CLT Practice Test 1

1^1.1 I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self. ^1.2 Besides, in drawing the picture of my early days, I also record those events which led, by insensible steps, to my after tale of misery: for when I would account to myself for the birth of that passion, which afterwards ruled my destiny, I find it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; but, swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has swept away all my hopes and joys.

2^2.1 Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate; I desire, therefore, in this narration, to state those facts which led to my predilection for that science. . . . ^2.2 In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. ^2.3 I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate, and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. ^2.4 A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind; and, bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father. ^2.5 My father looked carelessly at the titlepage of my book, and said, "Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash."

3^3.1 If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me, that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical; under such circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and have contented my imagination, warmed as it was, by returning with greater ardour to my former studies. ^3.2 It is even possible, that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. ^3.3 But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents; and I continued to read with the greatest avidity.

4^4.1 When I returned home, my first care was to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. ^4.2 I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few beside myself. ^4.3 I have described myself as always having been embued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature. ^4.4 In spite of the intense labour and wonderful discoveries of modern philosophers, I always came from my studies discontented and unsatisfied. ^4.5 Sir Isaac Newton is said to have avowed that he felt like a child picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth. ^4.6 Those of his successors in each branch of natural philosophy with whom I was acquainted, appeared even to my boy's apprehensions, as tyros engaged in the same pursuit.

5^5.1 . . . But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more. ^5.2 I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple. . . . ^5.3 Under the guidance of my new preceptors, I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention. ^5.4 Wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!

6^6.1 Nor were these my only visions. ^6.2 The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. ^6.3 And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories, and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas.

1^1.1 The same face of the Moon has looked down on every human being who has ever lived. ^1.2 Most of its far side had never been seen by anyone until a spacecraft photographed it in 1959. ^1.3 This is not a coincidence of our brief moment in history, and it is not because the Moon fails to rotate. ^1.4 The Moon turns on its axis once for every trip it makes around the Earth, and those two motions take the same amount of time on average. ^1.5 A body whose rotation has fallen into step with its orbit in this way is described as tidally locked.

2^2.1 The name is a source of some confusion, since the process has little to do with ocean tides as such. ^2.2 What tides and tidal locking share is a cause: the pull of gravity is stronger on the near side of a body than on its far side. ^2.3 That difference in pull stretches the body slightly along the line joining it to its partner, raising a bulge on each side. ^2.4 In the ocean, the water is free to move and the bulge travels around the planet as the planet turns beneath it. ^2.5 In solid rock the same stretching occurs, though the deformation is far smaller.

3^3.1 The locking follows from what happens to that bulge in a body that spins faster than it orbits. ^3.2 Rotation carries the bulge slightly ahead of the line connecting the two bodies, and the larger partner's gravity pulls back on the leading bulge. ^3.3 The result is a persistent drag on the rotation, weak but unrelenting, and over long spans of time it slows the spin. ^3.4 The drag continues until the bulge no longer runs ahead, which happens only when one rotation takes as long as one orbit. ^3.5 At that point the force slowing the spin largely disappears, though the body still rocks slightly and the stretching never stops altogether.

4^4.1 Because the strength of the effect falls off sharply with distance, locking is common among moons, which orbit close to their planets. ^4.2 All four of the large moons Galileo observed circling Jupiter in 1610 are locked to it. ^4.3 So is our own Moon, and so are most of the substantial moons in the solar system.

5^5.1 A planet can also be locked to its star, though the Sun's grip on bodies as distant as the planets is comparatively weak. ^5.2 Mercury is the instructive case. ^5.3 It orbits nearer the Sun than any other planet and might be expected to keep one face turned toward it permanently. ^5.4 Radar observations in 1965 showed otherwise. ^5.5 Mercury rotates three times for every two orbits it completes, a pattern known as a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance. ^5.6 Its markedly elliptical orbit made capture into that resonance possible, and the arrangement holds because Mercury is not a perfect sphere: the Sun pulls on its slightly elongated shape in a way that keeps the rotation locked to the orbit at three turns to two. ^5.7 Mercury is therefore not synchronous like the Moon, but its spin is bound to its orbit all the same.

6^6.1 Tidal locking is still under way in the Earth-Moon system, and it runs in both directions. ^6.2 The Moon raises tides on the Earth, and the drag from those tides is slowing our rotation by a small amount each century, lengthening the day. ^6.3 The Moon is meanwhile drifting outward by a few centimeters a year. ^6.4 Whether the Earth will eventually turn one face permanently toward the Moon is a question about timescales rather than mechanisms: the effect is real and measurable, but the Sun will have altered both bodies beyond recognition long before the process could finish.

Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Solar System Dynamics. Planetary and satellite parameters.

Theft is punished by Thy law, O Lord, and the law written in the hearts of men, which iniquity itself effaces not. For what thief will abide a thief? not even a rich thief, one stealing through want. Yet I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, nor poverty, but through a cloyedness of well-doing, and a pamperedness of iniquity. For I stole that, of which I had enough, and much better. Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself. A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for colour nor taste. To shake and rob this, some lewd young fellows of us went, late one night (having according to our pestilent custom prolonged our sports in the streets till then), and took huge loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them. And this, but to do what we liked only, because it was misliked.

Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, which Thou hadst pity upon in the bottom of the bottomless pit. Now, behold, let my heart tell Thee what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously evil, having no temptation to ill, but the ill itself. It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself. Foul soul, falling from Thy firmament to utter destruction; not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself!

What fruit had I then (wretched man!) in those things, of the remembrance whereof I am now ashamed? Especially, in that theft which I loved for the theft's sake; and it too was nothing, and therefore the more miserable I, who loved it. Yet alone I had not done it: such was I then, I remember, alone I had never done it. I loved then in it also the company of the accomplices, with whom I did it? I did not then love nothing else but the theft, yea rather I did love nothing else; for that circumstance of the company was also nothing. What is, in truth? who can teach me, save He that enlighteneth my heart, and discovereth its dark corners? What is it which hath come into my mind to enquire, and discuss, and consider? For had I then loved the pears I stole, and wished to enjoy them, I might have done it alone, had the bare commission of the theft sufficed to attain my pleasure; nor needed I have inflamed the itching of my desires by the excitement of accomplices. But since my pleasure was not in those pears, it was in the offence itself, which the company of fellow-sinners occasioned.

What then was this feeling? For of a truth it was too foul: and woe was me, who had it. But yet what was it? Who can understand his errors? It was the sport, which as it were tickled our hearts, that we beguiled those who little thought what we were doing, and much disliked it. Why then was my delight of such sort that I did it not alone? Because none doth ordinarily laugh alone? ordinarily no one; yet laughter sometimes masters men alone and singly when no one whatever is with them, if anything very ludicrous presents itself to their senses or mind. Yet I had not done this alone; alone I had never done it. Behold my God, before Thee, the vivid remembrance of my soul; alone, I had never committed that theft wherein what I stole pleased me not, but that I stole; nor had it alone liked me to do it, nor had I done it. O friendship too unfriendly! thou incomprehensible inveigler of the soul, thou greediness to do mischief out of mirth and wantonness, thou thirst of others' loss, without lust of my own gain or revenge: but when it is said, "Let's go, let's do it," we are ashamed not to be shameless.

“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.

“Nor are these the only points in which our city is worthy of admiration. We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and, instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation, each carried to its highest point, and both united in the same persons; although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflection. [. . .]

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and [41] sullenly think may be called the silliest ever known among men. They are much more wild than the wildest romances of chivalry and much more dull than the dullest religious tract. Moreover, the romances of chivalry were at least about [42] chivalry; the religious tracts are about religion. But these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every [43] bookstall in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. [44] To begin with, and it should be said at the outset, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey. . . .

It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. . . . You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about whist; you may want a book [45] about to cheat at whist. [46] For instance, you cannot want a book about Success. Especially you cannot want a book about Success such as those [47] which you can now find scattered by the hundred about the book-market. You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners.

In such strange utterances we see quite clearly what is really at the bottom of all these articles and books. It is not mere business; it is not even mere cynicism. It is mysticism; the horrible mysticism of money. The writer of that passage did not really have the remotest notion of how Vanderbilt made his money, or of how anybody else [48] are to make theirs. He does, indeed, conclude his remarks by advocating some scheme; but it has nothing in the world to do with Vanderbilt[49] , whose fortune he never explains. He merely wished to prostrate himself before the mystery of a millionaire. For when we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride? A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors. This was [50] totally bogus, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth. In our society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it may help him to respect himself. Good work will not make him a rich man, but good work may make him a good workman. The Industrious Apprentice rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues. But what shall we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious Apprentice; the Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices?

Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098, the tenth child of a family of the lesser nobility in the German Rhineland. Her parents promised her to the church while she was still a small girl, and at the age of eight she was placed in the care of an anchoress named Jutta, who lived in a cell attached to the monastery at Disibodenberg. From Jutta she learned to read the Latin psalter and to sing the divine office. She learned little else in any formal sense, and for the rest of her life she [51] describing herself as an unschooled woman. [52] Modern scholars have found reasons to doubt that description.

When Jutta died in 1136, the women who had gathered around her elected Hildegard as their leader. She was thirty-eight. Five years later she reported an experience that changed the shape of her [53] life a light of extraordinary brightness that she understood as a divine command to write down what she saw and heard. She had been having such visions since early childhood and had told almost no one about them. [54] She was reluctant and unwilling to obey, and by her own account she fell ill and remained so until she began to write.

The book that resulted, Scivias, took roughly ten years to finish. It described twenty-six visions and interpreted each one at length. What made the work unusual [55] was therefore less its content than its reception. Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential churchman of the age, spoke in her favor, and at the synod of Trier in 1147 and 1148 Pope Eugenius III had portions of the manuscript [56] summarized aloud to the assembled bishops, who heard Hildegard's own words rather than any account of them. His approval gave Hildegard something that almost no woman of her century possessed, which was permission to teach in public.

She used it. In the years after 1158 she conducted four preaching tours through the Rhineland, addressing clergy and laity in cathedrals and public squares, and her subject [57] were frequently the corruption of the church and the need for reform. She corresponded with emperors, abbots, and bishops, and she rebuked several of them in terms that would have been dangerous from a less securely established figure. Around 1150 she had founded her own monastery at Rupertsberg, after a long dispute with Abbot Kuno of [58] Disibodenberg, who was unwilling to lose the revenue her growing fame attracted.

Her other work ranged more widely than her visionary writing suggests. She composed seventy-seven liturgical songs and a sung morality play, using melodic lines that [59] jump around way more than those of most chant of the period. She wrote treatises on medicine and natural history, [60] cataloguing the properties of plants, stones, and animals with a practical detail that suggests direct observation rather than compilation from earlier authorities. She also invented an alphabet of twenty-three letters and a private language of roughly a thousand words, the purpose of which is still debated.

Hildegard died in 1179, at eighty-one. Veneration of her began almost immediately, but the formal process stalled for centuries, tangled in procedural failures that had little to do with her. Benedict XVI extended her cult to the whole church in May of 2012 and named her a Doctor of the Church that October, one of only four women to hold that title.

You may know that the oceans cover about 70 percent of the Earth's surface, and that about 97 percent of all water on and in the Earth is saline—there's a lot of salty water on our planet. By some estimates, if the salt in the ocean could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth's land surface, it would form a layer more than 500 feet (166 meters) thick, about the height of a 40-story office building. [61] For instance, where did all this salt come from? If you get into folk stories and mythology you will see that almost every culture has a story explaining how the oceans became salty. [62] The answer to this particular question is really very simple. Salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land. Here's how it works...

The rain that falls on the land contains some dissolved carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. This causes the rainwater to be slightly acidic due to carbonic acid. The rain physically erodes the rock and the acids chemically [63] breaks down the rocks and carry salts and minerals along in a dissolved state as ions. The ions in the runoff are carried to the streams and rivers and then to the ocean. Many of the dissolved ions [64] are used by organisms in the ocean and are removed from the water. Others are not used up and are left for long periods of time where their concentrations increase over time.

The two ions that are present most often in seawater are chloride and sodium. These two make up over 90% of all dissolved ions in seawater. By the way, the concentration of salt in seawater (salinity) is about 35 parts per thousand. In other words, about 35 of 1,000 (3.5%) of the weight of seawater comes from the dissolved [65] salts, in a cubic mile of seawater the weight of the salt, as sodium chloride, would be about 120 million tons. And, just so you don't think seawater is worthless, a cubic mile of it also can contain up to 25 pounds of gold (at a concentration of 0.000005 parts per million). Before you go out and try alchemy on seawater, though, just think about how big a cubic mile is, [66] and a cubic mile is very big (1 cubic mile contains 1,101,117,147,000 gallons!).

Rivers and surface runoff are not the only source of dissolved salts. Hydrothermal vents are recently-discovered features on the crest of oceanic ridges that [67] attribute dissolved minerals to the oceans. These vents are the exit point on the ocean floor from which seawater that has seeped into the rocks of the oceanic crust has become hotter, has dissolved some of the minerals from the crust, and [68] then flows back into the ocean. With the hot water come large amounts of dissolved minerals. Estimates of the amount of hydrothermal fluids now flowing from these vents indicate that the entire volume of the world's oceans could circulate through hydrothermal vent systems every 10-20 million years. Thus, this process [69] is a really big deal for salinity. The reactions between seawater and [70] oceanic basalt the rock of ocean crust, are not one-way, however; some of the dissolved salts react with the rock and are removed from seawater.

A final process that provides salts to the oceans is submarine volcanism, the eruption of volcanoes under water. This is similar to the previous process in that seawater is reacting with hot rock and dissolving some of the mineral constituents.

Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of dull Boeotia; you know the tale,—how swarthy Atalanta, tall and wild, would marry only him who out-raced her; and how the wily Hippomenes laid three apples of gold in the way. She fled like a shadow, paused, startled over the first apple, but even as he stretched his hand, fled again; hovered over the second, then, slipping from his hot grasp, [71] flying over river, vale, and hill; but as she lingered over the third, his arms fell round her, and looking on each other, the blazing passion of their love profaned the sanctuary of Love, and they were cursed. [72] In other words, if Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she ought to have been.

Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden whom greed of gold has led to defile the temple of Love; and not maids alone, but men in the race of life, [73] sinks from the high and generous ideals of youth to the gambler’s code of the Bourse; and in all our Nation’s striving is not the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay? So common is this that one-half think it [74] normal; so unquestioned, that we almost fear to question if the end of racing is not gold, if the aim of man is not rightly to be rich. And if this is the fault of America, how dire a danger [75] lounges before a new land and a new city, lest Atlanta, stooping for mere gold, shall find that gold accursed!

It was no maiden’s idle whim that started this hard racing; a fearful wilderness lay about the feet of that city after the War,—feudalism, poverty, the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Law and Order, and above and between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a journey for weary feet! what wings must Atalanta have [76] to flitting over all this hollow and hill, through sour wood and sullen water, and by the red waste of sun-baked clay! How fleet must Atalanta be if she will not be tempted by gold to profane the Sanctuary!

The Sanctuary of our fathers has, to be sure, few Gods,—some sneer, “all too few.” There is the thrifty Mercury of New England, Pluto of the North, and Ceres of the West; and there, too, is the half-forgotten Apollo of the South, [77] under whose aegis the maiden ran,—and as she ran she forgot him, even as there in Boeotia Venus was forgot. She forgot the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,—that new-world heir of the grace and courtliness of patrician, knight, and noble; [78] forgot his honor along with his various foibles, and his kindliness along with his carelessness, and stooped to apples of gold,—to men busier and sharper, thriftier and more unscrupulous. [79] Golden apples are beautiful, and, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no despicable parvenu. Work and wealth are [80] the really useful tools to lift this old new land; thrift and toil and saving are the highways to new hopes and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed lest the wily Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are the goal of racing, and not mere incidents by the way.