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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 2, Personal Freedom and Others.

Multiple Choice Questions

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

2. In what way does Beauvoir consider nihilistic thinking to be right?
(a) In understanding the future will be marked by violence.
(b) In understanding the obstacles that come from a complex world.
(c) In realizing that peace is punctuated by oppression and revolution.
(d) In thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing.

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

4. How does human spontaneity give purpose to a human life, according to Beauvoir?
(a) By the fact the spontaneous act of an individual draws a response from others.
(b) By spontaneity always projecting itself toward something.
(c) By spontaneous acts require conscious evaluation to determine their usefulness.
(d) By spontaneous acts have affects in a physical world.

5. What is the point at which existentialism is opposed to dialectic materialism according to Beauvoir?
(a) Where intellectual and bourgeois revolutions are considered suspiciously by the proletariat.
(b) Where subjectivity and objectivity become equally determined by the revolt of the proletariat.
(c) When the proletariat universally works to eliminate its class.
(d) Where revolt, need, hope, rejection, and desire are only the resultants of external forces.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Beauvoir claim comes of an accomplished act that is left behind by an individual?

2. To what does Beauvoir compare the "sub-man"?

3. What does Beauvoir suggest becomes the intellectual responsibility of existentialists who reject God?

4. By quoting Dostoyevsky ("If God does not exist, then everything is permitted"), what examination does Beauvoir make?

5. How does Beauvoir suggest a child has a state of security?

(see the answer key)

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