Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The message is if man fails to maintain the ecological balance, it will be harmful in the long run.

The author warns that birds and mammals are being killed faster than they breed, that the nobler forms of life suffer most, and that the less man upsets the balance of Nature the better. The consequence he fears is the loss of wildlife, so the message is about the harm of a broken balance.

He does not praise man's cleverness (A), and he deplores destruction of wildlife and does not advocate it (C). The idea that a balanced ecosystem will reduce man's importance (D) is nowhere in the passage.

Answer: D

The key gives the tone as sarcastic.

Questions on tone are matters of reading, and the passage has an ironic edge: it says that civilized man "begins by destroying the very forms of wildlife he learns to appreciate most when he becomes still more civilized", and ends by saying that man should not upset the balance of Nature "even when he tries to be an earthly Providence". The mockery of man's self-importance is the sarcasm the key points to.

Descriptive, humorous and narrative fit less well: the passage argues for a policy and is earnest in aim, and it tells no story. The key's choice is the most defensible of the four, though the passage is mainly serious argument.

Answer: B

According to the ancient Greeks, arts and crafts were the creations produced as per certain set rules.

The passage says both were regarded as productions according to rule and classified together as techne, organised knowledge applied to a preconceived result.

Divine power, foreign concepts and hollow inventions are not claimed anywhere; the passage is about rule-governed production, and the modern distinction between art and craft is the thing it calls foreign to antiquity.

Answer: A

The Greeks considered arts and crafts analogous to each other.

The passage says the distinction modern critics draw between them was foreign to classical antiquity: both were techne, so the Greeks treated them as one kind of rule-governed production.

'Distinct forms of creation' is the modern view, the passage says nothing about human contentment, and 'production' is only the sense of the word techne, not a separate concept the Greeks used to mark them apart.

Answer: B

On the modern aesthetic view, art cannot be governed by rules.

The first paragraph says the Greek concept runs counter to the modern insight that art cannot be reduced to rule, produced from pre-established concepts, or evaluated by a formula.

Options A and D describe the Greek idea of techne, with its organised procedure and preconceived result, which is exactly what the modern view rejects. Option C also gives a result-oriented picture of art that the passage attributes to the Greeks, not to modern thought.

Answer: C

Perfection was the primary criterion for the ancient Greeks.

The second paragraph says the Greek concept carried the notion that the appropriate criterion for judging excellence in both arts and crafts was the perfection of their production, a view that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century.

Modern artists, modern critics and art lovers are not given that criterion. Batteux replaced perfection with beauty, and later critics found even beauty too broad.

Answer: C

Batteux held that the production of beauty distinguishes the arts from the crafts and sciences.

The passage says the French aesthetician Charles Batteux put forward the idea that what distinguishes the arts from the crafts and the sciences is the arts' production of beauty. Beauty is the mark of the arts alone, set against both the other groups.

The other options group the arts with crafts or with sciences, which undoes the distinction Batteux was drawing.

Answer: A

The author suggests that there is a lack of an all-inclusive definition of art.

The passage ends by saying that since 1900 many definitions have emerged, each covering a sector of practice, but none of them applies to the whole of what the art world accepts as art.

Beauty is described as ambiguous and too broad as a basis for evaluation, so option B is contrary to the passage. The author does not rest judgment on lovers' opinions, and does not prefer the ancient concept to the modern one; the passage simply compares the two.