View a FREE sample

This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. 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) Tractrix.
(c) Cycloid.
(d) Brachistachrone.

2. Some of the "cabinet de physique" became very large, the most famous being the collection of the ________ in Haarlem.
(a) Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
(b) Ford Foundation.
(c) Teyler Foundation.
(d) Rockefeller Foundation.

3. ________, "curator of experiments" at the Royal Society, began research on the luminosity of phosphorus in 1705, under instruction from members of the society.
(a) William Gilbert.
(b) Francis Hauksbee.
(c) John Cuthbertson.
(d) Abbe Nollet.

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

5. In Chapter 2, who was the greatest analyst of the Enlightenment and created mathematical theories to predict the buckling of columns and beams?
(a) Newton.
(b) Leonhard Euler.
(c) Bernoulli.
(d) Leibniz.

6. Who was France's greatest hero of the Enlightenment partly because he was from England, the source of free thought and liberty and partly because he had solved the riddle of the planets, showing that their motions obeyed the same laws as motions on earth?
(a) Boyle.
(b) Fontenelle.
(c) Newton.
(d) Swift.

7. 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."
(a) A Modest Proposal.
(b) Gulliver's Travels.
(c) The Day of Judgement.
(d) Twelve Articles.

8. According to the narrator in Chapter 3, who became a famous doctor and chemist and initiated the Dutch program in his oration of 1715 entitled "De comparando certo in physicis"?
(a) Boerhaave.
(b) Mariotte.
(c) Newton.
(d) Musschenbroek.

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

10. 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) Galileo.
(b) Swift.
(c) Robert Boyle.
(d) Locke.

11. Who became the ablest and most productive mathematician of the eighteenth century, according to the narrator in Chapter 2?
(a) Newton.
(b) Bernoulli.
(c) Euler.
(d) Lagrange.

12. In Chapter 3, who proposed a single static electrical "atmosphere" that attracted and repelled by pressure rather than by the impact of an electrical wind?
(a) Musschenbroek.
(b) Franklin.
(c) Newton.
(d) Desagulier.

13. In Chapter 3, what was the name of the experimental tradition began in Western Europe during the Renaissance?
(a) Physics.
(b) Practical magic.
(c) Natural magic.
(d) Black magic.

14. In the hands of ________, history led not to an understanding of God's will but rather to an understanding of human nature.
(a) D'Alembert.
(b) Boyle.
(c) Kant.
(d) David Hume.

15. In 1769, ________, a student of Joseph Black's at Glasgow, measured the repulsion between charges with an apparatus that balanced the electrical repulsion against gravitational attraction.
(a) Charles Augustin Coulomb.
(b) Volta.
(c) Luigi Galvani.
(d) John Robison.

Short Answer Questions

1. In the preface to his "Histoire" of the Paris Academy of Science, who argued in 1699 that the new "geometric spirit" could also improve works on politics, morals, literary criticism, and even public speaking?

2. Who was the extraordinary philosopher whose life and career exemplified many aspects of the Enlightenment, although he was not especially prominent as a natural philosopher nor was he the main protagonist in the vis viva controversy?

3. Newton had not made it clear whether the forces acting between the planets and between the parts of matter acted at a distance or through some intervening medium called a(n) ________.

4. Which German metaphysician, when asked in 1785 if he believed he lived in an enlightened age, answered, "No, we are living in an age of enlightenment."

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

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 659 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample