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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. According to Chapter 2, for Newton, ________ consisted in "making experiments and observations and in drawing general Conclusion from them by Induction."
(a) Reason.
(b) Calculus.
(c) Analysis.
(d) Religion.

2. In Chapter 2, what was the name of the path of a body that is dragged over a resisting horizontal surface by a cord of which one end moves along a straight line found?
(a) Isoperimeters.
(b) Cycloid.
(c) Brachistachrone.
(d) Tractrix.

3. The narrator reveals that vis viva was a measure of ________ to conserve his creation while "action" was a measure of his efficiency.
(a) Man's passion.
(b) God's demeanor.
(c) Man's desire.
(d) God's desire.

4. Vis viva was thought by its creator ________ to be the dynamic quantity that was conserved in the universe, according to the narrator in Chapter 2.
(a) Leibniz.
(b) 'sGravesande.
(c) Euler.
(d) Descartes.

5. What was the name of the philosopher who was the leading scientific experimenter in seventeenth-century England, who had agreed that he had never seen any "inanimate production of nature, or of chance, whose contrivance was comparable to that of the meanest limb of the despicabilist animal"?
(a) Swift.
(b) Locke.
(c) Galileo.
(d) Robert Boyle.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. Madame du Chatelet supported the Leibnizian theory of ________ because it gave a better account of free will.

3. According to Chapter 1, ________, in 1747, attributed the cause of a "great revolution in physics" to Newton's "Principia."

4. 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."

5. According to the beginning of Chapter 1, in 1759 the French mathematician ________ described a revolution that he saw taking place in natural philosophy.

(see the answer key)

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