해커스 GRE 버벌 송종옥 선생님의 특급 자료

Change in the level of urbanization (the proportion of the population inhabiting towns) following the mid-fourteenth-century plague epidemic in England is a contentious issue. Some scholars argue that high urban mortality levels combined with reduced rural-to-urban migration may have meant a decline in England's urbanization. Alternatively it can be maintained that the cloth industry's expansion and a general rise in living standards in the late fourteenth century may have increased per capita demand for urban goods and services. Given the direct correlation between rising incomes and a growth in urbanization, which has been seen as typical of preindustrial economies, it is thus possible that, even if England's urban population underwent an absolute decline in this period, the urban sector still grew in relative terms.

The phonograph never merely recorded music: it changed both how people listened and how they played. Early recordings of violinists suggest that vibrato--the trembling action of hand or fingerboard that gives notes a warbling sweetness-was once used more sparingly than it is today. By the 1930s, many leading violinists had adopted continuous vibrato, which became the approved style taught in conservatories. Musicologist Mark Katz proposes that technology prompted the change. When vibratos wobble was added to violin tone, the phonograph could pick it up more easily; acoustically, it's a "wider" sound. Also, vibrato's fuzzier focus enabled players to cover up inaccuracies of intonation, and phonographs made players self-conscious about intonation. What worked in recording studios spread to concert stages.

The consensus among early-twentieth-century geologists that continents did not drift collide, or fragment was so strong that contentions about continents' mobility from the tune of Wegener (1924) and Holmes (1929) were initially rejected by the overwhelming majority. It is sometimes argued that this rejection was based on lack of mechanisms for such large-scale crustal mobility; but this is incorrect. There was a wide debate about possible mechanisms for continental drift, and in fact Holmes had laid out a remarkable account that foreshadowed plate tectonics. It was not until the 1960s. however, that new observations by geophysicists of symmetric sea floor stripping started a shift towards acceptance of the plate tectonics theory, generating many testable predictions that profoundly affected the Geld of geology.

Discussions of the collapse of the lowland Maya are not new. However, it might be better to say that Maya civilization as a whole did not collapse, although many zones did experience profound change. Because societies are not bounded, unitary entities, collapses are rarely total, and continuity is a normal part of collapse. At the end of the Classic period [200-900 C.E.], the institution of divine kingship and many of the well-known markers of elite culture such as carved stelae [slabs erected for funerals or commemorative purposes] and hieroglyphic polychromes [multicolored artistic pottery] ended, but Maya civilization continued in modified form with many important features intact (e.g., literacy, war, art, the production of fine ceramics). In some cases large buildings were constructed in the Postclassic period [900-1512 C.E.], but the transition to the Early Postclassic [900-1200 C.E.] era is distinctive for a decrease in elite goods and contexts. The variability in artifact changes during the Terminal Classic [800-900 C.E.] and into the Postclassic, even within artifact classes (e.g., fine versus unslipped ceramics), suggests weaker centralized control than during the Classic period. Site abandonments in the Terminal Classic indicate the collapse of the functional ability of Maya states, but sites that survived show that Maya civilization continued albeit without divine kingship and much of the spectacle around it.

Though long acknowledged internationally as one of India's major nonfiction writers, Nirad Chaudhuri (1897-1999), largely because of controversial political opinions, has been shunned by much of the Indian intelligentsia and his work made unavailable to Indian readers. Only since 1997, in fact, has his 1951 Autobiography, the book that made his international reputation, been brought back into print in India after an absence of many years. Though he has enjoyed support among novelists—VS. Naipaul has called the Autobiography a great book about the English colonization of India, and Doris Lessing has called it “one of the great books of the twentieth century”—Chaudhuri' s work has been more discussed than read. For example, until recently none of his books were available in the United States, but a critical work about him is a standard university text. At his best, says William Dalrymple, Chaudhuri is a superb writer of descriptive prose; but in his sometimes indulgent meandering and excessive allusion, Chaudhuri's work resembles that of a later Indian writer of genius, Salman Rushdie.

What changed, in Jane Austen's art, in the years between Susan and Mansfield Park? Attempts to differentiate Austen's later novels from her earlier ones have yielded only a disconnected series of distinctions: one critic sees a more thoroughgoing social critique in the later novels, another, a new insistence on the claims of desire, yet another, a new consciousness of the Napoleonic War. While these characterizations are unobjectionable, they fail to provide a coherent account of how Austen's art matured. Nor do they explain our common readerly intuitions about the later novels' higher merits—their greater emotional depth and artistic complexity—or the thematic and attitudinal developments that mark those novels as belonging to the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century.

The emphasis on intimate conversation in political discourse originated with Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) but became American labor leader Cesar Chavez’s (1927-1993) supreme contribution to political theory and practice. Such one-on-one organizing, like the feminist consciousness-raising groups that share its spirit, was promoted not just as a way of discussing politics, but as a way of doing politics. Its opposite was political oratory, the great transforming speech before a gathering of listeners. This view was an enormous departure in democratic theory: the leader’s ability to inspire a crowd had long been a touchstone of popular politics, but now such speeches and speechmakers seemed suspect, even essentially undemocratic, because they were frequently full of bombast, and because they talked at the people instead of listening to them.

Experiments and field observations show that in a Mediterranean plant community, drought has a counterintuitively positive effect on shrub seedling establishment. Due to decreased competition by annuals, droughts increase opportunities for shrub seedlings. Under nondrought conditions, annuals competed with shrub seedlings more effectively, confirming the experimenters’ assumption that annuals benefit more than shrub seedlings from an increase in water availability. This may be attributed to their faster or more efficient uptake of soil resources. Similar patterns can be observed in other semi-arid communities. Jurena and Archer showed for a savanna community that root biomass of grasses increased in wetter conditions, decreasing grassland susceptibility to encroachment by shrub seedlings.

Fossil evidence shows that within a century after the arrival of the first settlers on the island of Corme 16,000 years ago, the one species of kangaroo that had been thriving on Corme became extinct. Archaeologists contend that the primary cause of the kangaroo’s extinction was land-clearing rather than hunting. Evidence shows that the settlers burned large tracts of vegetation to clear land for cultivation, which would have greatly reduced the food available for the kangaroo.

Some scientists speculate that projected increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could increase crop yields and thereby help meet increased demand for food as the world’s population rises. Most plant species are classified as either type C3 or C4, each type referring to a distinct photosynthetic pathway. C3 plants (over 90 percent of all plant species) benefit much more from carbo dioxide increases than do C4 plants: experiments suggest that doubled carbon dioxide levels can increase C3 growth rates, and hence C3 crop yields, by 20 to 35 percent, whereas C4 plants——including some important food crops such as maize and sugarcane and many pasture grasses on which livestock herds depend——benefit little. Most information regarding crop response to carbon dioxide comes from experiments in which yield-reducing competition from weeds was not a factor. Site-specific mixes of weed and crop species, crop species’ responses to other environmental conditions such as precipitation and temperature, and likely changes in geographic ranges of insect, fungal, and bacterial crop pests as a result of carbon dioxide-related climate change——all these must be considered in projections of crop yields in the future carbon dioxide-rich world.