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Flashcards: Language in Contemporary Life Passages
"Conservatism" by Matthew Minerd (2013)
In American politics, there is perhaps no word that is more over-simplified than “conservative.” Many people use this term as though it has a single meaning and expresses a single historical-political outlook. Nothing could be further from the truth. The development of American conservatism must be understood as a combination of a number of strands of ideology that often coexist with great tension and difficulty. Although there are many groups that are combined in this larger assortment, two examples will suffice to show the great diversity present in this seemingly simple group.
For instance, there are the “traditionalist conservatives,” who generally are concerned with preserving Western culture and tradition against the developments of modern thought and culture. In many ways, this type of conservatism is the most “conserving”; that is, traditionalists are primarily concerned with maintaining the “old order” of Western civilization and learning. Because of these concerns, the traditionalist conservatives are very wary of any kind of major governmental program that promises to bring a “new order” into existence. While not disagreeing with the idea of progress, these conservatives believe that any such changes should occur organically, in a natural manner over a period of years.
On the other hand, there are also the “libertarians," who are often classed as “conservatives” as well. They are surprisingly different from the traditionalist conservatives. The libertarians are primarily concerned with maximizing freedom and limiting the role of government in individual lives. In many ways, they represent the kind of modern individualism disagreed with by the traditionalists.
These two opposed groups are able to come together in the general notion of “conservatism” because of their shared attitudes toward the government, particularly the federal government. The traditionalists wish to limit the role of the federal government out of a fear that it will ruin traditional culture through radically new plans and agendas. The libertarians seek to limit it out of a desire to give individual citizens maximum freedom of choice and action. While these two branches of “conservatism” are in many ways opposed to each other, they somehow manage to coexist along with many other positions that are all called “conservative” in spite of similarly striking differences.
What does the underlined expression “strands of ideology” mean in its context?
Rope-like thinking that is different and inconsistent
Long discussions on matters that are very complicated
Opposed, warring factions
Opposed groups who have no desire to be in communication
Distinct groups with different beliefs
All ISEE Middle Level Reading Resources
The ISEE Middle Level examination includes a section of Reading Comprehensions questions that test the young student’s abilities to apply his or her analytic skills to prose passages from various genres. The purpose of this section is to provide potential admissions boards with a metric for judging the overall linguistic and logical reasoning skills of the young applicant. Although such abilities do not represent the whole of one’s intelligence or academic prowess, they do represent an important part of the overall application to competitive schools. Generally speaking, such skills of analysis and comprehension are not limited in applicability only to literature and compositional studies. Indeed, this fact is acknowledged by the variety of passages topics used by the ISEE exam writers, who include not only literary passages among those presented in the examination, but also passages about the sciences, current affairs, and history. By offering a differentiated group of passage types, the exam attempts to test the general skills of students instead of focusing on one particular type of passage to the detriment of others.
The overall thrust of the exam’s questioning looks to ascertain the test-taker’s ability to understand the content of a given passage as a synoptic whole and then to analyze how that whole is held together as a composition made up of discrete parts. Some of the questions ask the young student to identify main themes, the conclusions of arguments, and the outcomes that are implied by a passage’s main arguments. Likewise, the section asks questions about the overall viewpoint of the author as expressed in the whole of the passage. All such inquiries help to test the young student’s ability to grasp the passage as a formal whole.
In addition to such comprehensive and synoptic questioning, the Middle Level ISEE’s Reading Comprehension section also looks to ascertain the young student’s overall logical reasoning abilities as evidenced by his or her skills at noting the general structure of argumentation in passages. This sort of questioning is more analytical in character, making various inquiries of the student regarding the reasoning used by the author of a given passage. They ask the student to identify elements of the passage’s sequence and structure, noting the way that it has been constructed as a series of interrelated logical stages. Such examination helps to show the young student’s ability to identify logical patterns and attests to his or her general skills in reasoning—skills that are critical to every kind of academic undertaking.
Finally, the examination tests less “tangible” abilities such as skills at recognizing and interpreting non-literal language. Such questions ask the student to note figurative uses of language as well as the stylistic variants utilized by authors. These questions provide an important final examination point, testing the student’s ability to understand the logic of meaning transference as well as the ways that language can be used to express multiple levels of communication at once.
