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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What contradiction does Marx say is Melville's true theme in Moby Dick?
(a) Man reveres nature but plunders it.
(b) The divine inspires and undermines man's projects.
(c) Industry provides for men and destroys them.
(d) Nature provides man with everything, and it kills him.

2. What did Coxe foresee for America?
(a) The value of industrialism.
(b) How industrialism would give America strength internationally.
(c) The danger of industrialism.
(d) The civic uses of industrialism.

3. What conflict does Marx say was avoided as America expanded?
(a) Warfare between industrial and agrarian interests.
(b) Warfare between North and South.
(c) Warfare between financiers and farmers.
(d) Class warfare.

4. What does modern man hope for, in spite of industrialism?
(a) Cooperation with nature.
(b) Limits on pollution.
(c) Greater and greater resource use.
(d) Reform for pollution.

5. What power does Marx credit government with, in reversing the trend toward urbanization and industrialization?
(a) Hesitancy to impose lifestyle changes on the people.
(b) Inability to manage complex problems.
(c) Powerlessness before the will of the people.
(d) The ability to create lasting change.

6. How did Thoreau describe modern man?
(a) Poised at the boundary between nature and industry.
(b) Unhappy in factories.
(c) Free in the wilderness.
(d) Torn apart by his desires.

7. What thinkers does Marx say followed Carlyle's critique of industrialism?
(a) Hegel and Marx.
(b) William James and John Dewey.
(c) Derrida and Foucault.
(d) Lenin and Stalin.

8. What is Ishmael's task, in Marx's description of Melville's vision in Moby Dick?
(a) To restrain Ahab.
(b) To save the ship.
(c) To reconcile nature and society.
(d) To kill the white whale.

9. How does Marx describe the pastoralism of the 19th century?
(a) Romantic.
(b) Modern.
(c) Industrial.
(d) Sentimental.

10. Who does Marx say will *not* contribute to reversing the trend toward urbanization and industrialization?
(a) Activists.
(b) Farmers.
(c) Artists.
(d) Urban planners.

11. What does Ishmael symbolize, in Marx's interpretation of Moby Dick?
(a) The representative of nature.
(b) The victim of the whale's aggression.
(c) The prophet to warn people against destroying nature.
(d) The middleman between nature and society.

12. How does Marx characterize man's hopes for nature?
(a) Consensus-based resource use.
(b) Scientific resource allocation.
(c) Pastoral idealism.
(d) Realistic planning.

13. How many Americans lived on farms by the end of the 19th century?
(a) 99%.
(b) 90%.
(c) 75%.
(d) 40%.

14. What conclusion about technology does the narrator reach at the end of Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court?
(a) Progress changes the course of human nature.
(b) Society's benefits do not outweigh its costs.
(c) Nature ultimately conquered industrial man.
(d) Primitive human psychology is inescapable.

15. What does the Pequod symbolize in Melville's Moby Dick?
(a) Elemental nature.
(b) Modern society.
(c) Spiritual degradation.
(d) Industry.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the purpose of an epilogue?

2. When was man supposed to return to nature, in Thoreau's vision?

3. What did Henry Adams envision as the consequence of technology?

4. How do modern authors, Marx included, tend to feel about preserving nature in an industrial world?

5. What feature of modern society came into existence with American industrialism?

(see the answer keys)

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