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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 3, The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity, Sections 4-5, The Present and the Future, Ambiguity and Conclusion.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Beauvoir claim to be the relationship between the serious and nihilism?
(a) Seriousness and nihilism both develop a narrow set of ethics based upon a relationship to achievement or lack of the same.
(b) Seriousness and nihilism focus on goals or the impossibility of reaching them to avoid accepting the freedom of ambiguity.
(c) The serious man often rallies to a partial nihilism, denying everything which is not its object.
(d) The serious man and nihilists dispute the purpose of those who do not support their goals.

2. What does Beauvoir claim a child can do due to his state of security?
(a) He can do with impunity whatever he likes.
(b) He can have all his needs provided without labor.
(c) He can create the world he wants to exist.
(d) He can choose a direction in which he desires to remove his ignorance.

3. What role does time play what Beauvoir identifies as the ability to will oneself free?
(a) The goal of freedom is pursued and confirmed in time.
(b) Time is required for the individual to understand that he is free.
(c) The individual uses time to manipulate the physical world to exercise his freedom.
(d) Time allows the accumulation of spontaneous acts to define their direction.

4. What is the illustration Beauvoir uses to prove her assertion of stubbornness in the face of impossibility?
(a) Beating her fist upon a stone.
(b) The sapling that grows through a sidewalk.
(c) The deaths that preceded the first successful climb of Mt. Everest.
(d) The development of the airplane.

5. Beauvoir claims that critics of existentialism claim that it is solipsistic. What is solipsism?
(a) The theory that life is replicated on many planets in many worlds.
(b) The theory that only the physical life exists and matter is eternal.
(c) The theory that life is nothing more than a creation in the mind of God.
(d) The theory that only the self (mind) exists or can be proven to exist.

Short Answer Questions

1. What are the four items that Beauvoir identifies as the "indefinite conquests of existence over being"?

2. In what way does Beauvoir consider nihilistic thinking to be right?

3. How does Beauvoir characterize the response of Western women when the structures that shelter them seem to be in danger?

4. How does Beauvoir explain that the Marxist paradox lends to her theory the scheme of man is ambiguous?

5. What does Beauvoir seek to prove regarding man's mastery of the world?

(see the answer key)

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