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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 2, Mathematics and the Exact Sciences.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. The eighteenth century was called by the French the ________ because of its emphasis on reason as a path to knowledge.
(a) Century of science.
(b) Century of light.
(c) Century of reason.
(d) Century of life.

2. According to the narrator in Chapter 1, what was the key to a correct method whose model was mathematics?
(a) Nature.
(b) Geometry.
(c) Nuture.
(d) Reason.

3. What was the name of the path by which an object slides from one point to another that is not on the same vertical line in the shortest possible time?
(a) Brachistachrone.
(b) Involute.
(c) Tractrix.
(d) Catenary.

4. Who carried rational mechanics to the highest point of generality and abstraction that it was to reach during the Enlightenment?
(a) Lagrange.
(b) Diderot.
(c) Hermann.
(d) Daniel.

5. From ________'s law of falling bodies, it was known that the heights would be proportional to the squares of the velocities at impact.
(a) Poleni.
(b) Descartes.
(c) Galileo.
(d) Voltaire.

Short Answer Questions

1. According to Chapter 1, the noble Houyhnhnm in Jonathan Swift's ________ "thought Nature and Reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid."

2. In Chapter 2, who was the greatest analyst of the Enlightenment and created mathematical theories to predict the buckling of columns and beams?

3. What was the name of the priest of the Congregation of the Oratory, who was also a philosopher, mathematician, and member of the French Academy of Sciences?

4. Chapter 2 states that ________ had been created to deal with the problem of motion and that the new mathematical techniques discovered in the eighteenth century were all responses to the challenges of mechanics.

5. Descartes's "quantity of motion" is equivalent to our modern principle of the conservation of ________.

(see the answer key)

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