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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 mean when she writes, "...festivals whose role is to stop the movement of transcendence?"
(a) The end has been set up as an end.
(b) Festivals marking a movement's success obscure the means used to attain the success.
(c) Festivals become both a means and an end to obscure the meaninglessness of both the present and the future.
(d) Festivals take people away from their future ambiguity.

2. What are the two clans that Beauvoir claims to come from oppression?
(a) Those who escape into their aesthetic only to allow their oppressive ideas to penetrate reality and subject the freedom of others to mechanically toil to satisfy their needs.
(b) The oppressors and the oppressed.
(c) Those who believe their status allows them the freedom to oppress and those whose freedom is taken for the benefit of those of status.
(d) Those who enlighten mankind by thrusting it ahead of itself, and those who are condemned to mark time hopelessly.

3. If an individual does not inform a slave of his oppression, what does Beauvoir suggest of their position regarding tyranny?
(a) The individual who remains silent regarding tyranny assumes the Aesthetic Attitude.
(b) The individual who remains silent regarding tyranny is complicit in tyranny.
(c) The individual who remains silent regarding tyranny loses his will to be free.
(d) The individual who remains silent regarding tyranny becomes a tyrant himself.

4. What does Beauvoir recognize as the paradox that faces a man who is willing to fight for a valid cause?
(a) Man can only assure better life by causing death to those who would destroy it.
(b) Only sacrifice can lead to achievement.
(c) No action can be generated for man without its being immediately generated against men.
(d) The only way a man can make an important gain is to sacrifice something equally important.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Beauvoir compare the present to the future?

2. What explanation does Beauvoir give to assert that existentialist thought helps to build community.

3. Upon what does Beauvoir claim existence is based?

4. At what point does Beauvoir claim an individual has the ability to decide and choose?

5. In the challenge for those who suffer more than one oppressor, what answer does Beauvoir offer?

(see the answer key)

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