Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC) Test - 8

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Car companies have been feverishly working to improve the technologies behind self-driving cars. But so far even the most high-tech vehicles still fail when it comes to safely navigating in rain and snow. This is because these weather conditions wreak havoc on the most common approaches for sensing, which usually involve either lidar sensors or cameras. In the snow, for example, cameras can no longer recognise lane markings and traffic signs, while the lasers of lidar sensors malfunction when there’s, say, stuff flying down from the sky.

A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has developed a new system that uses an existing technology called ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to send electromagnetic pulses underground that measure the area’s specific combination of soil, rocks, and roots. Specifically, the CSAIL team used a particular form of GPR instrumentation developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory called localising ground-penetrating radar, or LGPR. The mapping process creates a unique fingerprint of sorts that the car can later use to localize itself when it returns to that particular plot of land.
“If you or I grabbed a shovel and dug it into the ground, all we’re going to see is a bunch of dirt,” says CSAIL PhD student Teddy Ort, lead author on a new paper about the project that will be published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters journal later this month. “But LGPR can quantify the specific elements there and compare that to the map it’s already created, so that it knows exactly where it is, without needing cameras or lasers.”

In tests, the team found that in snowy conditions the navigation system’s average margin of error was on the order of only about an inch compared to clear weather. The researchers were surprised to find that it had a bit more trouble with rainy conditions, but was still only off by an average of 5.5 inches. (This is because rain leads to more water soaking into the ground, leading to a larger disparity between the original mapped LGPR reading and the current condition of the soil.) The researchers said the system’s robustness was further validated by the fact that, over a period of six months of testing, they never had to unexpectedly step in to take the wheel.

“Our work demonstrates that this approach is actually a practical way to help self-driving cars navigate poor weather without actually having to be able to ‘see’ in the traditional sense using laser scanners or cameras,” says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL and senior author on the new paper, which will also be presented in May at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Paris.
While the team has only tested the system at low speeds on a closed country road, Ort said that existing work from Lincoln Laboratory suggests that the system could easily be extended to highways and other high-speed areas.

This is the first time that developers of self-driving systems have employed ground-penetrating radar, which has previously been used in fields like construction planning, landmine detection, and even lunar exploration. The approach wouldn’t be able to work completely on its own since it can’t detect things above ground. But its ability to localise in bad weather means that it would couple nicely with lidar and vision approaches.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Car companies have been feverishly working to improve the technologies behind self-driving cars. But so far even the most high-tech vehicles still fail when it comes to safely navigating in rain and snow. This is because these weather conditions wreak havoc on the most common approaches for sensing, which usually involve either lidar sensors or cameras. In the snow, for example, cameras can no longer recognise lane markings and traffic signs, while the lasers of lidar sensors malfunction when there’s, say, stuff flying down from the sky.

A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has developed a new system that uses an existing technology called ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to send electromagnetic pulses underground that measure the area’s specific combination of soil, rocks, and roots. Specifically, the CSAIL team used a particular form of GPR instrumentation developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory called localising ground-penetrating radar, or LGPR. The mapping process creates a unique fingerprint of sorts that the car can later use to localize itself when it returns to that particular plot of land.
“If you or I grabbed a shovel and dug it into the ground, all we’re going to see is a bunch of dirt,” says CSAIL PhD student Teddy Ort, lead author on a new paper about the project that will be published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters journal later this month. “But LGPR can quantify the specific elements there and compare that to the map it’s already created, so that it knows exactly where it is, without needing cameras or lasers.”

In tests, the team found that in snowy conditions the navigation system’s average margin of error was on the order of only about an inch compared to clear weather. The researchers were surprised to find that it had a bit more trouble with rainy conditions, but was still only off by an average of 5.5 inches. (This is because rain leads to more water soaking into the ground, leading to a larger disparity between the original mapped LGPR reading and the current condition of the soil.) The researchers said the system’s robustness was further validated by the fact that, over a period of six months of testing, they never had to unexpectedly step in to take the wheel.

“Our work demonstrates that this approach is actually a practical way to help self-driving cars navigate poor weather without actually having to be able to ‘see’ in the traditional sense using laser scanners or cameras,” says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL and senior author on the new paper, which will also be presented in May at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Paris.
While the team has only tested the system at low speeds on a closed country road, Ort said that existing work from Lincoln Laboratory suggests that the system could easily be extended to highways and other high-speed areas.

This is the first time that developers of self-driving systems have employed ground-penetrating radar, which has previously been used in fields like construction planning, landmine detection, and even lunar exploration. The approach wouldn’t be able to work completely on its own since it can’t detect things above ground. But its ability to localise in bad weather means that it would couple nicely with lidar and vision approaches.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Car companies have been feverishly working to improve the technologies behind self-driving cars. But so far even the most high-tech vehicles still fail when it comes to safely navigating in rain and snow. This is because these weather conditions wreak havoc on the most common approaches for sensing, which usually involve either lidar sensors or cameras. In the snow, for example, cameras can no longer recognise lane markings and traffic signs, while the lasers of lidar sensors malfunction when there’s, say, stuff flying down from the sky.

A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has developed a new system that uses an existing technology called ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to send electromagnetic pulses underground that measure the area’s specific combination of soil, rocks, and roots. Specifically, the CSAIL team used a particular form of GPR instrumentation developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory called localising ground-penetrating radar, or LGPR. The mapping process creates a unique fingerprint of sorts that the car can later use to localize itself when it returns to that particular plot of land.
“If you or I grabbed a shovel and dug it into the ground, all we’re going to see is a bunch of dirt,” says CSAIL PhD student Teddy Ort, lead author on a new paper about the project that will be published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters journal later this month. “But LGPR can quantify the specific elements there and compare that to the map it’s already created, so that it knows exactly where it is, without needing cameras or lasers.”

In tests, the team found that in snowy conditions the navigation system’s average margin of error was on the order of only about an inch compared to clear weather. The researchers were surprised to find that it had a bit more trouble with rainy conditions, but was still only off by an average of 5.5 inches. (This is because rain leads to more water soaking into the ground, leading to a larger disparity between the original mapped LGPR reading and the current condition of the soil.) The researchers said the system’s robustness was further validated by the fact that, over a period of six months of testing, they never had to unexpectedly step in to take the wheel.

“Our work demonstrates that this approach is actually a practical way to help self-driving cars navigate poor weather without actually having to be able to ‘see’ in the traditional sense using laser scanners or cameras,” says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL and senior author on the new paper, which will also be presented in May at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Paris.
While the team has only tested the system at low speeds on a closed country road, Ort said that existing work from Lincoln Laboratory suggests that the system could easily be extended to highways and other high-speed areas.

This is the first time that developers of self-driving systems have employed ground-penetrating radar, which has previously been used in fields like construction planning, landmine detection, and even lunar exploration. The approach wouldn’t be able to work completely on its own since it can’t detect things above ground. But its ability to localise in bad weather means that it would couple nicely with lidar and vision approaches.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Car companies have been feverishly working to improve the technologies behind self-driving cars. But so far even the most high-tech vehicles still fail when it comes to safely navigating in rain and snow. This is because these weather conditions wreak havoc on the most common approaches for sensing, which usually involve either lidar sensors or cameras. In the snow, for example, cameras can no longer recognise lane markings and traffic signs, while the lasers of lidar sensors malfunction when there’s, say, stuff flying down from the sky.

A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has developed a new system that uses an existing technology called ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to send electromagnetic pulses underground that measure the area’s specific combination of soil, rocks, and roots. Specifically, the CSAIL team used a particular form of GPR instrumentation developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory called localising ground-penetrating radar, or LGPR. The mapping process creates a unique fingerprint of sorts that the car can later use to localize itself when it returns to that particular plot of land.
“If you or I grabbed a shovel and dug it into the ground, all we’re going to see is a bunch of dirt,” says CSAIL PhD student Teddy Ort, lead author on a new paper about the project that will be published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters journal later this month. “But LGPR can quantify the specific elements there and compare that to the map it’s already created, so that it knows exactly where it is, without needing cameras or lasers.”

In tests, the team found that in snowy conditions the navigation system’s average margin of error was on the order of only about an inch compared to clear weather. The researchers were surprised to find that it had a bit more trouble with rainy conditions, but was still only off by an average of 5.5 inches. (This is because rain leads to more water soaking into the ground, leading to a larger disparity between the original mapped LGPR reading and the current condition of the soil.) The researchers said the system’s robustness was further validated by the fact that, over a period of six months of testing, they never had to unexpectedly step in to take the wheel.

“Our work demonstrates that this approach is actually a practical way to help self-driving cars navigate poor weather without actually having to be able to ‘see’ in the traditional sense using laser scanners or cameras,” says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL and senior author on the new paper, which will also be presented in May at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Paris.
While the team has only tested the system at low speeds on a closed country road, Ort said that existing work from Lincoln Laboratory suggests that the system could easily be extended to highways and other high-speed areas.

This is the first time that developers of self-driving systems have employed ground-penetrating radar, which has previously been used in fields like construction planning, landmine detection, and even lunar exploration. The approach wouldn’t be able to work completely on its own since it can’t detect things above ground. But its ability to localise in bad weather means that it would couple nicely with lidar and vision approaches.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Detroit’s new railway station opened for business in December 1913 without much fanfare. Michigan Central was designed in the then-popular Beaux-Arts style by architects who had previously worked together on New York’s Grand Central Station. The structure was dominated by a 15-storey tower. When built, it was the tallest railway station in the world. It looked out over 18 tracks, raised above street level on a broad viaduct. Only two of those tracks remain, carrying heavy freight trains operated by Canadian Pacific. 

During World War Two the station was a hive of activity with troops arriving and departing. Former Detroit cop Ray Downing remembers seeing his older brother and uncle off at Michigan Central and meeting them whenever they came home on leave. “The station was absolutely packed,” he says. “The building was just cavernous - it meant a new world to me every time I went there.” During the early 1960s, Downing was based at a police precinct just around the corner from Michigan Central. It’s the mundane nature of the job he recalls - searching for lost children, dealing with drunks and so on. Despite Detroit’s subsequent reputation for crime and violence, he remembers it fondly. “Even in a neighbourhood with a railway station, it was reasonably peaceful and law-abiding,” he says.

Michigan Central was the place where workers arrived to take up new jobs in the growing automobile industry. “It was the Ellis Island of Detroit,” says labour historian and lecturer Steve Babson. In 1908, Henry Ford’s Piquette Avenue factory began turning out the first of the famous Model-T cars - a stripped-down, simplified automobile that ushered in the era of mass motoring. Before Ford, building a motor car had been a highly skilled job for craftsmen. But Ford brought in technologies for a mass production process. Huge stamping presses to take sheet metal and turn it into the key body components of a car, small disc grinders powerful enough to remove surplus metal, and even new types of paint. “The reason the Ford Model-T was black,” says Babson, “was because it was the only paint that would dry fast enough to keep pace with the production process.”

Mass production needed workers and lots of them. They came from all over the globe. Many of them arrived from Britain, via Canada. But as early as 1907 the Detroit Board of Commerce asked the immigrant reception centre at Ellis Island in New York harbour to direct skilled workers to the city - immigrants from Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Workers came from further afield too. The city came to have one of the largest Chaldean Catholic communities outside Iraq, with the first members arriving in the 1920s. In 1906 the workforce in Detroit stood at about 80,000. By 1911 it was 175,000 and growing. The first step many of them made in the city was on the platform at Michigan Central.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Detroit’s new railway station opened for business in December 1913 without much fanfare. Michigan Central was designed in the then-popular Beaux-Arts style by architects who had previously worked together on New York’s Grand Central Station. The structure was dominated by a 15-storey tower. When built, it was the tallest railway station in the world. It looked out over 18 tracks, raised above street level on a broad viaduct. Only two of those tracks remain, carrying heavy freight trains operated by Canadian Pacific. 

During World War Two the station was a hive of activity with troops arriving and departing. Former Detroit cop Ray Downing remembers seeing his older brother and uncle off at Michigan Central and meeting them whenever they came home on leave. “The station was absolutely packed,” he says. “The building was just cavernous - it meant a new world to me every time I went there.” During the early 1960s, Downing was based at a police precinct just around the corner from Michigan Central. It’s the mundane nature of the job he recalls - searching for lost children, dealing with drunks and so on. Despite Detroit’s subsequent reputation for crime and violence, he remembers it fondly. “Even in a neighbourhood with a railway station, it was reasonably peaceful and law-abiding,” he says.

Michigan Central was the place where workers arrived to take up new jobs in the growing automobile industry. “It was the Ellis Island of Detroit,” says labour historian and lecturer Steve Babson. In 1908, Henry Ford’s Piquette Avenue factory began turning out the first of the famous Model-T cars - a stripped-down, simplified automobile that ushered in the era of mass motoring. Before Ford, building a motor car had been a highly skilled job for craftsmen. But Ford brought in technologies for a mass production process. Huge stamping presses to take sheet metal and turn it into the key body components of a car, small disc grinders powerful enough to remove surplus metal, and even new types of paint. “The reason the Ford Model-T was black,” says Babson, “was because it was the only paint that would dry fast enough to keep pace with the production process.”

Mass production needed workers and lots of them. They came from all over the globe. Many of them arrived from Britain, via Canada. But as early as 1907 the Detroit Board of Commerce asked the immigrant reception centre at Ellis Island in New York harbour to direct skilled workers to the city - immigrants from Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Workers came from further afield too. The city came to have one of the largest Chaldean Catholic communities outside Iraq, with the first members arriving in the 1920s. In 1906 the workforce in Detroit stood at about 80,000. By 1911 it was 175,000 and growing. The first step many of them made in the city was on the platform at Michigan Central.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Detroit’s new railway station opened for business in December 1913 without much fanfare. Michigan Central was designed in the then-popular Beaux-Arts style by architects who had previously worked together on New York’s Grand Central Station. The structure was dominated by a 15-storey tower. When built, it was the tallest railway station in the world. It looked out over 18 tracks, raised above street level on a broad viaduct. Only two of those tracks remain, carrying heavy freight trains operated by Canadian Pacific. 

During World War Two the station was a hive of activity with troops arriving and departing. Former Detroit cop Ray Downing remembers seeing his older brother and uncle off at Michigan Central and meeting them whenever they came home on leave. “The station was absolutely packed,” he says. “The building was just cavernous - it meant a new world to me every time I went there.” During the early 1960s, Downing was based at a police precinct just around the corner from Michigan Central. It’s the mundane nature of the job he recalls - searching for lost children, dealing with drunks and so on. Despite Detroit’s subsequent reputation for crime and violence, he remembers it fondly. “Even in a neighbourhood with a railway station, it was reasonably peaceful and law-abiding,” he says.

Michigan Central was the place where workers arrived to take up new jobs in the growing automobile industry. “It was the Ellis Island of Detroit,” says labour historian and lecturer Steve Babson. In 1908, Henry Ford’s Piquette Avenue factory began turning out the first of the famous Model-T cars - a stripped-down, simplified automobile that ushered in the era of mass motoring. Before Ford, building a motor car had been a highly skilled job for craftsmen. But Ford brought in technologies for a mass production process. Huge stamping presses to take sheet metal and turn it into the key body components of a car, small disc grinders powerful enough to remove surplus metal, and even new types of paint. “The reason the Ford Model-T was black,” says Babson, “was because it was the only paint that would dry fast enough to keep pace with the production process.”

Mass production needed workers and lots of them. They came from all over the globe. Many of them arrived from Britain, via Canada. But as early as 1907 the Detroit Board of Commerce asked the immigrant reception centre at Ellis Island in New York harbour to direct skilled workers to the city - immigrants from Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Workers came from further afield too. The city came to have one of the largest Chaldean Catholic communities outside Iraq, with the first members arriving in the 1920s. In 1906 the workforce in Detroit stood at about 80,000. By 1911 it was 175,000 and growing. The first step many of them made in the city was on the platform at Michigan Central.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

Detroit’s new railway station opened for business in December 1913 without much fanfare. Michigan Central was designed in the then-popular Beaux-Arts style by architects who had previously worked together on New York’s Grand Central Station. The structure was dominated by a 15-storey tower. When built, it was the tallest railway station in the world. It looked out over 18 tracks, raised above street level on a broad viaduct. Only two of those tracks remain, carrying heavy freight trains operated by Canadian Pacific. 

During World War Two the station was a hive of activity with troops arriving and departing. Former Detroit cop Ray Downing remembers seeing his older brother and uncle off at Michigan Central and meeting them whenever they came home on leave. “The station was absolutely packed,” he says. “The building was just cavernous - it meant a new world to me every time I went there.” During the early 1960s, Downing was based at a police precinct just around the corner from Michigan Central. It’s the mundane nature of the job he recalls - searching for lost children, dealing with drunks and so on. Despite Detroit’s subsequent reputation for crime and violence, he remembers it fondly. “Even in a neighbourhood with a railway station, it was reasonably peaceful and law-abiding,” he says.

Michigan Central was the place where workers arrived to take up new jobs in the growing automobile industry. “It was the Ellis Island of Detroit,” says labour historian and lecturer Steve Babson. In 1908, Henry Ford’s Piquette Avenue factory began turning out the first of the famous Model-T cars - a stripped-down, simplified automobile that ushered in the era of mass motoring. Before Ford, building a motor car had been a highly skilled job for craftsmen. But Ford brought in technologies for a mass production process. Huge stamping presses to take sheet metal and turn it into the key body components of a car, small disc grinders powerful enough to remove surplus metal, and even new types of paint. “The reason the Ford Model-T was black,” says Babson, “was because it was the only paint that would dry fast enough to keep pace with the production process.”

Mass production needed workers and lots of them. They came from all over the globe. Many of them arrived from Britain, via Canada. But as early as 1907 the Detroit Board of Commerce asked the immigrant reception centre at Ellis Island in New York harbour to direct skilled workers to the city - immigrants from Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Workers came from further afield too. The city came to have one of the largest Chaldean Catholic communities outside Iraq, with the first members arriving in the 1920s. In 1906 the workforce in Detroit stood at about 80,000. By 1911 it was 175,000 and growing. The first step many of them made in the city was on the platform at Michigan Central.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

In November 1914, Bernard Bosanquet delivered the inaugural address to the Aristotelian Society’s 36th session. An ageing titan of British idealism, Bosanquet called his talk ‘Science and Philosophy’. It was a broadside on Bertrand Russell’s now-legendary book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) in which Russell sought to model a new ‘scientific’ method for doing philosophy that made the logical analysis of propositions fundamental. This logic-centric style would come to define what we now know as analytic philosophy.

Bosanquet’s opening complaint about Russell’s methodology was, surprisingly, political. He argued that the ‘scientific’ methodology would inevitably make philosophy ‘cosmopolitan in character and free from special national qualities’. Since logic, and science more generally, respects no political or cultural boundaries, Russell’s philosophy could never function as a distinctive expression of a people. This was a problem for Bosanquet. He held ‘that philosophy, being, like language, art, and poetry, a product of the whole man, is a thing which would forfeit some of its essences if it were to lose its national quality’ — British idealism for Britons, and German idealism for Germans.

The cosmopolitanism that Bosanquet thought implicit in Russell’s philosophical methodology was no illusion. Two weeks before Bosanquet’s attack at the Society, Russell had delivered a lecture at Oxford that would be published under the title ‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy’. Today it is remembered as a call to arms for logical analysis, and it largely restated, in a more pointed way, the methodological outlook of Our Knowledge. Russell’s essay is not overtly political. And yet privately, Russell told one colleague that the talk ‘was partly inspired by disgust at the universal outburst of “righteousness” in all nations since the war began. It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has given me a disgust of all ethical notions, which are chiefly useful as an excuse for murder.’ To another colleague, he described the lecture as ‘inspired by the bloodthirstiness of professors here and in Germany. I gave it at Oxford, and it produced all the disgust I had hoped.'

The political anxieties at play begin to make sense when one bears in mind the timing of all of this. Bosanquet’s attack was delivered amid the earthquake that was Britain’s entry into the Great War. The quake didn’t just shake soldiers on the battlefield. It also shook intellectuals, and would permanently change the direction of abstract pursuits that might seem highly remote from the concerns of warfare, like epistemology and metaphysics. For Russell, a crucial spark of the violence was nationalism, and he regarded scientific philosophy as a tool for opposing it.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

In November 1914, Bernard Bosanquet delivered the inaugural address to the Aristotelian Society’s 36th session. An ageing titan of British idealism, Bosanquet called his talk ‘Science and Philosophy’. It was a broadside on Bertrand Russell’s now-legendary book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) in which Russell sought to model a new ‘scientific’ method for doing philosophy that made the logical analysis of propositions fundamental. This logic-centric style would come to define what we now know as analytic philosophy.

Bosanquet’s opening complaint about Russell’s methodology was, surprisingly, political. He argued that the ‘scientific’ methodology would inevitably make philosophy ‘cosmopolitan in character and free from special national qualities’. Since logic, and science more generally, respects no political or cultural boundaries, Russell’s philosophy could never function as a distinctive expression of a people. This was a problem for Bosanquet. He held ‘that philosophy, being, like language, art, and poetry, a product of the whole man, is a thing which would forfeit some of its essences if it were to lose its national quality’ — British idealism for Britons, and German idealism for Germans.

The cosmopolitanism that Bosanquet thought implicit in Russell’s philosophical methodology was no illusion. Two weeks before Bosanquet’s attack at the Society, Russell had delivered a lecture at Oxford that would be published under the title ‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy’. Today it is remembered as a call to arms for logical analysis, and it largely restated, in a more pointed way, the methodological outlook of Our Knowledge. Russell’s essay is not overtly political. And yet privately, Russell told one colleague that the talk ‘was partly inspired by disgust at the universal outburst of “righteousness” in all nations since the war began. It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has given me a disgust of all ethical notions, which are chiefly useful as an excuse for murder.’ To another colleague, he described the lecture as ‘inspired by the bloodthirstiness of professors here and in Germany. I gave it at Oxford, and it produced all the disgust I had hoped.'

The political anxieties at play begin to make sense when one bears in mind the timing of all of this. Bosanquet’s attack was delivered amid the earthquake that was Britain’s entry into the Great War. The quake didn’t just shake soldiers on the battlefield. It also shook intellectuals, and would permanently change the direction of abstract pursuits that might seem highly remote from the concerns of warfare, like epistemology and metaphysics. For Russell, a crucial spark of the violence was nationalism, and he regarded scientific philosophy as a tool for opposing it.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

In November 1914, Bernard Bosanquet delivered the inaugural address to the Aristotelian Society’s 36th session. An ageing titan of British idealism, Bosanquet called his talk ‘Science and Philosophy’. It was a broadside on Bertrand Russell’s now-legendary book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) in which Russell sought to model a new ‘scientific’ method for doing philosophy that made the logical analysis of propositions fundamental. This logic-centric style would come to define what we now know as analytic philosophy.

Bosanquet’s opening complaint about Russell’s methodology was, surprisingly, political. He argued that the ‘scientific’ methodology would inevitably make philosophy ‘cosmopolitan in character and free from special national qualities’. Since logic, and science more generally, respects no political or cultural boundaries, Russell’s philosophy could never function as a distinctive expression of a people. This was a problem for Bosanquet. He held ‘that philosophy, being, like language, art, and poetry, a product of the whole man, is a thing which would forfeit some of its essences if it were to lose its national quality’ — British idealism for Britons, and German idealism for Germans.

The cosmopolitanism that Bosanquet thought implicit in Russell’s philosophical methodology was no illusion. Two weeks before Bosanquet’s attack at the Society, Russell had delivered a lecture at Oxford that would be published under the title ‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy’. Today it is remembered as a call to arms for logical analysis, and it largely restated, in a more pointed way, the methodological outlook of Our Knowledge. Russell’s essay is not overtly political. And yet privately, Russell told one colleague that the talk ‘was partly inspired by disgust at the universal outburst of “righteousness” in all nations since the war began. It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has given me a disgust of all ethical notions, which are chiefly useful as an excuse for murder.’ To another colleague, he described the lecture as ‘inspired by the bloodthirstiness of professors here and in Germany. I gave it at Oxford, and it produced all the disgust I had hoped.'

The political anxieties at play begin to make sense when one bears in mind the timing of all of this. Bosanquet’s attack was delivered amid the earthquake that was Britain’s entry into the Great War. The quake didn’t just shake soldiers on the battlefield. It also shook intellectuals, and would permanently change the direction of abstract pursuits that might seem highly remote from the concerns of warfare, like epistemology and metaphysics. For Russell, a crucial spark of the violence was nationalism, and he regarded scientific philosophy as a tool for opposing it.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

In November 1914, Bernard Bosanquet delivered the inaugural address to the Aristotelian Society’s 36th session. An ageing titan of British idealism, Bosanquet called his talk ‘Science and Philosophy’. It was a broadside on Bertrand Russell’s now-legendary book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) in which Russell sought to model a new ‘scientific’ method for doing philosophy that made the logical analysis of propositions fundamental. This logic-centric style would come to define what we now know as analytic philosophy.

Bosanquet’s opening complaint about Russell’s methodology was, surprisingly, political. He argued that the ‘scientific’ methodology would inevitably make philosophy ‘cosmopolitan in character and free from special national qualities’. Since logic, and science more generally, respects no political or cultural boundaries, Russell’s philosophy could never function as a distinctive expression of a people. This was a problem for Bosanquet. He held ‘that philosophy, being, like language, art, and poetry, a product of the whole man, is a thing which would forfeit some of its essences if it were to lose its national quality’ — British idealism for Britons, and German idealism for Germans.

The cosmopolitanism that Bosanquet thought implicit in Russell’s philosophical methodology was no illusion. Two weeks before Bosanquet’s attack at the Society, Russell had delivered a lecture at Oxford that would be published under the title ‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy’. Today it is remembered as a call to arms for logical analysis, and it largely restated, in a more pointed way, the methodological outlook of Our Knowledge. Russell’s essay is not overtly political. And yet privately, Russell told one colleague that the talk ‘was partly inspired by disgust at the universal outburst of “righteousness” in all nations since the war began. It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has given me a disgust of all ethical notions, which are chiefly useful as an excuse for murder.’ To another colleague, he described the lecture as ‘inspired by the bloodthirstiness of professors here and in Germany. I gave it at Oxford, and it produced all the disgust I had hoped.'

The political anxieties at play begin to make sense when one bears in mind the timing of all of this. Bosanquet’s attack was delivered amid the earthquake that was Britain’s entry into the Great War. The quake didn’t just shake soldiers on the battlefield. It also shook intellectuals, and would permanently change the direction of abstract pursuits that might seem highly remote from the concerns of warfare, like epistemology and metaphysics. For Russell, a crucial spark of the violence was nationalism, and he regarded scientific philosophy as a tool for opposing it.

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

It was January 27, 1908, at the Columbia Theater in St. Louis and Harry Houdini was about to debut his first theatrical performance. The great master of illusion stepped inside of an over-size milk can, sloshing gallons of water on to the stage. The can had already been poked, prodded and turned upside down to prove to the audience that there was no hole beneath the stage. Houdini was handcuffed with his hands in front of him. Holding his breath, he squeezed his entire body into the water-filled can as the lid was attached and locked from the outside with six padlocks. A cabinet was wheeled around the can to hide it from view.

Time ticked away as the audience waited for Harry Houdini to drown. Two minutes later, a panting and dripping Houdini emerged from behind the cabinet. ... During his lifetime, nobody ever managed to figure out how he had escaped.

Harry Houdini is most often remembered as an escape artist and a magician. He was also an actor, a pioneering aviator, an amateur historian and a businessman. Within each of these roles, he was an innovator, and sometimes an inventor. But to protect his illusions, he largely avoided the patent process, kept secrets, copyrighted his tricks and otherwise concealed his inventive nature. A 1920 gelatin silver print by an unidentified artist resides in collections of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. It depicts Houdini at his most theatrical, wearing makeup and facing the camera with a calculated mysterious gaze.

The great magician Teller recently recalled how he discovered one of Houdini's inventions at a Los Angeles auction held by the late Sid Radner. “I got a big black wooden cross... I bought the thing thinking this was a good souvenir,” Teller told me in a telephone interview. “After I had bought it, Sid came up and said, 'be careful you don't have kids around this thing.' I said, 'why not?' He said, 'you don't want them sticking their fingers in here.' It has holes where you lash a person to it and they try to escape. What I didn't realize is that it is an elaborate mechanism. With a simple movement of your foot, you could sever all of the ropes simultaneously.”

Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss in 1874 in Budapest to Jewish parents, but raised in the United States from the age of four.  “His name constantly comes up in popular culture any time someone does something sneaky or miraculous,” says John Cox, author of the well-regarded website Wild About Harry. “His tricks are still amazing. Escaping from jail while stripped naked, that is still an incredible feat. His stories feel electric and contemporary. Even though he has been dead for over 90 years.”

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

It was January 27, 1908, at the Columbia Theater in St. Louis and Harry Houdini was about to debut his first theatrical performance. The great master of illusion stepped inside of an over-size milk can, sloshing gallons of water on to the stage. The can had already been poked, prodded and turned upside down to prove to the audience that there was no hole beneath the stage. Houdini was handcuffed with his hands in front of him. Holding his breath, he squeezed his entire body into the water-filled can as the lid was attached and locked from the outside with six padlocks. A cabinet was wheeled around the can to hide it from view.

Time ticked away as the audience waited for Harry Houdini to drown. Two minutes later, a panting and dripping Houdini emerged from behind the cabinet. ... During his lifetime, nobody ever managed to figure out how he had escaped.

Harry Houdini is most often remembered as an escape artist and a magician. He was also an actor, a pioneering aviator, an amateur historian and a businessman. Within each of these roles, he was an innovator, and sometimes an inventor. But to protect his illusions, he largely avoided the patent process, kept secrets, copyrighted his tricks and otherwise concealed his inventive nature. A 1920 gelatin silver print by an unidentified artist resides in collections of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. It depicts Houdini at his most theatrical, wearing makeup and facing the camera with a calculated mysterious gaze.

The great magician Teller recently recalled how he discovered one of Houdini's inventions at a Los Angeles auction held by the late Sid Radner. “I got a big black wooden cross... I bought the thing thinking this was a good souvenir,” Teller told me in a telephone interview. “After I had bought it, Sid came up and said, 'be careful you don't have kids around this thing.' I said, 'why not?' He said, 'you don't want them sticking their fingers in here.' It has holes where you lash a person to it and they try to escape. What I didn't realize is that it is an elaborate mechanism. With a simple movement of your foot, you could sever all of the ropes simultaneously.”

Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss in 1874 in Budapest to Jewish parents, but raised in the United States from the age of four.  “His name constantly comes up in popular culture any time someone does something sneaky or miraculous,” says John Cox, author of the well-regarded website Wild About Harry. “His tricks are still amazing. Escaping from jail while stripped naked, that is still an incredible feat. His stories feel electric and contemporary. Even though he has been dead for over 90 years.”

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

It was January 27, 1908, at the Columbia Theater in St. Louis and Harry Houdini was about to debut his first theatrical performance. The great master of illusion stepped inside of an over-size milk can, sloshing gallons of water on to the stage. The can had already been poked, prodded and turned upside down to prove to the audience that there was no hole beneath the stage. Houdini was handcuffed with his hands in front of him. Holding his breath, he squeezed his entire body into the water-filled can as the lid was attached and locked from the outside with six padlocks. A cabinet was wheeled around the can to hide it from view.

Time ticked away as the audience waited for Harry Houdini to drown. Two minutes later, a panting and dripping Houdini emerged from behind the cabinet. ... During his lifetime, nobody ever managed to figure out how he had escaped.

Harry Houdini is most often remembered as an escape artist and a magician. He was also an actor, a pioneering aviator, an amateur historian and a businessman. Within each of these roles, he was an innovator, and sometimes an inventor. But to protect his illusions, he largely avoided the patent process, kept secrets, copyrighted his tricks and otherwise concealed his inventive nature. A 1920 gelatin silver print by an unidentified artist resides in collections of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. It depicts Houdini at his most theatrical, wearing makeup and facing the camera with a calculated mysterious gaze.

The great magician Teller recently recalled how he discovered one of Houdini's inventions at a Los Angeles auction held by the late Sid Radner. “I got a big black wooden cross... I bought the thing thinking this was a good souvenir,” Teller told me in a telephone interview. “After I had bought it, Sid came up and said, 'be careful you don't have kids around this thing.' I said, 'why not?' He said, 'you don't want them sticking their fingers in here.' It has holes where you lash a person to it and they try to escape. What I didn't realize is that it is an elaborate mechanism. With a simple movement of your foot, you could sever all of the ropes simultaneously.”

Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss in 1874 in Budapest to Jewish parents, but raised in the United States from the age of four.  “His name constantly comes up in popular culture any time someone does something sneaky or miraculous,” says John Cox, author of the well-regarded website Wild About Harry. “His tricks are still amazing. Escaping from jail while stripped naked, that is still an incredible feat. His stories feel electric and contemporary. Even though he has been dead for over 90 years.”

Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

It was January 27, 1908, at the Columbia Theater in St. Louis and Harry Houdini was about to debut his first theatrical performance. The great master of illusion stepped inside of an over-size milk can, sloshing gallons of water on to the stage. The can had already been poked, prodded and turned upside down to prove to the audience that there was no hole beneath the stage. Houdini was handcuffed with his hands in front of him. Holding his breath, he squeezed his entire body into the water-filled can as the lid was attached and locked from the outside with six padlocks. A cabinet was wheeled around the can to hide it from view.

Time ticked away as the audience waited for Harry Houdini to drown. Two minutes later, a panting and dripping Houdini emerged from behind the cabinet. ... During his lifetime, nobody ever managed to figure out how he had escaped.

Harry Houdini is most often remembered as an escape artist and a magician. He was also an actor, a pioneering aviator, an amateur historian and a businessman. Within each of these roles, he was an innovator, and sometimes an inventor. But to protect his illusions, he largely avoided the patent process, kept secrets, copyrighted his tricks and otherwise concealed his inventive nature. A 1920 gelatin silver print by an unidentified artist resides in collections of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. It depicts Houdini at his most theatrical, wearing makeup and facing the camera with a calculated mysterious gaze.

The great magician Teller recently recalled how he discovered one of Houdini's inventions at a Los Angeles auction held by the late Sid Radner. “I got a big black wooden cross... I bought the thing thinking this was a good souvenir,” Teller told me in a telephone interview. “After I had bought it, Sid came up and said, 'be careful you don't have kids around this thing.' I said, 'why not?' He said, 'you don't want them sticking their fingers in here.' It has holes where you lash a person to it and they try to escape. What I didn't realize is that it is an elaborate mechanism. With a simple movement of your foot, you could sever all of the ropes simultaneously.”

Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss in 1874 in Budapest to Jewish parents, but raised in the United States from the age of four.  “His name constantly comes up in popular culture any time someone does something sneaky or miraculous,” says John Cox, author of the well-regarded website Wild About Harry. “His tricks are still amazing. Escaping from jail while stripped naked, that is still an incredible feat. His stories feel electric and contemporary. Even though he has been dead for over 90 years.”