Recent studies of the gender gap in the history of United States politics tend to focus on candidate choice rather than on registration and turnout. This shift in focus away from gender inequality in political participation may be due to the finding in several studies of voting behavior in the United States that since 1980. differences in rates of registration and voting between men and women are not statistically significant after controlling for traditional predictors of participation. However. Fullerton and Stern argue that researchers have overlooked the substantial gender gap in registration and voting in the South. While the gender gap in participation virtually disappeared outside the South by the 1950s, substantial gender differences persisted in the South throughout the 1950s and 1960s, only beginning to decline in the 1970s.
The passage is primarily concerned with
The relevance of the literary personality—a writer's distinctive attitudes, concerns, and artistic choices—to the analysis of a literary work is being scrutinized by various schools of contemporary criticism. Deconstmctionists view the literary personality, like the writer's biographical personality, as irrelevant. The proper focus of literary analysis, they argue, is a work's intertextuality (interrelationship with other texts), subtexts (unspoken, concealed. or repressed discourses), and metatexts (self-referential aspects), not a perception of a writer's verbal and aesthetic "fingerprints." New historicists also devalue the literary personality, since, in their emphasis on a work's historical context, they credit a writer with only those insights and ideas that were generally available when the writer lived. However, to readers interested in literary detective work—say scholars of classical (Greek and Roman! literature who wish to reconstruct damaged texts or deduce a work's authorship— the literary personality sometimes provides vital clues.
It can be inferred from the passage that on the issue of how to analyze a literary work, the new historic its would most likely agree with the deconstructionists that
Recent research has identified_________bats' navigational tool, echolocation: smooth, vertical surfaces
such as the metal or glass plates on buildings can trick a bat into thinking it is flying in open air.
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"?
Sensationalism—the purveyance of emotionally charged content. focused mainly on violent crime, to a broad public—has often been decried, but the full history of the phenomenon has yet to be written. Scholars have tended to dismiss sensationalism as unworthy of serious study, based on two pervasive though somewhat incompatible assumptions: first, that sensationalism is essentially a commercial product, built on the exploitation of modern mass media, and second, that it appeals almost entirely to a simple, basic emotion and thus has little history apart from the changing technological means of spreading it. An exploration of sensationalism's early history, however, challenges both assumptions and suggests that they have tended to obscure the complexity and historicity of the genre.
In the context in which it appears, "charged" most nearly means
The (i)_________between the scholar's arguments and their (ii)_________has long been evident: the arguments
claim that we live in a world of rhetoric and contingency, but the arguer presents her claim as anything but rhetorical and contingent.
The poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was the premier Black writer of poetry that used the dialect of rural African Americans of the southern United States. Although Dunbar's works were both popular with readers and acclaimed by literary critics during his lifetime, after the First World War a radical shift occurred, at least in critical opinion of his poetry, and twentieth-century critical evaluation of his work has been generally negative. Some critics attacked his work on social grounds for failing to challenge plantation stereotypes of African Americans. Other critics, such as the poet James Weldon Johnson, argued from aesthetic grounds that dialect poetry in general was too limited as an artistic medium, and capable of producing only two effects: pathos and humor. The negative critical trend only began to reverse itself in the 1970s, when scholars began to emphasize the importance of mythic, psychological, and historical dimensions of Dunbar's works, focusing on the interior and exterior realities of African American life after the Civil War.
Which of the following general criticisms of dialect poetry is mentioned in the passage?
The term "ragtime opera" was used frequently m the first years of the twentieth century, but more often than not its use was (i)_________. The very idea of "ragtime opera" was viewed as lii)_________: opera was regarded as the highest form of musical art; ragtime was at the opposite pole.
While prudence is recognized as a kind of virtue, there is nonetheless a tendency to view someone who is prudent as. in some sense._________. too narrow and dull to partake of spontaneously arising opportunities.
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.
In the first paragraph, the author of the passage develops his argument primarily by
