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 can come to people who are filled with the horror of defeat?
(a) The face the transcendent moment at which they must face failure or freedom to act.
(b) They would keep themselves from ever doing anything.
(c) They must go back to their most recent success to retrace the steps of purpose.
(d) They reach the need to recall experience to make purpose of life.

2. What is the paradox with which Beauvoir closes Chapter One?
(a) "Man cannot know existence without first knowing his nothingness."
(b) Man is a being that, "in order to know the existence of achievement he must face the nothingness of failure."
(c) In order to fill his existence, man must assume himself as a being who, "makes himself a lack of being so that there might be being."
(d) Man as an individual is, "At once alone in himself which makes up the mass of universality."

3. How does Beauvoir introduce the role of God in the discussion of ethics?
(a) By suggesting the wide views of the nature of God actually makes God ambiguous.
(b) By pointing out that all ethics end up being an effort to define God.
(c) By pointing out that Sartre's view of existentialism ends with man attempting to make himself God.
(d) By considering the endless pursuit of pure ethics and the failure to achieve such places the power of judgement in the hands of God.

4. To what does Beauvoir compare the presence of freedom within the drama of choice?
(a) The arbitrariness of the grace distributed by God in Calvinistic Doctrine.
(b) The adolescent who sees the world constructed for him as a child is corrupt.
(c) The calm before the storm.
(d) The historian who chooses threads that take him to the original cause.

5. How does Beauvoir show how her example of moving through obstacles prove her arguments?
(a) She pointed out that Hitler had desires to rule the world in spite of the fact that he did not have the ability to take his navy outside of the North Sea.
(b) She explained that Adalai Stevenson believed his intellectualism would over come Dwight Eisenhower's popular reputation in two presidential elections.
(c) She asserted that Van Gogh, despite being institutionalized, integrated his his past as a painter and continued to communicate through his talent.
(d) She explained that Sisyphus was condemned to rolling the boulder up the mountain despite his the fact that it would roll back down once he got it to the top.