RC: Art, Literary and Criticism - 2 | Verbal Ability (VA) & Reading Comprehension (RC) - CAT PDF Download

Passage 

Direction: The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.
It is an unfortunate fact that most North Americans know little about American Indian culture and history. Scholars have studied such matters, but they have not succeeded in broadcasting their conclusions widely. Thus, it is still not widely known that American Indians have epics, that they performed plays long before Europeans arrived, and that they practiced politics and carried on trade.
One way to gain a fuller appreciation of this rich culture is to examine American Indian poetry, for poetry is in all cultures the most central and articulate of the arts. It is especially important that we study American Indian poetry as this poetry can create a context that gives cohesive expression to the crafts, the artifacts, and the isolated facts that many Americans have managed to notice willy-nilly . Even a survey of American Indian poetry reveals a range of poetic thought and technique that defies easy generalization. Jarold Ramsey hazards a summary, however, which serves at least to give the uninitiated reader some sense of what American Indian poetry is like. Overall, he writes, it represents “an oral, formulaic, traditional, and anonymous art form,” whose approach is to emphasize the “mythic and sacred” components of reality. It “flourished through public performances... by skilled recitalists whose audiences already knew the individual stories” and valued the performers for their “ability to exploit their material dramatically and to combine them ?their stories? in longer cycles” rather than for their “plot invention.” Because this poetry belongs to highly ethnocentric tribal peoples, whose cultures “we still do not know much about,” it “is likely to seem all the more terse, even cryptic.”
American Indian poetry has another feature that Ramsey ignores: it is always functional. Whether sung, chanted, or recited; whether performed ceremonially, as entertainment, or as part of a task such as curing a patient or grinding corn; or whether recited individually or by a group, it is always fully woven into the fabric of ordinary life.
For complicated reasons, American Indian poetry has basically been ignored by non-Indian cultures. Kenneth Lincoln writes that failure to hear American Indian voices results “partly...from the tragedies of tribal dislocation, partly from mistranslation, partly from misconceptions about literature, partly from cultural indifference.” Brian Swann suggests an additional explanation: tribal poetry is oral, whereas Europeans arrived in the New World with a deeply ingrained belief in the primacy of the written word. As a result, European settles found it hard to imagine that poetry could exist without written texts and thus that the American Indians had achieved something parallel to what Europeans called literature long before Europeans arrived. As a consequence, Europeans did not fully respond to the rich vitality of American Indian poetry.
Q1: According to the passage, American Indian cultures have produced all of the following forms of artistic expression EXCEPT
(a) Crafts
(b) Dramas
(c) Songs
(d) Written poems
(e) Oral epics

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Q2: According to Kenneth Lincoln, one of the reasons that non-Indians have had little knowledge of American Indian poetry is that American Indian poems
(a) Have been poorly translated
(b) Have not yet attracted the scholarly attention they deserve
(c) Can be appreciated only when presented orally
(d) Are difficult to understand without a background in comparative mythology
(e) Are too stylistically complex

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Q3: According to the passage, it would be unusual for American Indian poetry to be
(a) Attributed to specific authors
(b) Sung by a group of performers
(c) Chanted while working
(d) Sung during a sacred ceremony
(e) Performed in a dramatic manner

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Q4: The tone of lines 12-16 suggests that the author believes that most Americans’ knowledge of American Indian culture can best be characterized as
(a) Spotty and contradictory
(b) Stereotyped and limited
(c) Confused and inaccurate
(d) Unsystematic and superficial
(e) Vague and biased

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Q5: Which of the following best describes the organization of the last paragraph of the passage?
(a) An observation is made and qualifications of it are provided.
(b) A phenomenon is noted and explanations for it are presented.
(c) A hypothesis is presented and arguments against it are cited.
(d) A prognosis is made and evidence supporting it is discussed.
(e) A criticism is presented and information expanding it is provided.

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