Science and the Enlightenment Test | Mid-Book Test - Hard

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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who had written a preface to the second edition of the "Principia," supposedly with Newton's blessing, that described gravity as a force acting at a distance without any intervening medium?

2. What term did Toland invent for the belief that God and nature were one and the same, according to the narrator in Chapter 1?

3. Chapter 1 states that in 1700, ________ first talked about an "almost complete revolution in geometry" that had begun with the analytic geometry of Descartes.

4. All of the following were forms of fire, according to Boerhaave and Musschenbroek, except for which one?

5. What area of study in the Middle Ages had been the domain of those truths that could be found through the use of reason alone without the revelation of the Bible?

Short Essay Questions

1. Discuss how nature and reason tied into the Enlightenment.

2. Discuss Christian Wolff's book "Generally useful researches for attaining to a more exact knowledge of nature and the arts."

3. Discuss the periodic fluctuation Bradley found in 1748.

4. What prompted the versions of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century? Give an example.

5. Explain why Newton's laws were not adequate to deal with all of the mechanical phenomena studied during the Enlightenment.

6. Who coined the term "Scientific Revolution" and who was this person? What was the Scientific Revolution?

7. Discuss Benjamin Franklin's single static electrical atmosphere.

8. What were the two necessary ingredients for the improvement of astronomical tables? Explain.

9. Discuss the electrical experiments of Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Gray and Abbe Jean Antoine Nollet.

10. What advantage did natural philosophy have over other literary pursuits? Explain.

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss natural history's impact on the field of physiology as detailed in Chapter 5 of "Science and the Enlightenment."

Essay Topic 2

Explain the motion along a curve theory and its relevance to the Enlightenment.

Essay Topic 3

Compare and contrast positional astronomy to physical astronomy.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 797 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample