SAT Mc Graw Hill 2011

CHAPTER 4 / CRITICAL READING SKILLS 195

35 passion, for fits of anger and craving for

sensual pleasures and some such things do

unmistakenly produce a change in bodily

condition and in some instances actually

cause madness.

1. The last sentence of Passage 1 (“For normal
   man... do not exist,’ lines 19–20) suggests that
   (A) certain modern discoveries have hindered
   our understanding of our bodily senses
   (B) biological knowledge has grown rapidly in
   recent decades
   (C) we must work hard to maintain the pace of
   technological progress
   (D) recent studies of proprioception have been
   misleading
   (E) most people do not appreciate the function
   of certain physical senses


2. According to Passage 2, wrongdoing “does not
   seem strange” (line 27) when the wrongdoer
   (A) applies moral knowledge to the situation
   (B) is attacking a person incapable of self-defense
   (C) is in full control of his or her faculties of
   reason
   (D) fails to think about what is right and wrong
   before committing the act
   (E) is doing something that he or she believes is
   right

SAT Practice 6:

Finding Alternativesin Attacking the Questions

PASSAGE 1

We have five senses in which we glory, senses

that constitute the sensible world for us. But

Linethere are other senses, equally vital, but

unrecognized and unlauded. These senses,

5 unconscious, automatic, had to be discovered.

What the Victorians vaguely called “muscle

sense”—the awareness of the relative position

of trunk and limbs, was only really defined,

and named “proprioception,” in the 1890s.

10 And the complex mechanisms and controls by

which our bodies are properly aligned and

balanced in space have only been defined in

the 20th century and still hold many myster-

ies. Perhaps it will only be in this space age,

15 with the paradoxical license and hazards of

gravity-free life, that we will truly appreciate

our inner ears, our vestibules, and all the

other obscure receptors and reflexes that gov-

ern our body orientation. For normal man, in

20 normal situations, they simply do not exist.

PASSAGE 2

A person can “know” something and apply

that knowledge but also can “know” something

Linewithout applying that knowledge. There is a

difference between doing wrong when one

25 knows but does not reflect on that knowledge

and doing wrong when one knows and

reflects. Wrongdoing does not seem strange in

the former case, but it does in the latter.

When a person has knowledge but does not

30 apply it, “having” has an unconventional

meaning. In fact, in one sense he has knowl-

edge and in another sense he does not, as in

sleep or madness or intoxication. This is the

condition of people under the influence of

First passage: Excerpted with permission of Simon and Schuster Adult Publishing Group from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks. Copyright © 1970, 1981, 1984, 1985 by Oliver Sacks.
Second passage: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.Public domain.