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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. 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 life.
(d) Century of reason.

2. ________'s emphasis on the repulsive or expansive property of air, led naturally to an emphasis on the expansive properties of the even more subtle fluids of heat and electricity.
(a) Musschenbroek.
(b) Hales.
(c) Aristotle.
(d) Boerhaave.

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

4. In Chapter 2, what was the name of the shape of a chain suspended between two fixed points?
(a) Isoperimeters.
(b) Catenary.
(c) Involute.
(d) Tractrix.

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) Descartes.
(b) Poleni.
(c) Galileo.
(d) Voltaire.

Short Answer 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.

2. 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"?

3. 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"?

4. Throughout the Enlightenment, reason was usually extolled in the same breath with ________, the other key word of the Enlightenment.

5. 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?

Short Essay Questions

1. What were the proponents of blunt rods which where used in the study of electricity? Who led the proponents of blunt rods? Explain.

2. What prompted the versions of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century? Give an example.

3. Discuss the two concepts that were studied in rational mechanics during the Enlightenment.

4. Discuss the study of physics in the beginning of the Enlightenment.

5. What advantage did natural philosophy have over other literary pursuits? Explain.

6. Discuss the ideology of the Enlightenment on natural philosophers. Who was France's main natural philosopher? Explain.

7. How did the eighteenth century define analysis? Explain.

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

9. What did the French call the eighteenth century? Explain.

10. Explain how mathematics and mechanics advanced through the study of curves.

(see the answer keys)

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