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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapters 11 and 12.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In what year did Bartholomeu Diaz round the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip if Africa?
(a) 1598.
(b) 1455.
(c) 1616.
(d) 1488.

2. What is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines?
(a) Cartography.
(b) Micrometer.
(c) Chronometry.
(d) Parallax.

3. What is a member of a class of very luminous variable stars?
(a) Cepheid.
(b) Dark matter.
(c) Parallax.
(d) Micrometer.

4. Who was the first astronomer to suggest a solar-centered planetary system?
(a) Archimedes.
(b) Aristarchus.
(c) Pontius Pilate.
(d) Claudius Ptolemy.

5. Who elevated spectroscopy to an exact science?
(a) Joseph Fraunhofer.
(b) Nicole Oresme.
(c) William Parsons.
(d) Mikolai Kopernik.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who worked under George Hale, director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, as described by the author in Chapter 9?

2. Legend had it that Galileo dropped what off the tower of Pisa to illustrate that all objects fell at the same rate of speed?

3. As far back as Ptolemy, geography was employed as an aid in the study of what, according to the author in Chapter 3: "The Discovery of the Earth"?

4. Copernicus studied the great astronomers, and particularly admired whom?

5. What foremost astronomer of the sixteenth century proved Aristotle wrong in 1577?

(see the answer key)

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