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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Who wrote the sonnet "The World Is Too Much With Us"?
(a) William Wordsworth.
(b) Ernest Gellner.
(c) Stanislaw Lem.
(d) Ian Hacking.

2. The author asserts in Part II, Section 8, "Where it concerns human beings, it is almost always true that the more anxiously we look for purity the more likely we are to come upon" what (108)?
(a) "Fear and sorrow."
(b) "Nature."
(c) "Admixture and interbreeding."
(d) "Stress and anxiety."

3. Who wrote of coal mines, "the militancy that formed in these workplaces was typically an effort to defend this autonomy" (74)?
(a) Stanislaw Lem.
(b) Ian Hacking.
(c) Franco Moretti.
(d) Timothy Mitchell.

4. Who was Mary Godwin's stepsister with whom Lord Byron had a brief affair in England?
(a) Claire.
(b) Mary.
(c) Sarah.
(d) Emma.

5. What author did Lionel Trilling famously dismiss as one who thought "like a social function, not a novelist" (79-80)?
(a) Franco Moretti.
(b) John Steinbeck.
(c) Ian Hacking.
(d) Stanislaw Lem.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who announced in 1964, "The humanist intellectual is, essentially, an expert on the written world" (84)?

2. When does the author describe marching in a massive antiwar demonstration in New York in Part III, Section 2?

3. When did the Kosi River disaster in Bihar occur?

4. Who wrote Frankenstein?

5. What anthropologist wrote How Forests Think?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why is Mary Shelley discussed in Part I, Section 15?

2. What was the Registry Act?

3. How does Bruno Latour define modernity?

4. How is "climate fiction" defined and who are some of the authors of this genre discussed in the book?

5. What is noted from the manual Classic of the Waterways of Sichuan in Part II, Section 5?

6. When did Mount Tambora erupt? How is this event described?

7. What does the author write of the universalist premise of industrial civilization?

8. When did China undergo a "medieval economic revolution" (98) according to the author in Part II, Section 5? What were the impacts of this revolution?

9. How does the author describe the motivations for the push for oil consumption over coal in Part I, Section 17?

10. Who wrote the sonnet "The World is Too Much With Us" and why does the author discuss it in the book?

(see the answer keys)

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