AP MC Practice

Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers were of too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively from the statement that they were part of the Protestant population of Great Britain. Their theory of life had its core of soundness, as all theories must have on which decent and propsperous families have been reared and have flourished; but it had the very slightest tincture of theology. If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters, their bibles opened more easily at some parts than other, it was becase of dried tulip petals, which had been distributed quite impartially without preference for the historical, devotional, or doctrinal. From the first sentence, one can infer which of the following about the Dodsons' and tullivers' religious and moral ideas?

• They are not typical of those of British Protestants in general.
• The narrator is unable to describe them with complete accuracy.
• They spring from a fundamental lack of tolerance for the ideas of others.
• They have no real logical foundation.

It has been well said that the highest aim in education is analogous to the highest aim in mathematics, namely, to obtain not results but powers, not particular solutions, but the means by which endless solutions may be wrought. He is the most effective educator who aims less at perfecting specific acquirements than at producing that mental condition which renders acquirements easy, and leads to their useful application; who does not seek to make his pupils moral by enjoining particular courses of action, but by bringing into activity the feelings and sympathies that must issue in noble action.(Line 12) On the same ground it may be said that the most effective writer is not he who announces a particular discovery, who convinces men of a particular conclusion, who demonstrates that this measure is right and that measure wrong; but he who rouses in others the activities that must issue in discovery, who awake men from their indifference to the right and the wrong, who nerves their energies to seek for the truth and live up to it at whatever cost. The author uses the phrase "On the same ground" (Lines 12-13) to set up a comparison between...

• Scientific writing and inspirational writing
• Conceptually powerful writers and exemplary educators.
• The formulation of solutions and the indentification of problems.
• Intellectual challenges faced by writers and those faced by readers.

(The following is an excerpt from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.) Mr. Severe, the overseer, used to stand by the door of the quarter, armed with a large hickory stick and heavy cow skin, ready to whip any one who was so unfortunate as not to hear, or, from any other cause, was prevented from being ready to start for the field at the sound of the horn. Mr. Severe was rightly named: he was a cruel man. I have seen him whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this, too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother’s release. He seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish barbarity. Added to his cruelty, he was a profane swearer. It was enough to chill the blood and stiffen the hair of an ordinary man to hear him talk. Scarce a sentence escaped him but that was commenced or concluded by some horrid oath. The field was the place to witness his cruelty and profanity. His presence made it both the field of blood and of blasphemy. From the rising till the going down of the sun, he was cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the field, in the most frightful manner. His career was short. He died very soon after I went to Colonel Lloyd’s; and he died as he lived, uttering, with his dying groans, bitter curses and horrid oaths. His death was regarded by the slaves as the result of a merciful providence. Mr. Severe’s place was filled by a Mr. Hopkins. He was a very different man. He was less cruel, less profane, and made less noise, than Mr. Severe. His course was characterized by no extraordinary demonstrations of cruelty. He whipped, but seemed to take no pleasure in it. He was called by the slaves a good overseer. Which statement does NOT describe Mr. Severe?

• A sadistic tyrant
• So brutal that the slaves viewed his death as a blessing
• A disgusting, cruel slave owner
• Somewhat inhuman

"It is not surprising that Gullivers Travels should be filled with the shows and diversions of London. All the Scriblerians were fascinated with popular entertainments...." Scriblerians refers to...

• Book craftsmen in london
• Characters in Swifts novels
• English politicians and aristocrats
• A circle of English authors

"...a young healthy child is well nursed us at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and i make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout." fricassee is best interpreted to mean...

• Animal
• Child
• Dish
• Place

"What are the practical results of the cult of beauty? The exercises and the massages, the health motors and the skin foods... " The word "cult" as used in the passage means primarily to...

• A subculture dedicated to pagan rite
• A group with a particular obsession
• The devotees of a unique ideology
• The followers of a charismatic leader

Which is an example of a euphemism?

• Her friends didn't care for her at all. They called her names attributed to starchy vegetables.
• She had told her younger sister that her aunt had gone to help God in his garden.
• Her teacher said her work was akin to the quality of an orangutan's do-it-yourself activity.
• His gimcrack was obtained from an aged witch in the Andes mountains.

The new morality is a morality of development. It teaches that there can no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there can be an immutable position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane. The business of the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine aloft amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist is to adjust life to a constantly changing environment. an action which was suicide yesterday becomes heroism today, and futility or hypocrisy tomorrow. In the context of the passage the word "immutable" means ...

• subject to being questioned
• incomprehensible
• unchanging throughout time
• quite diverse

"Writing is not something that comes naturally to the chosen few. Most Amer- ican writers of my generation didn’t just learn to write on their own. Without the classes we took in creative writing and modem literature, we wouldnt have known what to read, how to read it, how to pay attention to form and content. We needed to be shown how to write good dialogue, smooth transitions, pared-down but vivid character descriptions. These things didn't come naturally. It would have taken us thirty years to learn, on our own, the same skills we learned in eight years of college and graduate school. My friends at graduate school came from average Midwestern homes; they were not children of famous writers. School gave us a chance we would never have had otherwise. In America, we are proof that the romantic notion of the natural writer is a myth. In Japan, where no formal training is offered in writing, the myth may be a sad reality that prevents many people from becoming writers." "School" by Kyoko Mori Which rhetorical strategy is not used in this excerpt?

• Personal Anecdote
• Parallel Sentence Structure
• Syllogism
• Anaphora

Adapted from On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859) Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs be protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence, and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism. Which of the following best describes the tone Mill employs throughout this passage?

• Evenhanded and logical
• Sarcastic and biting
• Whimsical and poetic
• Imprecise and accusative