1. The work of South African writer Ezekiel Mphahlele has confounded literary critics, especially those who feel compelled to draw a sharp distinction between autobiography and fiction. These critics point        (5) to Mphahlele’s best-known works—his 1959 autobiography Down Second Avenue and his 1971 novel The Wanderers—to illustrate the problem of categorizing his work. While his autobiography traces his life from age five until the beginning of his (10) self-imposed 20-year exile at age thirty-eight, The Wanderers appears to pick up at the beginning of his exile and go on from there. Critics have variously decried the former as too fictionalized and the latter as too autobiographical, but those who focus on (15) traditional labels inevitably miss the fact that Mphahlele manipulates different prose forms purely in the service of the social message he advances. Even where critics give him a favorable reading, all too often their reviews carry a negative subtext.

(20) For example, one critic said of The Wanderers that if anger, firsthand experiences, compassion, and topicality were the sole requirements for great literature, the novel might well be one of the masterpieces of this declining part of the twentieth (25) century. And although this critic may not have meant to question the literary contribution of the novel, there are those who are outright dismissive of The Wanderers because it contains an autobiographical framework and is populated with real-world (30) characters. Mphahlele briefly defends against such charges by pointing out the importance of the fictional father-son relationship that opens and closes the novel. But his greater concern is the social vision that pervades his work, though it too is prone to (35) misunderstandings and underappreciation. Mphahlele is a humanist and an integrationist, and his writings wonderfully articulate his vision of the future; but critics often balk at this vision because Mphahlele provides no road maps for bringing such a future (40) about.

Mphahlele himself shows little interest in establishing guidelines to distinguish autobiography from fiction. Though he does refer to Down Second Avenue as an autobiography and The Wanderers as a (45) novel, he asserts that no novelist can write complete fiction or absolute fact. It is the nature of writing, at least the writing he cares about, that the details must be drawn from the writer’s experiences, and thus are in some sense fact, but conveyed in such a way as to (50) maximize the effectiveness of the social message contained in the work, and thus inevitably fiction. As he claims, the whole point of the exercise of writing has nothing to do with classification; in all forms writing is the transmission of ideas, and important

(55) ideas at that: “Whenever you write prose or poetry or drama you are writing a social criticism of one kind or another. If you don’t, you are completely irrelevant—you don’t count.”

Based on the passage, with which one of the following statements would Mphahlele be most likely to agree?

2. The passage states that Mphahlele believes which one of the following?

3. In lines 18–25, the author uses the phrase “negative subtext” in reference to the critic’s comment to claim that

4. According to the passage, critics offer which one of the following reasons for their dismissal of The Wanderers?

5. The author quotes Mphahlele (lines 55–58) primarily in order to

6. Which one of the following aspects of Mphahlele’s work does the author of the passage appear to value most highly?

7. Which one of the following is most strongly suggested by the information in the passage?

8. A vigorous debate in astronomy centers on an epoch in planetary history that was first identified by analysis of rock samples obtained in lunar missions. Scientists discovered that the major craters on the (5) Moon were created by a vigorous bombardment of debris approximately four billion years ago—the so-called late heavy bombardment (LHB). Projectiles from this bombardment that affected the Moon should also have struck Earth, a likelihood with profound (10) consequences for the history of Earth since, until the LHB ended, life could not have survived here.

Various theoretical approaches have been developed to account for both the evidence gleaned from samples of Moon rock collected during lunar (15) explorations and the size and distribution of craters on the Moon. Since the sizes of LHB craters suggest they were formed by large bodies, some astronomers believe that the LHB was linked to the disintegration of an asteroid or comet orbiting the Sun. In this view,(20) a large body broke apart and peppered the inner solar system with debris. Other scientists disagree and believe that the label “LHB” is in itself a misnomer. These researchers claim that a cataclysm is not necessary to explain the LHB evidence. They claim(25) that the Moon’s evidence merely provides a view of the period concluding billions of years of a continuous, declining heavy bombardment throughout the inner solar system. According to them, the impacts from the latter part of the bombardment were (30) so intense that they obliterated evidence of earlier impacts. A third group contends that the Moon’s evidence supports the view that the LHB was a sharply defined cataclysmic cratering period, but these scientists believe that because of its relatively brief (35) duration, this cataclysm did not extend throughout the inner solar system. They hold that the LHB involved only the disintegration of a body within the Earth- Moon system, because the debris from such an event would have been swept up relatively quickly.

New support for the hypothesis that a late bombardment extended throughout the inner solar system has been found in evidence from the textural features and chemical makeup of a meteorite that has been found on Earth. It seems to be a rare example of (45) a Mars rock that made its way to Earth after being knocked from the surface of Mars. The rock has recently been experimentally dated at about four billion years old, which means that, if the rock is indeed from Mars, it was knocked from the planet at (50) about the same time that the Moon was experiencing the LHB. This tiny piece of evidence suggests that at least two planetary systems in the inner solar system experienced bombardment at the same time. However, to determine the pervasiveness of the LHB, scientists (55) will need to locate many more such rocks and perhaps obtain surface samples from other planets in the inner solar system.

Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main point of the passage?

9. The author’s attitude toward arguments that might be based on the evidence of the rock mentioned in the passage as being from Mars (lines 44–46) can most accurately be described as

10. The author mentions that the LHB ‘should also have struck Earth’ (lines 8–9) primarily to

11. The author implies that all theoretical approaches to the LHB would agree on which one of the following?

12. According to the passage, the third group of scientists (line 31) believes that the LHB

13. Which one of the following, if true, would lend the most support to the view that the LHB was limited to Earth and the Moon?

14. Specialists in international communications almost unanimously assert that the broadcasting in developing nations of television programs produced by industrialized countries amounts to cultural (5) imperialism: the phenomenon of one culture’s productions overwhelming another’s, to the detriment of the flourishing of the latter. This assertion assumes the automatic dominance of the imported productions and their negative effect on the domestic culture. But (10) the assertion is polemical and abstract, based on little or no research into the place held by imported programs in the economies of importing countries or in the lives of viewers. This is not to deny that dominance is sometimes a risk in relationships (15) between cultures, but rather to say that the assertion lacks empirical foundation and in some cases goes against fact. For one example, imported programs rarely threaten the economic viability of the importing country’s own television industry. For (20) another, imported programs do not uniformly attract larger audiences than domestically produced programs; viewers are not part of a passive, undifferentiated mass but are individuals with personal tastes, and most of them tend to prefer domestically (25) produced television over imported television.

The role of television in developing nations is far removed from what the specialists assert. An anthropological study of one community that deals in part with residents’ viewing habits where imported (30) programs are available cites the popularity of domestically produced serial dramas and points out that, because viewers enjoy following the dramas from day to day, television in the community can serve an analogous function to that of oral poetry, (35) which the residents often use at public gatherings as a daily journal of events of interest. An empirical approach not unlike that of anthropologists is needed if communications specialists are to understand the impact of external (40) cultural influences on the lives of people in a society. The first question they must investigate is: Given the evidence suggesting that the primary relationship of imported cultural productions to domestic ones is not dominance, then what model best represents the true (45) relationship? One possibility is that, rather than one culture’s productions dominating another’s, the domestic culture absorbs the imported productions and becomes enriched. Another is that the imported productions fuse with domestic culture only where (50) the two share common aspects, such as the use of themes, situations, or character types that are relevant and interesting to both cultures.

Communications researchers will also need to consider how to assess the position of the individual (55) viewer in their model of cultural relationships. This model must emphasize the diversity of human responses, and will require engaging with the actual experiences of viewers, taking into account the variable contexts in which productions are (60) experienced, and the complex manner in which individuals ascribe meanings to those productions.

The primary purpose of the passage is to:

15. Which one of the following most accurately describes the organization of the passage?

16. Which one of the following is the most logical continuation of the last paragraph of the passage?

17. The author most likely discusses an anthropological study in the second paragraph primarily in order to

18. Which one of the following can most reasonably be concluded about the television viewers who were the subject of the study discussed in the second paragraph?

19. According to the author, an empirical study of the effect of external cultural influences on the lives of people in a society must begin by identifying

20. Suppose a study is conducted that measures the amount of airtime allotted to imported television programming in the daily broadcasting schedules of several developing nations. Given the information in the passage, the results of that study would be most directly relevant to answering which one of the following questions?

21. Computers have long been utilized in the sphere of law in the form of word processors, spreadsheets, legal research systems, and practice management systems. Most exciting, however, has been the (5) prospect of using artificial intelligence techniques to create so-called legal reasoning systems—computer programs that can help to resolve legal disputes by reasoning from and applying the law. But the practical benefits of such automated reasoning (10) systems have fallen short of optimistic early predictions and have not resulted in computer systems that can independently provide expert advice about substantive law. This is not surprising in light of the difficulty in resolving problems involving the (15) meaning and applicability of rules set out in a legal text.

Early attempts at automated legal reasoning focused on the doctrinal nature of law. They viewed law as a set of rules, and the resulting computer systems (20) were engineered to make legal decisions by determining the consequences that followed when its stored set of legal rules was applied to a collection of evidentiary data. Such systems underestimated the problems of interpretation that can arise at every stage of a legal (25) argument. Examples abound of situations that are open to differing interpretations: whether a mobile home in a trailer park is a house or a motor vehicle, whether a couple can be regarded as married in the absence of a formal legal ceremony, and so on. Indeed, many notions (30) invoked in the text of a statute may be deliberately left undefined so as to allow the law to be adapted to unforeseen circumstances. But in order to be able to apply legal rules to novel situations, systems have to be equipped with a kind of comprehensive knowledge of

(35) the world that is far beyond their capabilities at present or in the foreseeable future. Proponents of legal reasoning systems now argue that accommodating reference to, and reasoning from, cases improves the chances of producing a successful (40) system. By focusing on the practice of reasoning from precedents, researchers have designed systems called case-based reasoners, which store individual example cases in their knowledge bases. In contrast to a system that models legal knowledge based on a (45) set of rules, a case-based reasoner, when given a concrete problem, manipulates the cases in its knowledge base to reach a conclusion based on a similar case. Unfortunately, in the case-based systems currently in development, the criteria for similarity (50) among cases are system dependent and fixed by the designer, so that similarity is found only by testing for the presence or absence of predefined factors. This simply postpones the apparently intractable problem of developing a system that can discover for (55) itself the factors that make cases similar in relevant ways.

Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main point of the passage?

22. The logical relationship of lines 8–13 of the passage to lines 23–25 and 49–53 of the passage is most accurately described as

23. In the passage as a whole, the author is primarily concerned with

24. The passage suggests that the author would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements about computerized automated legal reasoning systems?

25. It can be most reasonably inferred from the passage’s discussion of requirements for developing effective automated legal reasoning systems that the author would agree with which one of the following statements?

26. Based on the passage, which one of the following can be most reasonably inferred concerning case-based reasoners?

27. Which one of the following is mentioned in the passage as an important characteristic of many statutes that frustrates the application of computerized legal reasoning systems?

28. The examples of situations that are open to differing interpretations (lines 25–30) function in the passage to