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How many fnsi-ye.it students did 112! take the placemen! exam in 1995 ?

A.

57

B.

63

C.

66

D.

70

E.

73

Experimental magazine essays are quite in vogue, but many of the characteristic that now seem innovative will doubtless look (1)________in thirty years" time; a vaunted self-consciousness will look affected, a fractured style, far from appearing (ii)________ will appear (lii)________instead.

A.

mannered

B.

groundbreaking

C.

foreign

D.

radical

E.

conventional

F.

pretentious

G.

quaint

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 tittle 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.

According to the passage, scholars have not given sensationalism serious consideration because they believe sensationalism

A.

possesses largely emotional rather than rational content

B.

is produced with an eye to making money

C.

lacks historical complexity

Like paleontologists who interpret timescales from fossil evidence, we infer the history of star formation in the Milks' Way galaxy from the heavy-element composition of its stars. According to the big bang theory of the origin of the universe, the first gas clouds—and the first generation of stars formed from them—were composed of pure hydrogen and helium; most heavier elements— iron and calcium, for example—came later, created by explosions of supernovas, massive stars in their death thaws. Loaded with heavy elements, material ejected from supernovas enriched the interstellar gas clouds from which the next generation of stars formed, the level of heavy elements increasing with succeeding generations. Because most stars live for many billions of years and because the Milky Way is thus composed of multiple stellar generations, comparing the number of stars of low heavy-element abundance with those of high heavy-element abundance enables astronomers to untangle the history of star formation in the Milky Way.

Replacement of the word "enriched" with which of the following words results in the least change in meaning for the passage?

A.

refined

B.

altered

C.

heightened

D.

briehtened

E.

improved

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

A.

establishing the chronology of a transition

B.

discussing a perceived oversight

C.

explaining the reasons for a change

D.

evaluating an underlying assumption

E.

confirming the merits of a claim

Although the claim that no one knows what dark matter is remains parallel assertion that dark matter has not been detected.

A.

contentious

B.

questionable

C.

sound

D.

prominent

E.

unassailable

F.

unverifiable

G.

some scientists dispute the

Instances of "galactic cannibalism"—mergers in which large galaxies completely consume smaller ones—may be fairly common. Tidal forces produced by the Milky Way's powerful gravity, for example, appear to be dismantling and engulfing a dwarf galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius, producing large clumps and streamers of stars connecting the two galaxies. Astronomers have also observed two dense clusters of stars and gas at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy, an apparent "double nucleus" that may contain the remnant of a cannibalized dwarf galaxy. But this Twin-lobed appearance could also be created by two parts of a single nucleus bisected by a lane of dust. Scientists believe that only about 25 percent of such apparent double nuclei actually represent galactic cannibalism. Many of the rest result from the illusion of proximity that occurs when objects at different distances appear along the same line of sight: others consist of debris from galactic "collisions." in which one galaxy has passed through another without merging, causing waves of new star formation.

According to the passage, a true double nucleus may be produced by the

A.

collision of two dwarf galaxies

B.

incorporation of a dwarf galaxy into a larger galaxy

C.

merging of two galaxies of approximately equal size

D.

separation of a single nucleus into two parts by a lane of dust

E.

waves of new star formation resulting from an instance of galactic cannibalism

In Cleopatra: A Life. Schitf_________Cleopatra, stripping away the accretions of myth built up around the

Egyptian queen and plucking off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare and Shaw.

A.

denigrates

B.

elucidates

C.

embellishes

D.

aggrandizes

E.

demystifies

F.

manipulates

In the past, the region's literacy support programs had been_________distributed—abundant in places where literacy rates were relatively high, absent in places where rates were low.

A.

complexly

B.

cautiously

C.

sagaciously

D.

perversely

E.

uniformly

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.

The author of the passage talks about Wonder Woman primarily to

A.

provide an example of a change in the public perception of comics" characters

B.

identify the gender stereotypes in comics against which feminists struggled

C.

suggest the extent to which the comics industry remained a male-dominated field

D.

note a significant improvement in the way women were represented in comics

E.

contest the claim that superheroes were generally portrayed as outcasts