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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. In their relation to their world, to whom does Paz compare Mexicans?

2. What makes the foreigner skeptical about Mexicans (Chapter Four)?

3. Why did Catholicism drastically change the Aztec view of life?

4. Where does Paz state that the Mexican's indifference hides his life force?

5. Paz says that during critical moments in a nation's development, the people ask themselves a critical question. What is that question?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the greatest horror that a worker suffers? Do you think that is true?

2. What mutual problem do both the Mexican and the North American face? What is the solution to that problem?

3. What is the Mexican's ideal of manliness? How does it affect his interactions with other people?

4. How important are fiestas in Mexican culture? What relationship exists between the fiesta and the individual?

5. In Chapter Three, the following idea is presented: "There is nothing so joyous as a Mexican fiesta, but there is also nothing so sorrowful. Fiesta night is also a night of mourning" (Chapter 3, page 53). What does that mean?

6. What is the world of terrorism like? How is it different from the past world of conquest and war?

7. What group of people did the author have in mind as he wrote the book? How and why did those people become important to him?

8. Why does the Mexican love Form? Other than in personal relationships, how does that idea express itself?

9. What is Paz's understanding of woman? How does it fit the Mexican mindset?

10. Who represents the conflict that Mexicans have not been able to solve? What effect does that conflict have on their culture?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What are the gender roles explained throughout the book? Given the culture and the time, what are the gender expectations? Who acts against those expectations?

Essay Topic 2

Use this quote as the foundation for your essay: "We have been expelled from the center of the world, and are condemned to search for it through jungles and deserts or in the underground mazes of the labyrinth.

Essay Topic 3

Spain accepted all forms of the Renaissance and then closed itself off to further influence. How did that affect the Conquest? How does that continue to affect Mexico's philosophical and religious development?

(see the answer keys)

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