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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

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 do with impunity whatever he likes.
(c) He can choose a direction in which he desires to remove his ignorance.
(d) He can have all his needs provided without labor.

2. Although Beauvoir reports that existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity, what does she claim to be existentialism's fundamental flaw?
(a) Existentialism is essentially taken by individuals seeking to pursue what is normally antisocial and contributes to the violence of mastery of nature.
(b) It is so deeply ambiguous that its true understanding cannot be achieved.
(c) It is incapable of furnishing any principle for making choices.
(d) Its true ambiguity is superficial since it has no moral code.

3. How does Beauvoir characterize the response of Western women when the structures that shelter them seem to be in danger?
(a) They become detached and unemotional.
(b) They become harder, more bitter and even more furious or cruel than their masters.
(c) They become confused and bewildered to the point of despair.
(d) They drive themselves further into the subjection that makes them child like.

4. What does Beauvoir identify as the spirit of seriousness?
(a) Leaving the fallacy of materialists that only matter matters.
(b) To consider values as ready-made things.
(c) Leaving the fallacy of existentialism that only thought matters.
(d) Facing the reality that the fate of all is the grave.

5. How does Beauvoir compare southern slaves to children?
(a) By comparing their faith in a heavenly afterlife to the fantasy world that children create in their minds.
(b) By comparing their obedience to the slave owner to that of children to adults in their lives.
(c) By comparing the ignorance of their condition to the ignorance of children to the realities of the world.
(d) By comparing hopes for freedom to the a child's hope for the future.

6. What does Beauvoir claim comes of the man who does not use his the necessary instruments to escape the lie of his serious life that prevents his freedom?
(a) He becomes a "sub-man" who has no more purpose in existing than pebbles or trees.
(b) He slips back into the defined existence of a child.
(c) He is condemned to living a life in which all his ethics, morality, and decisions are made for him.
(d) He is no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist party.

7. How does Beauvoir compare women to slaves?
(a) By pointing out that women are subject to the laws, gods, customs, and truths created by males.
(b) By pointing out that women create an existence in their minds that escapes the reality of the world around them.
(c) By pointing out that women base their success on the contentment of their families.
(d) By pointing out that many women choose to be ignorant of the condition of the world.

8. What prevents a moral question from presenting itself to the child according to Beauvoir?
(a) The misunderstanding of spontaneity and affects.
(b) Ignorance of consequences.
(c) A lack of perspective to see himself in the past or seeing himself in the future.
(d) Ignorance of the physical world.

9. What does Beauvoir state is the goal at which her freedom aims?
(a) "Understanding the difference between delusion, denial, and stone pounding to affirm true existence."
(b) "Rejecting the verdicts of doubters and seeing the possibility of achieving ends through obstacles."
(c) "Seeing the doors of defeat before initiating and act."
(d) "...(C)onquering existence across the always inadequate density of being."

10. What claim of existentialists does Beauvoir offer in defense of detractors to existentialism?
(a) Bouvoir claims that existentialists offer their detractors important challenges to prove their theories.
(b) Bouvoir claims that existentialists help to accentuate the strengths of other theories.
(c) Bouvoir claims that existentialists give focus to the importance of matter in reality.
(d) Bouvoir claims that existentialists believe that the world is willed by man, insofar as his will expresses his genuine reality.

11. What relationship does Beauvoir identify between ethics and facticity?
(a) Ethics cannot exist without facticity upon which to base them.
(b) Ethics are the spawn of facticity.
(c) Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.
(d) Ethics is the ambiguous manipulation of facticity.

12. How does Beauvoir identify dualism?
(a) They are thinkers that believe that the only two human values are life and death.
(b) They are thinkers that establish a hierarchy between body and soul.
(c) They are thinkers that claim that each individual is destined to live a brief physical life and an eternal spiritual life.
(d) They are thinkers that set to prove that each life has a dual existence in a different dimension.

13. During their stage of freedom, how does Beauvoir claim that a child sees adults?
(a) As divinities.
(b) As physically threatening.
(c) As fanciful projections of their uninhibited minds.
(d) As benevolent dictators that provide their needs.

14. By quoting Dostoyevsky ("If God does not exist, then everything is permitted"), what examination does Beauvoir make?
(a) The role of an external moral code in extinguishing passions.
(b) The role of the physical world on the development of a moral code.
(c) The role of a dualistic spiritual existence in directing passion.
(d) The role of the existence of God in defining the existence of man and the world.

15. How does Beauvoir explain the differences between the conditions of Western women from that of children?
(a) Western women have left the life of children to accept the serious life.
(b) Because of the voting privilege of Western societies, the opinions of women must be taken more seriously than children.
(c) The condition of children are forced upon them, but women choose their condition.
(d) Children have no instrument to attack the civilization which oppresses them, but women have their charm and guile.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Beauvoir claim that Marxists consider man's actions to be valid?

2. What does Beauvoir require for an individual to genuinely desire an end in the present?

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

4. How does Beauvoir characterize the fate of the "sub-man"?

5. How does Beauvoir explain that the serious man becomes a dangerous tyrant?

(see the answer keys)

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