Passage 1 For centuries, explorers have risked their lives venturing into the unknown for reasons that were to varying degrees economic and nationalistic. Columbus went west to look for better trade routes to the Orient and to promote the greater glory of Spain. Lewis and Clark journeyed into the American wilderness to find out what the US had acquired when it purchased Louisiana, and the Appolo astronauts rocketed to the moon in a dramatic show of technological muscle during the cold war. Although their missions blended commercial and political-military imperatives, the explorers involved all accomplished some significant science simply by going where no scientists had gone. Today Mars looms as humanity’s next great terra incognita. And with doubtful prospects for a short- term financial return, with the cold war a rapidly fading memory and amid a growing emphasis on international cooperation in large space ventures, it is-clear that imperatives other than profits or nationalism will have to compel human beings to leave their tracks on the planet’s reddish surface. Could it be that science. which has long played a minor role in exploration, is at last destined to take a leading role The question naturally invites a couple of others: Are there experiments that only humans could do on Mars Could those experiments pro- vide insights profound enough to justify the expense of sending people across interplanetary space With Mars the scientific stakes are arguably higher than they have ever been. The issue of whether life ever existed on the planet, and whether it persists to this day, has been highlighted by mounting evidence that the Red Planet had abundant stable, liquid water and by the continuing controversy over suggestions that bacterial fossils rode to Earth on a meteorite from Mars. A more conclusive answer about life on Mars, past or present, would give researchers invaluable data about the range of conditions under which a planet can generate the complex chemistry that leads to life, If it could be established that life arose independently on Mars and Earth, the finding would provide the first concrete clues in one of the deepest mysteries in all of science: the prevalence of life in the universe. 45 The passage tells us that proof of life on Mars would ______.
A. make clear the complex chemistry in the development of life
B. confirm the suggestion that bacterial fossils travelled to Earth on a meteorite
C. reveal the kind of conditions under which life originates
D. provide an explanation why life is common in the universe
Passage 3 During the adolescence, the development of political ideology becomes apparent in the individual: ideology here is defined as the presence of roughly consistent attitudes, more or less organized in reference to a more encompassing set of general principles. As such, political ideology is dim or absent at the beginning of adolescence. Its acquisition by the adolescent, in even the most modest sense, requires the acquisition of relatively sophisticated cognitive skills; the ability to manage abstractness, to synthesize and generalize, to imagine the future. These are accompanied by a steady advance in the ability to understand principles. The child’s rapid acquisition of political knowledge also promotes the growth of political ideology during adolescence. By knowledge I mean more than the dull "facts" such as the composition of country government, that the child is exposed to in the conventional ninth-grade school course. Nor do I mean only information on current political realities. These are facts of knowledge, but they are less critical than the adolescent’s absorption of a feeling for those many unspoken assumptions about the political system that comprise the common ground of understanding, for example, what the state can "appropriately" demand of its citizens, and vice versa, or the "proper" relationship of government to subsidiary social institutions, such as the schools and churches. Thus, political knowledge is the awareness of social assumptions and relationships as well as of objective facts. Much of the naivete that characterizes the younger adolescent’s grasp of politics stems not from an ignorance of "facts" but from an incomplete comprehension of the common conventions of the system, of which is and not customarily done, and of how and why it is or is not done. Yet I do not want to over-emphasize the significance of increased political knowledge in forming adolescent ideology, Over the years I have become progressively disenchanted about the centrality of such knowledge and have come to believe that much current work in political socialization, by relying too heavily on its apparent acquisition, has been misled about the tempo of political understanding in adolescence. Just as young children can count numbers in series without grasping the principle of ordination, young adolescents may have in their heads many random hits of political information without a secure understanding of those concepts that would give order and meaning to the information. Children’s minds pick up bits and pieces of data, but until the adolescent has grasped the encompassing function that concepts and principles provide, the data remain fragmented, random, disordered. It can be inferred from the passage that the author would be most likely to agree with which of the following statements about schools
A. They should present political information according to carefully planned, schematic arrangements.
B. They themselves constitute part of a general socio-political system that adolescents are learning to understand.
C. They are ineffectual to the degree that they disregard adolescents’ political naivete.
D. Because they are subs. diary to government, their contribution to the political understanding of adolescents must be limited.