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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. 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.
(a) Statistics.
(b) Geometry.
(c) Arithmetic.
(d) Calculus.

2. According to Chapter 1, who made Newton into a supreme rationalist whose laws of motion were a priori deductions of pure thought?
(a) Maupertuis.
(b) Fontenelle.
(c) Roberts.
(d) Marquis de l'Hopital.

3. Who became the leading literary figure of the Enlightenment and in 1734 published "Philosophical Letters"?
(a) Newton.
(b) Voltaire.
(c) Breteuil.
(d) Chatelet.

4. The conversion of 'sGravesande confused the ideological debate because he was one of the leading supporters of ________ philosophy on the Continent.
(a) Aristotlian.
(b) Newtonian.
(c) Voltairian.
(d) Platoian.

5. 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."
(a) Immanuel Kant.
(b) Chatelet.
(c) Diderot.
(d) Maupertuis.

Short Answer Questions

1. In Chapter 3, who noticed that when he pulled off his silk socks in the evening, "they frequently made a crackling or snapping noise" and emitted "sparks of fire"?

2. 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"?

3. Who claimed a community of atheists could live a completely moral existence, according to Chapter 1 of the book "Science and the Enlightenment"?

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

5. In 1729, ________, a dedicated amateur experimenter and occasional contributor to the "Philosophical Transactions" of the Royal Society, discovered that electricity could be communicated over rather long distances by contact.

Short Essay Questions

1. Discuss Charles Francois de Cisternai Dufay and his impact in electrical science.

2. Discuss the electrical experiments of Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Gray and Abbe Jean Antoine Nollet.

3. What did Leibniz argue in regards to the mechanical philosophy of the Enlightenment?

4. Discuss the origin of the study of electricity.

5. Who redefined physics in the 1720s? Explain.

6. Discuss the periodic fluctuation Bradley found in 1748.

7. What was the meaning of experimental physics at the end of the Enlightenment? Why is important that the meaning of experimental physics had changed?

8. Briefly explain the major philosopher of method in France in the eighteenth century.

9. Explain how the laws of nature were to be discovered by experimentation and observation.

10. Discuss how nature and reason tied into the Enlightenment.

(see the answer keys)

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