correct Answer:A

- (Topic 3)
The public has not reacted favorably to the majority of the policies adopted by the present government. If. however, the electoral landslide by which the government achieved power five years ago was. as is often claimed, a mandate for more conservative policies, then the public response to most of the government's policies would have been favorable.
If the statements in the passage are true, which of the following must also be true on the basis of them?

Correct Answer:D

- (Topic 3)
Carbon dating of charcoal gathered from a Nok iron smelter at Intime. Nigeria, suggests that iron technology was established there by 410 B.C. This may not be the oldest smelter in sub-Saharan Africa, however. Archaeologists have located evidence of iron-smelting in the Termite Hills of Niger from as early as 1400 B.C.. but skeptics say the wood used for that dating could have already been centuries old when burned as fuel—a problem that dogs carbon dating, especially in arid places like Niger, where wood desiccates and lasts longer. Of course, the same problem could distort dates for the Intime furnace as well, but here there is an important piece of corroborating evidence: Nok pottery found inside the
furnace alongside the charcoal.
The author implies which of the following about the "Nok pottery found inside the furnace"?

Correct Answer:A