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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. In the face of emerging violence of man's growing mastery of the world, what does Beauvoir suggest to individuals who seek to navigate it?
(a) To seek to understand God's role in the growing environment of violence.
(b) To accept the insignificance of the individual as a means of embracing individual ambiguity.
(c) To discontinue to attempt to keep up with the changes going on in the world.
(d) To assume and know the condition of our fundamental ambiguity.

2. In the challenge for those who suffer more than one oppressor, what answer does Beauvoir offer?
(a) Overthrowing the oppressors is a matter of opportunity and efficiency.
(b) Only by generating full support of the masses could any of the oppressors be dispatched.
(c) Only by working with the least offensive of the oppressors could other oppressors be removed.
(d) The issue is moral, not political, and the moral consensus must be reached with at least one oppressor.

3. For whom do Beauvoir and Marx agree that the cause of freedom is most urgent?
(a) To the oppressed that it appears as immediately necessary.
(b) The unenlightened who does not realize their exploitation.
(c) The proletariat who is controlled by the bourgeois.
(d) Women who are unaware of the subjugation to men.

4. How does Beauvoir explain what Descartes meant when he said that the freedom of man is infinite, but this power is limited?
(a) The individual man has the power to follow his desires until his pursuit is obstructed by a more power man.
(b) That man is free to believe all things, but achieving them is subject to the physical universe.
(c) That man's mind has no limits in thought, but his physical body does not have the ability to follow the thoughts.
(d) That the will is defined only by raising obstacles and by the contingency of certain obstacles that let themselves be conquered and others that do not.

5. How does Beauvoir define materialist philosophers?
(a) Those who "see no life after this one".
(b) Those who "conceive all matter as eternal".
(c) Those who have "striven to reduce mind to matter".
(d) Those who see "no value in thought".

Short Answer Questions

1. How does human spontaneity give purpose to a human life, according to Beauvoir?

2. What is the illustration Beauvoir uses to prove her assertion of stubbornness in the face of impossibility?

3. What type of man does Beauvoir identify as being nihilistic?

4. What does Beauvoir suggest of movements whose means of achieving a goal contradicts the goal?

5. What does Beauvoir state is the goal at which her freedom aims?

(see the answer key)

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