25 - ] Model SAT Tests - Test Twenty Five

25 - ] Model SAT Tests

Test Twenty Five

Read each passage below , and then answer the questions that follow the passage . The correct response may be stated outright or merely suggested in the passage .

Questions 1 - 6 are based on the following passage .

Are Americans today overworked ? The following passage is excerpted from a book published in 1991 on the unexpected decline of leisure in American life .

            Faith in progress is deep within our culture . We have been taught to believe that our lives are better than the lives of those who came before us . The ideology of modern economics suggests that material progress has yielded enhanced satisfaction and well-being. But much of our confidence about our own well being comes from the assumption that our lives are easier than those of earlier generations . I have already disputed the notion that we work less than medieval European peasants , however poor they may have been . The field research of anthropologists gives another view of the conventional wisdom .

            The lives of so-called primitive people are commonly thought to be harsh - their existence dominated by the “incessant quest for food .” In fact ,primitives do little work . By contemporary standards , we’d have to judge them very lazy .If the Kapauku of Papua work one day , they do no labor on the next . ! Kung Bushmen put in only two and a half days per week and six hours per day . In the Sandwich Islands of Hawaii , men work only four hours per day . And Australian aborigines have similar schedules . The key to understanding why these “stone-age people “ fail to act like us - increasing their work effort to get more things - is that they have limited desired . In the race between wanting and having , they have kept their wanting low - and , in this way , ensure their own kind of satisfaction . They are materially poor by contemporary standards , but in at least one dimension - time - we have to count them richer .

          I do not raise these issues to imply that we would be better off as Polynesian natives or medieval peasants . Nor am I arguing that “progress” has made us worse off > I am , instead , making a much simpler point . We have paid a price for prosperity . Capitalism has brought a dramatically increased standard of living , but at the cost of a much more demanding work-life . We are eating more , but we are burning up those calories at work . We have color televisions and compact disc players , but we need them to unwind after a stressful day at the office . We take vacations , but we work so hard throughout  the year that they became indispensable to our sanity . The conventional wisdom that economic progress has given us more things  as well as more leisure is difficult to sustain .

1 . According to the author , we base our belief that American people today are well off on the assumption that

(A) America has always been the land of opportunity

(B) Americans particularly deserve to be prosperous

(C) people elsewhere have an inferior standard of living

(D) people elsewhere envy the American way of life

(E) our faith in progress will protect us as a nation

2 . The author regards “ the conventional wisdom” at the end of paragraph one with

(A) resentment (B) skepticism (C) complacency (D) apprehension (E) bewilderment

3 .  In paragraph two , the Kapauku tribesmen and the Kung Bushmen are presented as examples of

(A) malingerers who turn down opportunities to work

(B) noble savages with little sense of time

(C) people who implicitly believe in progress

(D) people unmotivated by a desire for consumer goods

(E) people obsessed by their constant search for food

4 . The underlined word “raise” in paragraph three means  

(A) elevate (B) increase (C) nurture (D) bring up (E) set upright

5 . The primary purpose of the passage is to

(A) dispute an assumption

(B) highlight a problem

(C) ridicule a theory

(D) answer a criticism

(E) counter propaganda

6 . The last of the passage at the end of paragraph three provide

(A) a recapitulation of a previously made argument

(B) an example of the argument that has been proposed earlier

(C) a series of assertions and qualifications with a conclusion

(D) a reconciliation of two opposing viewpoints

(E) a reversal of the author’s original position

Questions  7 - 15 are based on the following passage .

 The following passage , written in the twentieth century , is taken from a discussion of John Webster’s seventeenth-century drama “ The Duchess of Malfi .”

            The curtain rises ; the Cardinal and Daniel de Bosola enter from the right . In appearance , the Cardinal is something between an El Greco cardinal and a Van Dyke noble  lord . He has the tall ,  spare form - the elongated hands , and features of the former ; the trim pointed beard , the imperial repose , the commanding authority of the latter . But the El Greco features are not really those of asceticism or inner mystic spirituality . They are the index to a cold , refined nut ruthless cruelty in a highly civilized controlled form . Neither is the imperial repose an aloof mood of proud detachment . It is a refined expression of satanic pride of place and talent .

            To a degree , the Cardinal’s coldness is artificially cultivated . He has defined himself against his younger brother Duke Ferdinand and is the opposite to the overwrought emotionality of the latter . But the Cardinal’s aloof mood is not one of bland detachment .It is the deliberate detachment of a methodical man who collects his thoughts and emotions into the most compact and formidable shape - that when he strikes , he may strike with the more efficient and devastating force . His easy movements are those of the slowly circling eagle just before the swift descent with the exposed talons . Above all else , he is a man who never for a moment doubts his destined authority as a governor . He derisively and sharply rebukes his brother the Duke as easily and readily as he mocks his mistress Julia . If he has betrayed his hireling Bosola , he uses his brother as the tool to win back his “familiar.” His court dress is a long brilliant scarlet cardinal’s gown with white cuffs and a white collar turned back over the red , both collar and cuffs being elaborately scalloped and embroidered .He wears a small cape , reaching only to the elbows . His cassock is buttoned to the ground , giving a heightened effect to his already tall presence . Richelieu would have adored his neatly trimmed beard . A richly jeweled and ornamented cross lies on his breast , suspended from his neck by a gold chain .

            Bosola , for his part  , is the Renaissance “familiar” dressed conventionally in somber black with a white collar . He wears a chain about his neck , a suspended ornament , and a sword . Although a “bravo.” he must not be thought of as a leather jacketed , heavy booted tough , squat and swarthy . Still less is he a sneering , leering , melodramatic villain of the Victorian gaslight tradition . Like his black-and-white clothes , he is a colorful contradiction , a scholar-assassin , a humanist-hangman introverted and introspective , yet ruthless in action , moody and reluctant , yet violent . He is a man of scholarly taste and subtle intellectual discrimination doing the work of a hired ruffian . In general effect , his impersonator must achieve suppleness and subtlety of nature , a highly complex compressed , yet well restrained intensity of temperament . Like Duke Ferdinand , he is inwardly tormented ,but not by undiluted passion . His dominant emotion is an intellectualized one : that of disgust at a world filled with knavery and folly , but in which he must play a part and that a lowly despicable one .He is the kind of rarity that Browning loved to depict in his Renaissance monologues .

7 . The primary purpose of the passage appears to be to                   

(A) provide historical background on the Renaissance church

(B) describe ecclesiastical costuming and pageantry

(C) analyze the appearance and moral natures of two dramatic figures

(D)  explain why modern audiences enjoy The Duchess of Malfi

(E) compare two interpretations of a challenging role .

8 . The underlined word “spare’ in paragraph one means

(A) excessive (B)  superfluous (C) pardonable (D) lean (E) inadequate  

9 . In paragraph two , the author most likely compares the movements of the Cardinal to those of a circling eagle in order to emphasize his

(A) flightiness (B) love of freedom (C) eminence (D) spirituality (E)  mercilessness

10 . The Cardinal’s “satanic pride of place” at the end of paragraph one refers to his glorying in his  

(A) faith (B) rank (C) residence (D) immobility (E) wickedness

10 . As used in the third paragraph , the underlined word “bravo” most nearly means  

(A) a courageous man

(B) a national hero

(C) a clergyman

(D) a humanist

(E) a mercenary killer

11. In describing Bosola in the third paragraph ,the author chiefly uses which of the following literary techniques ?

(A) Rhetorical questions

(B) Unqualified assertions

(C) Comparison and contrast

(D) Dramatic irony

(E) Literary allusion

12 . The underlined word in the third paragraph “discrimination” means

(A) prejudice (B) villainy (C) discretion (D) favoritism (E) discernment

13 . According to the third paragraph ‘Like Duke….. one”, why does Bosola suffer torments?

(A) His master , the Cardinal , berates him for performing his duties inadequately .

(B) He feels intense compassion for the pains endured by the Cardinal’s victims .

(C) He is frustrated by his inability to attain a higher rank in the church .

(D) He feels superior to the villainy around him , yet must act the villain himself .

(E) He lacks the intellectual powers for scholarly success , but cannot endure common fools.

14 . The author of the passage assumes that the reader is

(A) familiar with the paintings of El Greco and Van Dyke

(B) disgusted with a world filled with cruelty and folly

(C) ignorant of the history of the Roman Catholic Church

(D) uninterested in psychological distinctions

(E) unacquainted with the writing of Browning