38 - ] Model SAT Tests - Test Thirty Eight

38 - ] Model SAT Tests

Test Thirty Eight

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

The writer John Updike muses on the significance of Mickey Mouse .

            Cartoon characters have soul as Carl Jung defined it in his Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious : “soul is a life-giving demon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence . “Without the “leaping and twinkling of the soul ,”Jung says , “man would rot away in his greatest passion , idleness .” The Mickey Mouse of the thirties shorts was a whirlwind of activity , with a host of unsuspected skills and a reluctant heroism that rose to every occasion . Like Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks and Fred Astaire , he acted out our fantasies of endless nimbleness of perfect weightlessness . Yet withal , there was nothing aggressive or self-promoting about him , as there was about Popeye . Disney , interviewed in the thirties , said , “Sometimes , I’ve tried to figure out why Mickey appealed to the whole world . Everybody’s tried to figure it out . So far as I know , nobody has . He’s a pretty nice fellow who never does anybody any harm , who gets into scrapes through no fault of his own , but always managed to come up grinning . “This was perhaps Disney’s image of himself : for twenty years he did Mickey’s voice in the films , and would often say , “There’s a lot of the Mouse in me .” Mickey was a character created with his own pen , and nurtured on Disney’s memories of his mouse-ridden Kansas City studio and of the Missouri farm where his struggling father tried for time to make a living . Walt’s humble , scrambling beginnings remained embodied in the mouse , whom the Nazis , in a fury against the Mickey- inspired Allied legions ( the Allied code word on D-Day was “Mickey Mouse” ) , called “the most miserable ideal ever revealed…. mice are dirty .”

            But was Disney , like Mickey , just “a pretty nice fellow” ? He was until crossed in his driving perfectionism , his Napoleonic capacity to marshal men and take risks in the service of an artistic and entrepreneurial vision . He was one of those great Americans , like Edison and Henry Ford , who invented themselves in terms of a new technology . The technology - in Disney’s case , film animation - would have been anyway , but only a few driven men seized the full possibilities and made empires . In the dozen years between Steamboat Willie and Fantasia , the Disney studios took the art of animation to heights of ambition and accomplishment it would never have reached otherwise , and Disney’s personal zeal was the animating force . He created an empire of the mind , and its emperor was Mickey Mouse .

            The thirties were Mickey’s conquering decade . His image circled the globe . In Africa , tribesmen painfully had tiny mosaic Mickey Mouses inset into their front teeth , and a South African tribe refused to buy soap unless the cakes were embossed with Mickey’s image . Nor were the high and mighty immune to Mickey’s elemental appeal - King George V and Franklin Roosevelt insisted that all film showings they attended include a dose of Mickey Mouse. But other popular phantoms , like Felix the Cat , have faded, where Mickey has settled into the national collective consciousness . The television program revived him for my children’s generation , and the theme parks make him live for my grandchildren’s . Yet survival cannot be imposed through weight of publicity . Mickey’s persistence springs from something timeless in the image that has allowed it to pass in status from a fad to an icon .

            To take a bite out of our imagination , an icon must be simple . The ears , the wiggly tail , the red shorts , give us a Mickey . Donald Duck and Goofy , Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker are inextricably bound up with the draftsmanship of the artists who make them move and squawk , but Mickey floats free . It was Claes Oldenburg’s pop art that first alerted me to the fact that Mickey Mouse had passed out of the realm of commercially generated image into that of artifact . A new Disney gadget , advertised on television , is a camera-like box that spouts bubbles when a key is turned ; the key consists of three circles , two mounted on a larger one , and the image is unmistakably Mickey . Like yin and yang , like the Christian cross  and the star of Israel . Mickey can be seen everywhere - a sign , a rune ,  hieroglyphic trace of a secret power , an electricity we want to plug into . Like totem poles , like African masks , Mickey stands at that intersection of abstraction and representation where magic connects .

1 . The author’s attitude toward Popeye in lines 6 -8 is primarily                    

(A) nostalgic (B) deprecatory (C) apathetic (D) vindictive (E) reverent

2 . By describing Mickey’s skills as “ unsuspected” and his heroism as “reluctant” (lines 5 and 6 ) , the author primarily conveys Mickey’s       

(A) unassuming nature

(B)  unrealistic success

(C) contradictory image

(D) ignominious failings

(E) idealistic character

3 . The underlined word “scrape” in line 12 means      

(A) abrasions

(B) harsh sounds

(C) small economies

(D) discarded fragments

(E) predicaments

4 . Bt saying “There’s a lot of the Mouse in me “ Disney revealed      

(A) his inability to distinguish himself as an individual

(B)the extent of his identification with his creation

(C) the desire to capitalize on his character’s popularity

(D) his fear of being surpassed by a creature he produced

(E) his somewhat negative image of himself

5 . The reference to the Nazis’ comments on Mickey in paragraph three can best be described as      

(A) a digression (B) a metaphor (C) an analysis  (D) an equivocation (E) a refutation

6 . The underlined word “crossed” means       

(A) traversed (B) confused (C) intersected (D) encountered (E) opposed

7 . The author views Disney as all of the following EXCEPT     

(A) a self-made man

(B) a demanding artist (C) an enterprising businessman

(D) the inventor of film animation

(E) an empire-builder

8 . The reference to the African tribesmen and to Franklin Roosevelt serve primarily to      

(A) demonstrate the improbability of Mickey’s reaching such disparate audiences

(B) dispel a misconception about the nature of Mickey’s popularity

(C) support the assertion that people of all backgrounds were drawn to Mickey Mouse

(D) show how much research the author has done into the early history of Disney cartoons

(E) answer the charges made by critics of Disney’s appeal

9 . The distinction made between  a “fad” and an “icon”  at the end of paragraph three can best be summarized as which of the following ?    

(A) The first is a popular fashion , the second attracts only a small group

(B) The first involves a greater degree of audience involvement than the second

(C) The first is less likely to need publicity than the second

(D) The first is less enduring in appeal than is the second

(E) The first conveys greater prestige than the second

10 . The phrase “take a bite out of our imagination” in paragraph four most nearly means        

(A) injure our creativity

(B) reduce our innovative capacity

(C) cut into our inspiration

(D) capture our fancies

(E) limit our visions

11 . The author’s description of the new Disney gadget  in paragraph four does which of the following ?    

(A) It suggests that popular new product lines are still being manufactured by Disney.

(B) It demonstrates that even a rudimentary outline can convey the image of Mickey.

(C) It illustrates the importance of television advertising in marketing new products .

(D) It disproves the notion that Disney’s death has undermined his mercantile empire .

(E) It refutes the author’s assertion that Mickey’s survival springs from something unhyped .

12 . Which of the following most resembles the new Disney gadget in paragraph four in presenting Mickey as an artifact ?       

(A) A comic book presenting the adventures of Mickey Mouse

(B) A rubber mask realistically portraying Mickey’s features

(C) A Mickey Mouse watch on which Mickey’s hands point at the time

(D)A Mickey’s Mouse waffle iron that makes waffles in the shape of three linked circles.  (E) A framed cell or single strip from an original Mickey Mouse animated film