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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Boorstin say Moses introduced into Western culture?
(a) The idea of human sacrifice.
(b) The idea of a single omnipotent creator.
(c) The notion of eternal reoccurrence.
(d) The idea of original sin.

2. What does Paul Valery say the artist's business is in the epigraph to Book 1?
(a) To do God's will.
(b) To make something out of nothing.
(c) To free man from God.
(d) To create gods.

3. What does Abbé Suger say about how spirits can raise themselves to eternal things in the epigraph to Part 6?
(a) That it happens on its own.
(b) That it requires symbolic death, again and again.
(c) That it requires symbols of beauty.
(d) That it requires renunciation of the world.

4. What does Boorstin say Christianity got people to see?
(a) The nature of divinity.
(b) Time as cyclical.
(c) The future.
(d) Heaven.

5. What did Saint Ambrose invent?
(a) Colored printing.
(b) Christian architecture.
(c) Christian hymns.
(d) Stained glass windows.

6. What are hieroglyphs?
(a) Symbols of a dead language.
(b) A pictorial language.
(c) An early alphabet.
(d) No one knows.

7. What does Virginia Woolf say, in the second epigraph to Part 7, about writing?
(a) That writing is a weak man's refuge from the tyranny of events.
(b) That writing is just the poor afterimage of a lived reality.
(c) That a thing has not happened until it has been described.
(d) That written accounts are only valuable in settling disputes between people.

8. What is Boorstin's subject in The Creators?
(a) How mankind has come to face the question of its own survival.
(b) How mankind has invented itself.
(c) How mankind has manipulated its environment.
(d) How mankind has progressed through the ages.

9. Of what does Stonehenge consist?
(a) Numerous figures carved in chalk on hillsides.
(b) An elongated cross.
(c) A stone temple and courtyard.
(d) Two circles of stones.

10. What did Thespis invent, according to Boorstin?
(a) Comedy.
(b) Tragedy.
(c) Poetry.
(d) Drama.

11. What fear did St. Ambrose's creation allay?
(a) Of drabness in church literature.
(b) Of unsuitable music entering the church.
(c) Of buildings that rendered prayer impossible.
(d) Of unseemly literature entering the church canon.

12. What does Byron say a sculptor should do in the epigraph to Part 4?
(a) Exceed his model.
(b) Capture his model.
(c) Perfect his model.
(d) Leave some flaw by which the work could be distinguished from the model.

13. Of what is The Odyssey a parable according to Boorstin?
(a) The mystery of language.
(b) The mystery of warfare.
(c) The mystery of death.
(d) The mystery of creation.

14. To what use did Romans put sculpture according to Boorstin?
(a) Holding up buildings.
(b) Memorializing the dead.
(c) Marking territories.
(d) Teaching anatomy.

15. What does the dome of the Pantheon proclaim according to Boorstin?
(a) Man's ability to enclose a sacred precinct.
(b) Man's ability to provide houses for his gods.
(c) Man's ability to defy gravity in building.
(d) Man's ability to fill a void with his own creation.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the source of the epigraph that opens The Creators?

2. What does Boorstin say man discovered in Section 24: The Birth of the Spectator?

3. Of what are Chaucer's Canterbury Tales comprised?

4. What does Boorstin see in men making images of men?

5. How long was it before Gothic art changed the style of European art and architecture in Boorstin's account?

(see the answer keys)

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