Question

Question 1

What 1927 film was the first feature-length talkie?

Answer

The Blue Angel

The Wizard of Oz

The Black Pirate

The Jazz Singer

Question 2

2 points

Why did movie theaters thrive during the Great Depression?

Answer

Brief escape from reality

Prices relatively inexpensive

Subsidized by the WPA

Sources of current news

Question 3

2 points

How did Mohandas Gandhi convince the British to decolonize India in 1947?

Answer

Leading guerrilla resistance

Using passive resistance

Ceding Pakistan to Britain

Starting a civil war in India

Question 4

2 points

Why did Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicate to the Social Democratic Party in 1919?

Answer

Appease the Spartikusbund uprising

Satisfy the terms of the Treaty of Versailles

Avoid imprisonment by invading Czechs

Support the new Weimer Republic government

Question 5

2 points

In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, why is protagonist Josef K. arrested and tried?

Answer

For being a communist

For being Jewish

For killing his mother

For an unknown reason

Question 6

2 points

What did Bertolt Brecht aim to accomplish by alienating audiences with his epic theater?

Answer

Expose the excesses of a capitalistic society

Make them view the characters critically

Shock them into turning to Marxism

Force them to identify with the main character

Question 7

2 points

Why did Hitler begin the tradition of carrying the Olympic torch from Athens to the Olympic venue in 1936?

Answer

Show off the Germans’ athletic abilities

Advertise Germany’s openness to other cultures

Suggest that Germany was the new classical Greece

Imply Germany’s position as civilization’s center

Question 8

2 points

On what condition would Picasso allow Guernica to be on permanent display in a museum in his native Spain?

Answer

Picasso himself was dead

Spanish people regain civil liberties

Francisco Franco was dead

Spain became a republic

Question 9

2 points

With what did Bauhaus School founder Walter Gropius equate his architecture?

Answer

Politics

Romance

Nationalism

Religion

Question 10

2 points

How many Jews are estimated to have been exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau?

Answer

85,000

444,000

1-2.5 million

6 million

Question 11

2 points

What is the central thematic concern of the Theater of the Absurd?

Answer

Futility of organized religion

Ridiculousness of the masses

Meaninglessness of existence

Fragmentation of the human psyche

Question 12

2 points

Why did a rooster have psychological meaning to Jackson Pollock, who painted one into his Guardians of the Secret?

Answer

Like the rooster, Pollock had an colossal ego

He grew up on a California chicken farm

A rooster had stolen his severed fingertip

Like his art, roosters symbolize honesty

Question 13

2 points

What work best characterizes the Beat generation?

Answer

Robert Frank’s The Americans

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch

Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”

Question 14

2 points

As discussed in the chapter’s “Continuity and Change” section, in 1954 why did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that “separate but equal” schools for whites and blacks were unacceptable?

Answer

The races were alienated from each other

Separate by definition means inherently unequal

Not all districts could afford racially separate schools

The South was excluding blacks from education

Question 15

2 points

In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, why does Godot never arrive?

Answer

He is dead

Audience never knows

He does not exist

He goes to the wrong place

Question 16

2 points

Why is Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist play titled Huis Clos (No Exit)?

Answer

Main character is in prison

Set in a concentration camp

Main character is in hell

Focuses on a loveless marriage

Question 17

2 points

Why do the works by Jean Dubuffet, such as Corps de Dame, look do disordered?

Answer

He practiced “ghost drawing,” producing works while in a trance

He aimed for “authentic” art, divorced from convention and tradition

He modeled his works after the art brut created by psychotics and children

He deconstructed figures, reducing them to unraveled lines

Question 18

2 points

According to Søren Kierkegaard, why must Christians live in a state of anguish caused by their own freedom of choice?

Answer

They must endure the guilt of their sins

Belief in God requires suspension of reason

They hold responsibility for Jesus’s sacrifice

Temptation awaits them at every turn

Question 19

2 points

To reap the full effect of David Smith’s Blackburn: Song of an Irish Blacksmith, what must the viewer do?

Answer

See it in different lights

Move around it

Know Smith’s background

See it move

Question 20

2 points

What does Roy Lichtenstein criticize in Oh, Jeff . . . I Love You, Too . . . But . . . ?

Answer

Comic book mentality

Georges Seurat’s pointillism

Modern love’s emptiness

America’s obsession with Hollywood

Question 21

2 points

What did the electronic synthesizer allow composers to create for the first time?

Answer

Stereo and surround sound

Music without performers

The sound of pure vibration

A natural echo chamber

Question 22

2 points

Why did rap, or hip-hop, develop during the 1960s?

Answer

Perform during the Last Poets gatherings

Protest treatment of African Americans

Popularize works by African American poets

Protest the dominancy of white music

Question 23

2 points

According to Jean-Paul Sartre in “Black Orpheus,” what about black people confirmed their authenticity-defined them?

Answer

Skin color

History of enslavement

African diaspora

Music and religion

Question 24

2 points

In The Feminist Mystique, why does Betty Friedan reject Freud’s idea that women envy men?

Answer

Assumption that women are inferior to men

Too much emphasis to female sexuality

Denial of the chance for inequality to be eliminated

Acceptance that culture determines gender roles

Question 25

2 points

In his mural F-111, how does artist James Rosenquist equate the military with consumer culture?

Answer

Juxtaposes consumer products with the fighter plane

Paints product advertisements on the plane’s body

Symbolizes the war with various product labels

Shows American consumers in awe of the bomber

Question 26

2 points

What was a main effect of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence?

Answer

Spirit of collaboration in its erection

Political statement that it offered

Extraordinary images of it from space

Reusability of the 24.5 miles of fabric

Question 27

2 points

In 1963, why did Birmingham, AL, officials stop distributing food to the city’s needy?

Answer

To stop the segregation protests led by Martin Luther King, Jr.

In response to the black community’s boycott of Birmingham stores

To force the poor black families to relocate to another city

In retaliation for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church

Question 28

2 points

Why did Smithson use the spiral shape for his land art?

Answer

Association with pagan religions

Symbolism of rebirth and renewal

Prevalence in nature and ornamentation

Reflection of the Great Salt Lake’s shape

Question 29

2 points

How did television’s An American Family star Lance Loud create controversy in the mid 1970s?

Answer

He was openly gay

He was divorced

He supported abortion

He posed nude for Andy Warhol

Question 30

2 points

According to composer Philip Glass, what made the score for Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach so difficult?

Answer

Many repeating patterns

Interweaving of text and music

Patterns that almost never repeat

53 brief thematic fragments

Question 31

2 points

Why did African painter Chris Ofili support The Holy Virgin Mary on two balls of elephant dung?

Answer

The dried and varnished dung made sturdy mounts

Dried elephant dung is considered good luck in Africa

He wanted to make himself more known through controversy

The Zimbabwe viewed elephant dung as a fertility symbol

Question 32

2 points

What is a key question for grasping meaning in Gerhard Richter’s photographic paintings?

Answer

Why he selected a particular photograph

Why he deviated from the photograph’s reality

Why he omitted certain details from the photograph

Why he blurred some details and not others

Question 33

2 points

How is deconstruction, the act of analyzing a text to see what has been omitted or overlooked, integral to postmodernism?

Answer

Determine a reader’s response to a work

Draw attention to the individual words

Become aware of culture’s influence on a text

Expose the possibilities of meaning

Question 34

2 points

What has Santiago Calatrava designed the Port Authority Trans Hudson station at the World Trade Center site to resemble?

Answer

Stepped-terrace memorial garden

Rainbow bridge spanning Ground Zero

Series of monoliths of graduating heights

Bird being released by a child’s hands

Question 35

2 points

What does David P. Bradley expose in his painting Indian Country Today?

Answer

Defacement of Native American lands

Assimilation of Native American and white

Commercialization of Native American tradition

Revitalization of Native American lands

Question 36

2 points

Why did Zhang Huan invite 40 Chinese peasants to be photographed standing in a pond to raise the water level?

Answer

Make it into the Guinness Book of World Records

Show how Western culture was drowning the Chinese

Raise Beijing officials’ consciousness about the poor

Show how the Chinese class system caused loss of self

Question 37

2 points

Why did the Chinese government demand Zhang Hongtu’s painting Bird’s Nest, in the Style of Cubism be removed from China?

Answer

Inclusion of words in English, not Chinese

Imitation of French Cubism style

Inappropriate muted palette for celebration

Use of number 8 to mock Chinese superstition

Question 38

2 points

Why did playwright Luis Valdez produce Zoot Suit?

Answer

Call attention to police brutality against Latinos

Raise awareness about Hispanic farmworkers’ low pay

Help César Chávez unionize Hispanic farmworkers

Celebrate the Hispanics’ success in American culture

Question 39

2 points

How does Renzo Piano’s Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia qualify as “green architecture”?

Answer

Ten pavilions function as wind scoops and cool the inside

Open, unfinished pavilions are used to collect rainwater

Open center is used for cultivating bamboo for construction

Southern orientation provides passive solar heating

Question 40

2 points

In Thomas Pynchon’s novel V. why can protagonist Herbert Stencil never fulfill his quest for the mysterious V?

Answer

V. died in Italy during World War II

Not a person, V. is an unreachable vanishing point

V. moved to Africa and changed her name

V. was a figment of his father’s imagination