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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does the child's life begin actually become serious according to Beauvoir?
(a) By learning which erases his ignorance.
(b) Through following the examples of role models.
(c) By restricting his actions to those that gain rewards.
(d) By feeling the consequences of poorly thought decisions.

2. What does Beauvoir require for an individual to genuinely desire an end in the present?
(a) An expected manipulation of the material world through the desired end.
(b) A recognition of consequences that will come through the desired end.
(c) A fulfillment of spontaneous desires over time.
(d) A desire for that end throughout his entire existence.

3. What does Beauvoir report to be the child's situation?
(a) He is subject to accept all things based upon what others tell him.
(b) He is cast into a universe which he has not helped to establish and appears as an absolute to which he can only submit.
(c) His ambiguity is compounded by his ignorance of right and wrong.
(d) He faces the reality that his freedom is continually reduced by his growing knowledge.

4. How does Beauvoir claim that the child develops the conviction of good and evil?
(a) Through pain and healing.
(b) Through joy and disappointment.
(c) Through observation and learning.
(d) Through punishments, prizes, words of praise or blame.

5. How does Beauvoir accuse Marxists of accepting moral superiority?
(a) By being suspicious of any bourgeois revolution.
(b) When Marxists find fault with their adversaries and charge them with cowardice, lying, selfishness, and venality.
(c) By morally condemning any member of the proletariat who does not participate in revolution.
(d) By considering any movement in which a Marxist is involved to be part of the revolution of the proletariat.

6. 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) The condition of children are forced upon them, but women choose their condition.
(c) Because of the voting privilege of Western societies, the opinions of women must be taken more seriously than children.
(d) Children have no instrument to attack the civilization which oppresses them, but women have their charm and guile.

7. 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 existence of God in defining the existence of man and the world.
(c) The role of the physical world on the development of a moral code.
(d) The role of a dualistic spiritual existence in directing passion.

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

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

10. What does Beauvoir suggest becomes the intellectual responsibility of existentialists who reject God?
(a) He has the responsibility of defining how works for self-benefit are also beneficial to his environs.
(b) He bears the responsibility to prove the lives of others have not affects on himself, starting with the union of his parents that brought his existence.
(c) He bears responsibility for a world which is not the work of strange power.
(d) He bears the responsibility to show his works for self-benefit do not affect others in his environs.

11. How does Beauvoir consider stubbornness in the face of an obstacle that is impossible to overcome?
(a) As the beginning of innovation.
(b) As that trial that brings experience.
(c) As stupidity.
(d) As the seed of innocent hope.

12. How does Beauvoir suggest that a child console himself when confronted with personal imperfection?
(a) By pinning his hopes on the future.
(b) By holding to ignorance so as not to have to explain his predicament.
(c) By denying the flaw and moving to his next goal.
(d) By blaming his problem on another child.

13. How does the "sub-man" submerge his freedom, according to Beauvoir?
(a) He accepts the ethics and expectations of society.
(b) He ignores the ambiguity of his existence.
(c) He avoids actions that have consequences.
(d) He refuses subjectivity in favor of predictability.

14. What does Beauvoir report to the the qualities of God that establishes moral standards?
(a) A moral code from God constricts believers to live within boundaries.
(b) A God can pardon, efface and compensate.
(c) A moral code from God contributes to establishing a moral consensus that directs thought.
(d) A moral code given from God removes the demands from human minds to create one.

15. What comes to the individual at the point he begins to notice the conflicts of the adult world, according to Beauvoir?
(a) The individual can pursue freedom or seriousness.
(b) The individual must at last assume his subjectivity.
(c) The individual faces the daunting challenge of pursuing ethics that have none of the inconsistencies that have plagued societies through history.
(d) The individual has the choice of holding to existentialist myths or accepting his ambiguity.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Beauvoir compare women to slaves?

2. According to Beauvoir, how is freedom present within the drama of choice?

3. What does Beauvoir identify as the irony of the serious man?

4. What is the point at which existentialism is opposed to dialectic materialism according to Beauvoir?

5. Who does Beauvoir use as an example of moving through such obstacles?

(see the answer keys)

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