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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What refers to the process or fact of personally observing, encountering, or undergoing something?
(a) Pseudo-experience.
(b) Reality.
(c) Experience.
(d) Action.

2. When was Publishers' Weekly first published?
(a) 1959.
(b) 1872.
(c) 1849.
(d) 1805.

3. In Chapter 6, Boorstin suggests that the greatest challenge Americans are now dealing with is what?
(a) Foreign affairs.
(b) Illusion.
(c) Reality.
(d) Advertising.

4. What refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s?
(a) Dirt fiction.
(b) Dime store fiction.
(c) Romance fiction.
(d) Pulp fiction.

5. Boorstin writes that the amount of dissociation has become so absolute that what no longer feels real?
(a) The media.
(b) The natural.
(c) The pseudo-event.
(d) The pseudo-reality.

6. Boorstin writes in Chapter 6 - Section III, "We fill our lives not with experience but with the ____ of experience."
(a) Archetypes.
(b) Ideals.
(c) Images.
(d) Stereotypes.

7. What is the science of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics?
(a) Media studies.
(b) Aestheics.
(c) Anaesthetics.
(d) Linguistics.

8. Where is Reader's Digest based?
(a) New York, New York.
(b) Chappaqua, New York.
(c) Portland, Oregon.
(d) San Francisco, California.

9. What refers to a single complete page, front and back, in a finished book?
(a) Double.
(b) Leaf.
(c) Press page.
(d) Single.

10. What is the second characteristic of the image, according to Boorstin?
(a) It is believable.
(b) It is simplified.
(c) It is synthetic.
(d) It is ambiguous.

11. What is the third characteristic of the image, according to Boorstin?
(a) It is ambiguous.
(b) It is synthetic.
(c) It is passive.
(d) It is believable.

12. What refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 large professional theaters with 500 seats or more located in the Theater District, New York?
(a) Main Stage.
(b) SoHo.
(c) Broadway.
(d) West End.

13. Boorstin claims that in the effort to make art and literature accessible to all, these forms of expression were what?
(a) Diminished.
(b) Embellished.
(c) Disembodied.
(d) Destroyed.

14. What Muzak designer suggested that his company was more the business of programming than the business of music?
(a) Adolf Zukor.
(b) Donald O'Neill.
(c) Carl Laemmle.
(d) James Morrison.

15. The first aspect of successful advertising discussed by Boorstin in Chapter 5 - Section IV is what?
(a) Ambiguity.
(b) Appeal of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
(c) Appeal of the half-intelligible.
(d) Appeal of the contrived.

Short Answer Questions

1. When was Reader's Digest founded?

2. What is the name of a small press capable of printing small-format pieces such as billheads, letterheads, business cards, and envelopes?

3. What type of book binding begins with the signatures of the book as loose pages which are then clamped together?

4. What refers to something that exists independently of ideas concerning it?

5. What system does Boorstin assert affected "traditional forms of achievement," in Chapter 4 - Section VIII?

(see the answer keys)

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