Passage 1

Carla L. Peterson’s Doers of the Word (1997), a study of African American women speakers and writers from 1830-1880, is an important addition to scholarship on nineteenth-century African American women. Its scope resembles that of Frances Smith Fosters 1993 study, but its approach is quite different. For Foster, the Black women who came to literary voice in nineteenth-century America were claiming their rights as United States citizens, denying that anything should disqualify them from full membership in an enlightened national polity. Peterson sees these same women as having been fundamentally estranged from the nation by a dominant culture unsympathetic to Black women, and by a Black intelligentsia whose male view of race concerns left little room for Black female intellect. 

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Passage 2

For centuries, oak was the wood of choice for European shipbuilders. However, toward the end of the eighteenth century, as British oak supplies grew scarce, shipbuilders there turned to teak and found in it an ideal substitute. Other woods expand and contract at different rates than oak, so repairs to oak ships done with those woods split or leak. Only teak matches oak’s expansion coefficient and stays watertight. It is unmatched in its resistance to rot and pests, and its oils even protect nails against corrosion. Moreover, it was one of two important tropical hardwoods (with Central American mahogany) that dried light enough to float downriver--the only way to transport timber in quantity from the inland jungles where it grew. 

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Passage 3

Recent studies of ancient Maya water management have found that the urban architecture of some cities was used to divert rainfall runoff into gravity-fed systems of interconnected reservoirs. In the central and southern May Lowlands, this kind of water control was necessary to support large populations throughout the year due to the scarcity of perennial surface water and the seasonal availability of rainfall. Some scholars argue that the concentration of water within the urban core of these sites provided a centralized source of political authority for Maya elites based largely on controlled water access. Such an argument is plausible, however, it is less useful for understanding the sociopolitical implications of water use and control in other, water-rich parts of the Maya region.

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Passage 4

Because the subject matter was so personal, the work of several prominent mid-twentieth century poets has been termed “confessional” poetry. But confession is a bad metaphor for what those poets did. The motive for confession is penitential or therapeutic—by speaking openly about personal guilt and suffering, the poet hopes to make them easier to bear. But these poets always approached their writing as artists, and their motive was aesthetic. Writing from experiences like madness, despair, and lust, their aim was to make effective art, not to cure themselves. To treat their poems mainly as documents of personal experience is not just to diminish the poets’ achievement, but to ignore their unanimous disdain for the idea of confessional poetry.

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Passage 5

Buell’s study of village sketches (a type of fiction popular in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s) provides a valuable summary of sketches that portray the community as homogeneous and fixed, but it ignores those by women writers, which typically depicted the diversity that increasingly characterized actual village communities at that time. These women’s geographical mobility was restricted (although women writers of the time were not uniformly circumscribed in this way), and their subject matter reflected this fact. Yet their texts were enriched by what Gilligan, writing in a different context, has called the ability to attend to voices other than one’s own. 

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Passage 6

Currently, Sulandian television journalists are twice as likely as other workers to support the Blue Party, and Sulandian journalism students are significantly more likely to support the Blue Party than working television journalists are. Therefore, assuming that these students do not change their political affiliations as they get older, the disparity between the political affiliations of Sulandia’s television journalists and those of the rest of the working population will increase as current Sulandian journalism students enter the profession.

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Passage 7

Although the passenger pigeons, now extinct, were abundant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, archaeological studies at twelfth-century Cahokian sites in the present day United States examined household food trash and found that traces of passenger pigeon were quite rare. Given that the sites were close to a huge passenger pigeon roost documented by John James Audubon in the nineteenth century and that Cahokians consumed almost every other animal protein source available, the archaeologists conducting the studies concluded the passenger pigeon population had once been very limited before increasing dramatically in post-Columbian America. 

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Passage 8

In 1995 the Galileo spacecraft captured data about Jupiters atmosphere—namely, the absence of most of the predicted atmospheric water—that challenged prevailing theories about Jupiters structure. The unexpectedness of this finding fits a larger pattern in which theories about planetary composition and dynamics have failed to predict the realities discovered through space exploration. Instead of normal planets whose composition could be predicted by theory, the planets populating our solar system are unique individuals whose chemical and tectonic identities were created through numerous contingent events.

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1. Space is often referred to as the final frontier, as the only realm of which humankind has still to gain substantial understanding, yet the ocean is also another vast area about which our knowledge is _____.

A. erroneous      

B. confusing

C. frustrating

D. rudimentary

E. delusive

F. sketchy

2. Partly because of Lee’s skill at synthesizing (i)_____ trends drawn from many fields of study, her theories appeared to present, with uncanny aptness, ideas already (ii)_____ in the minds of her contemporaries.

3. One big challenge with placebo responses is that they are _____: people given the same inert pill or potion may show wildly different reactions, and the effects can vary widely according to each person’s illness.

A. capricious

B. illusory
C. unpredictable
D. chimerical
E. marginal
F. ephemeral

4. The guilty-pleasure of the play lies in its invitation for us to identify with its characters—attractive, articulate young women and young men (i)_____ behavior that, from the outside, may look more than a little (ii)_____: though the actions are initially repugnant, we cannot help but share the point of the view of the characters committing them.

5. Despite the scathing precision with which she satirizes the lives of social aspirants and moneyed folk, the writer appears to (i)_____ being part of the world she presents as so (ii)_____.

6. The often-cited parallels between human communities and insect colonies are _____: the cooperation found among social insects is essentially due to the insects genetic ties, while humans often collaborate with non-relatives.

A. superficial

B. obvious
C. hackneyed
D. contradictory

E. uncanny

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