ABC English

Free online help learning English

Reading Comprehension 3

Name:
EMail:

There are two paragraphs and two sets of questions bellow. Please read the paragraph and then answer the questions. This quiz should take about 8 minutes.

The "taint of melancholy" which Edgar Allan Poe throughout his life associated with the more "soulful" aspects of beauty was, of course, one of the familiar moods of romantics everywhere. But it is somewhat unusual that this particular mood should be so favoured by Southern poets. From the defiant anguish reminiscent of Byron to the delicate sadness characteristic of female poets like Mrs. Felicia Hemans, the whole range of melancholy feeling could be found in the pages of The Messenger during the 1930's. This is not to say that the magazine published only the poems of the Southern poetasters who invoked melancholy. The significant point is that the Southern poets whom The Messager did publish were prone to exploit melancholy. Poems on Poe's favorite subject, the death of a beautiful woman, were numerous enough in The Messanger to make us feel some retroactive concern about the durability of Southern belles.

1. Most poetry published in the South:
was cheerful in mood
was melancholy
did not reflect one of the familiar moods of the romantics
was written by Edgar Allen Poe

2. Poe had a preference for poems that dealt with:
the death of a child
Byronic despair
Southern belles
the death of a beautiful woman

3. The author implies that Southern belles:
may often have been delicately sad
may often have died young
may have written many poems
may have lived very melancholy lives

4. The Messenger published:
only melancholy poems
only female poets
only Southern poets who wrote melancholy poems
many poems about death

5. The words "reminiscent of" mean most nearly
prominent in
recalling
absent in
favoured by

In the early nineteenth century Rousseau's misgivings concerning the progress of civilization were largely forgotten, but his idea of tracing the evolution of human nature from brute-like beginnings took hold with a vengance. Theories of social evolution proliferated like mushrooms. The impetus to their elaboration came less from biology than from a growing awareness of change and improvement in the social institutions and a growing conviction that man's early condition had been a savage one. Taking progress for granted, social scientists endeavored to discover its laws and stages. Auguste Comte, for example, set for "social physics" (or sociology, as he later called it) the task of discovering "by what necessary chain of successive transformations the human race, starting from a condition barely superior to that of a society of apes, has been gradually led up to the present stage of European civilization." Like Rousseau, Comte regarded man as the only species of animal capable of evolution.

6. The growth of theories in social evolution is compared to the growth of mushrooms because:
mushrooms grow in the dark
mushrooms grow and multiply very rapidly
mushrooms can be poisonous
mushrooms are searched for with great care

7. Sociology was first known as:
social science
Comtism
social philosophy
social physics

8. Rousseau believed
in the inevitability of progress
that man was the only creature capable of evolution
that all of nature (animals, plants and men) was constantly evolving
that the science of sociology would promote social evolution

9. Theories of social evolution proliferated because of:
advances in biology
advances in biology
respect for Rouseau as a social thinker and philosopher
the conviction that man's beginnings had been brute-like, but that his condition was showing steady improvement