Let’s return once again to the four mini-passages from the first section, but this time view them with an eye toward the kinds of questions that would probably be included with each on Test Day.
One of the first examples of the ascendance of abstraction in 20th-century art is the Dada movement, which Lowenthal dubbed “the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art…and the movement that laid the foundation for surrealism.” Dadaism was ultimately premised on a philosophical rejection of the dominant culture, which is to say the dominating culture of colonialist Europe. Not content with the violent exploitation of other peoples, Europe’s ruling factions once again turned inward, reigniting provincial disputes into the conflagration that came to be known by the Eurocentric epithet “World War I”—the European subcontinent apparently being the only part of the world that mattered.
The absurd destructiveness of the Great War was a natural prelude to the creative absurdity of Dada. Is it any wonder that the rejection of reason made manifest by senseless atrocities should lead to the embrace of irrationality and disorder among the West’s subaltern artistic communities? Marcel Janco, one of the first Dadaists, cited this rationale: “We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa.” Thus, we find the overturning of what was once considered art: a urinal becomes the Fountain after Marcel Duchamp signs it “R. Mutt” in 1917, the nonsense syllables of Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters transform into “sound poems,” and dancers in cardboard cubist costumes accompanied by foghorns and typewriters metamorphosize into the ballet Parade. Unsurprisingly, many commentators, including founding members, have described Dada as an “anti-art” movement. Notwithstanding such a designation, Dadaism has left a lasting imprint on modern Western art.
Because this passage is relatively heavy on opinion, expect to see questions that require identifying what the author would agree or disagree with. So, for instance, it’s clear this author has a negative opinion of European colonialism and warfare, but a positive opinion of Dada—which is not so surprising because this art is supposedly a rejection of those tendencies in European culture. A more difficult opinion to untangle might be the one at the very end: the author attributes the view to many commentators that Dadaism is “anti-art,” yet the author uses a Difference keyword (Notwithstanding) to signal disagreement with that conclusion, which is consistent with the author’s use of the word art to refer to Dada, such as in the very first sentence.
This passage is also abundant in details, so expect Detail questions, described in Chapter 9 of MCAT CARS Review, which require you to comb through the passage searching for particular bits from the text.
What this passage lacks is much in the way of support, aside from quotations presumably coming from an art scholar, in the first paragraph, and an artist, one of the first Dadaists, in the second. Because you can still expect to see questions on reasoning accompanying any passage, it’s quite likely that they’ll bring in new elements to account for the relative dearth of evidence.
Passages with a lack of support or argumentation are likely to include Reasoning Beyond the Text questions, which bring in a new element of information and ask you to apply the information in the passage to a new scenario (Apply questions) or ask how the new information would impact the passage (Strengthen–Weaken [Beyond the Text] questions). These question types are discussed in Chapter 11 of MCAT CARS Review.
The most prevalent argument against doctor-assisted suicide relies upon a distinction between passive and active euthanasia—in essence, the difference between killing someone and letting that person die. On this account, a physician is restricted by her Hippocratic oath to do no harm and thus cannot act in ways that would inflict the ultimate harm, death. In contrast, failing to resuscitate an individual who is dying is permitted because this would be only an instance of refraining from help and not a willful cause of harm. The common objection to this distinction, that it is vague and therefore difficult to apply, does not carry much weight. After all, applying ethical principles of any sort to the complexities of the world is an enterprise fraught with imprecision.
Rather, the fundamental problem with the distinction is that it is not an ethically relevant one, readily apparent in the following thought experiment. Imagine a terminally ill patient hooked up to an unusual sort of life support device, one that only functioned to prevent a separate “suicide machine” from administering a lethal injection so long as the doctor pressed a button on it once per day. Would there be any relevant difference between using the suicide machine directly and not using the prevention device? The intention of the doctor would be the same (fulfilling the patient’s wish to die), and the effect would be the same (an injection causing the patient’s death). The only variance here is the means by which the effect comes about, and this is not an ethical difference but merely a technical one.
This passage repeatedly uses an Opposition keyword, distinction, so expect to see questions requiring you to understand the basic conceptual difference between active and passive euthanasia. The author’s characterization of this as not an ethical difference but merely a technical one at the end of the passage is particularly likely to be important because it includes an additional opposition: ethical vs. technical differences.
The numerous Logic keywords mean you can also anticipate questions that ask about the author’s argumentative structure called Strengthen–Weaken (Within the Passage) questions. These are discussed in Chapter 10 of MCAT CARS Review. Notice the author’s use of an appeal to the reader’s imagination by means of a thought experiment—this is definitely ripe for questioning.
There is no shortage of evidence for the existence of systemic biases in ordinary human reasoning. For instance, Kahneman and Tversky in their groundbreaking 1974 work proposed the existence of a heuristic—an error-prone shortcut in reasoning—known as “anchoring.” In one of their most notable experiments, participants were exposed to the spin of a roulette wheel (specially rigged to land randomly on one of only two possible results) before being asked to guess what percentage of United Nations member states were African. The half of the sample who had the roulette wheel stop at 65 guessed, on average, that 45% of the UN was African, while those with a result of 10 guessed only 25%, demonstrating that prior presentation of a random number otherwise unconnected to a quantitative judgment can still influence that judgment.
The anchoring effect has been observed on repeated other occasions, such as in Dan Ariely’s experiment that used digits in Social Security numbers as an anchor for bids at an auction, and in the 1996 study by Wilson et al. that showed even awareness of the existence of anchoring bias is insufficient to mitigate its effects. The advertising industry has long been aware of this bias, the rationale for its frequent practice of featuring an “original” price before showing a “sale” price that is invariably reduced. Of course, anchoring is hardly alone among the defective tendencies in human reasoning; other systemic biases have also been experimentally identified, including loss aversion, the availability heuristic, and optimism bias.
This passage focuses on a particular phenomenon, so you can expect to see questions asking about what the term anchoring means or for examples of it. Because the author never explicitly defines the word, and you have to figure it out from the experiments described, you’re especially likely to see questions about it.
When a passage uses a term repeatedly without explicitly defining it, expect a question that asks you for this definition. These questions, appropriately called Definition-in-Context questions, are discussed in Chapter 9 of MCAT CARS Review.
In addition, you should also anticipate questions asking about what the cited experiments actually show and what assertions they support. These questions would fall broadly into the Reasoning Within the Text category.
In 1941, an exuberant nationalist wrote: “We must accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation…to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” If forced to guess the identity of the writer, many US citizens would likely suspect a German jingoist advocating for Lebensraum. In actuality, the sentiment was expressed by one of America’s own: Henry Luce, the highly influential publisher of the magazines Life, Time, and Fortune. Luce sought to dub the 1900s the “American Century,” calling upon the nation to pursue global hegemony as it slipped from the grasp of warring Old World empires. As a forecast of world history, Luce’s pronouncement seems prescient—but is it justifiable as a normative stance?
Not all of Luce’s contemporaries bought into his exceptionalist creed. Only a year later, Henry Wallace, vice president under FDR, insisted that no country had the “right to exploit other nations” and that “military [and] economic imperialism” were invariably immoral. It is a foundational assumption in ethics that the wrongness of an act is independent of the particular identity of the actor—individuals who pay no heed to moral consistency are justly condemned as hypocrites. So why should it be any different for nation-states? In accord with this principle, Wallace proselytized for “the century of the common man,” for the furtherance of a “great revolution of the people,” and for bringing justice and prosperity to all persons irrespective of accidents of birth. Sadly, Wallace never had the chance to lead the United States in this cosmopolitan direction; prior to Roosevelt’s demise at the beginning of his fourth term, the vice presidency was handed to Harry Truman, a man whose narrow provincialism ensconced him firmly in Luce’s camp. And with Truman came the ghastly atomic eradication of two Japanese cities, the dangerous precedent set by military action without congressional approval in Korea, and a Cold War with the Soviet Union that brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction.
When two opposing views are presented, as in this passage, you can be sure that you’ll get questions asking you about one of the views or requiring you to contrast them. You could see straightforward questions asking you about who says what, about whom the author favors (as noted in our sample outline earlier, the author clearly favors Wallace over Luce and Truman), or about the assumptions implicit in each view.
The author’s strong opinion is also ripe for questions, just as was the case in the Arts passage. Although many authors are fairly moderate, a substantial minority do take more overt positions, heavily employing Positive, Negative, and Extreme Author keywords. While you may not get an explicit question asking about the extreme view, you can at least expect to use your knowledge of the author’s attitude to eliminate inappropriate answer choices.
Passages that include two or more differing opinions will usually be accompanied by questions that ask about the differences between or among those opinions, who holds which opinions, or the assumptions implicit in the various opinions.