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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What prevents a moral question from presenting itself to the child according to Beauvoir?
(a) Ignorance of consequences.
(b) The misunderstanding of spontaneity and affects.
(c) A lack of perspective to see himself in the past or seeing himself in the future.
(d) Ignorance of the physical world.

2. Why does Beauvoir claim that some individuals have lives that slip into an infantile world?
(a) Because they are kept in a state of servitude and ignorance and have no means of breaking the ceiling which is over their heads.
(b) Because the labor they choose prevents them from using their minds.
(c) Because they discover they are incompetent in the direction they choose for their lives.
(d) Because they never leave the fanciful world they create in their minds.

3. In what sense does Beauvoir claim that every man is free?
(a) In the sense that he can choose his own ethic.
(b) In the sense that only consequences affect his choices.
(c) In the sense that he spontaneously casts himself into the world.
(d) In the sense that he is free to end or continue his existence.

4. What does Descartes credit man's unhappiness to, according to Beauvoir?
(a) Having first been a child.
(b) The inner conflict between doing right and doing what he wants.
(c) His lack of freedom.
(d) His inability to accept his ambiguity.

5. What type of man does Beauvoir identify as being nihilistic?
(a) The man who sees the futility of his goals and realizes he has missed the benefits of his ambiguity.
(b) The man who disputes the seriousness of another man's goals to the point that his goals are regarded as generally useless as a consequence.
(c) The point at which the serious man realizes the pursuit of his goals have been made at the expense of his freedom.
(d) When a man who faces failure becomes conscious of being unable to be anything and decides to be nothing.

Short Answer Questions

1. In what way does Beauvoir suggest Marxists practice free will?

2. To what does Beauvoir compare the presence of freedom within the drama of choice?

3. What does Beauvoir claim defines the "sub-man"?

4. What role does time play what Beauvoir identifies as the ability to will oneself free?

5. What does Beauvoir claim a child can do due to his state of security?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Beauvoir explain that adult lives can slip by in an infantile world?

2. How does Beauvoir claim that spontaneity affects man's freedom?

3. What faces the adolescent who is being liberated from the infantile world, according to Beauvoir?

4. How does Beauvoir claim an individual makes himself a "sub-man"?

5. What type of adults does Beauvoir claim stays in an infantile world?

6. How does Beauvoir claim that man can rise to a higher moral freedom?

7. How does Beauvoir claim one can avoid nihilism?

8. How does Beauvoir explain that nihilism becomes the desire for power?

9. According to Beauvoir, how does man cast himself into the world?

10. What does Beauvoir suggest causes the infantile world to begin to pass away by adolescence?

(see the answer keys)

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