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Medical College Admission Test: Verbal Reasoning, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Writing Sample Questions 187–191 (page: 38)

As Alice Echols went on to claim, "Nothing seems to conjure up the 1970s quite so effectively as disco. Even at the time, critics remarked upon disco's neat encapsulation of that decade's zeitgeist. `It must be clear by now to everyone with an ear or an eye that this era,' wrote journalist Andrew Kopkind in 1979, `is already the Disco Years, whether it will be called by that name or not.' A former sixties radical, Kopkind was by turns fascinated, bemused, and appalled by the disco epoch, and he likely imagined that in years to come fellow cultural critics would share his interest. But the seventies have not loomed large in our national imagination, except perhaps as comic relief. For many Americans, these were the forgettable years.
That forgettability owes a lot to the 1960s, the outsized decade that dwarfs all others in recent memory. The sixties will always be remembered for their audacity, whether found in the courage of civil rights protesters who put their bodies on the line or in those doomed but beautiful rock stars who tried breaking through to the other side. By contrast, the seventies seem the decade when nothing, or nothing good, happened ­ an era memorable for the country's hapless presidents, declining prestige, bad fashions, ludicrous music, and such over-the-top narcissism that Tom Wolfe dubbed it the `Me Decade.' Before the decade was out, this narrative of decline had become routine. `After the poetry of the Beatles comes the monotonous bass-pedal bombardment of Donna Summer,' huffed one New York Times writer in 1979. It is a measure of the era's persistent bad press that a recent book challenging this view carries the pleading title Something Happened.
As for the sixties, it doesn't matter how much silliness went down, we still invest those times with seismic significance. Take Joe Cocker's performance at Woodstock. His spasmodic thrashing about and his vocals, slurred to the point of incomprehensibility, are something of a joke today. Cringe-inducing though it may be, however, Cocker's performance is never made to stand in for the whole of the sixties. The sixties remain enveloped in the gauzy sentimentalism of what might have been. Yet the iconic image of John Travolta as dance-floor king Tony Manero in white polyester suit, arm thrust to the disco heavens, has come to symbolize the narcissistic imbecility and inconsequentiality of the disco years.
Were it not for the Rubaiyat, I, too, might well regard the seventies as a lamentable and regrettable period in American history. The Rubaiyat was, yes, a disco. It was located in the heart of sixtiesland: Ann Arbor, Michigan, the home of the University of Michigan and legendary incubator of radical activism. At the height of the seventies, the town's annual Hash Bash ­ a smoke-in to reform marijuana laws ­ was still going strong and so were its two food co-ops-one reform, the other orthodox when it came to selling white foods (that is, rice, sugar, and flour of the white variety). Ann Arbor also had bookstores galore, including the original, wonderful Borders Bookstore, and any number of hippie-ish restaurants and bars such as the Fleetwood Diner, the Del Rio, and the Blind Pig. Musically, it prided itself on its vintage music (it hosted one of the earliest blues festivals), but at heart it was a rock town besotted with Iggy Pop and the Stooges and Sonic's Rendezvous, a band fronted by Patti Smith's future husband, Fred Smith. Its leading music store, Schoolkids' Records, stocked disco, but never played it. All of this is to say that disco-averse Ann Arbor came close to providing something of a safe haven from glitterball culture.
The Rubaiyat was no red-velvet-rope disco where fashionista doormen determined who was sufficiently fabulous to gain entry. This would never have worked in a town where down jackets and army surplus were hardly an unusual sight. The club did have some pretensions to classiness, but the mismatched, sagging booths and bordello red defeated occasional efforts at upmarket sophistication. What the Rubaiyat did have were better-than-average speakers, a heterogeneous clientèle, and a weekend cover of three dollars."
Echols, A. (2011). Hot stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York: W. W. Norton.

Which of the following arguments would MOST STRONGLY support the author's claims?

As Alice Echols went on to claim, "Nothing seems to conjure up the 1970s quite so effectively as disco. Even at the time, critics remarked upon disco's neat encapsulation of that decade's zeitgeist. `It must be clear by now to everyone with an ear or an eye that this era,' wrote journalist Andrew Kopkind in 1979, `is already the Disco Years, whether it will be called by that name or not.' A former sixties radical, Kopkind was by turns fascinated, bemused, and appalled by the disco epoch, and he likely imagined that in years to come fellow cultural critics would share his interest. But the seventies have not loomed large in our national imagination, except perhaps as comic relief. For many Americans, these were the forgettable years.
That forgettability owes a lot to the 1960s, the outsized decade that dwarfs all others in recent memory. The sixties will always be remembered for their audacity, whether found in the courage of civil rights protesters who put their bodies on the line or in those doomed but beautiful rock stars who tried breaking through to the other side. By contrast, the seventies seem the decade when nothing, or nothing good, happened ­ an era memorable for the country's hapless presidents, declining prestige, bad fashions, ludicrous music, and such over-the-top narcissism that Tom Wolfe dubbed it the `Me Decade.' Before the decade was out, this narrative of decline had become routine. `After the poetry of the Beatles comes the monotonous bass-pedal bombardment of Donna Summer,' huffed one New York Times writer in 1979. It is a measure of the era's persistent bad press that a recent book challenging this view carries the pleading title Something Happened.
As for the sixties, it doesn't matter how much silliness went down, we still invest those times with seismic significance. Take Joe Cocker's performance at Woodstock. His spasmodic thrashing about and his vocals, slurred to the point of incomprehensibility, are something of a joke today. Cringe-inducing though it may be, however, Cocker's performance is never made to stand in for the whole of the sixties. The sixties remain enveloped in the gauzy sentimentalism of what might have been. Yet the iconic image of John Travolta as dance-floor king Tony Manero in white polyester suit, arm thrust to the disco heavens, has come to symbolize the narcissistic imbecility and inconsequentiality of the disco years.
Were it not for the Rubaiyat, I, too, might well regard the seventies as a lamentable and regrettable period in American history. The Rubaiyat was, yes, a disco. It was located in the heart of sixtiesland: Ann Arbor, Michigan, the home of the University of Michigan and legendary incubator of radical activism. At the height of the seventies, the town's annual Hash Bash ­ a smoke-in to reform marijuana laws ­ was still going strong and so were its two food co-ops-one reform, the other orthodox when it came to selling white foods (that is, rice, sugar, and flour of the white variety). Ann Arbor also had bookstores galore, including the original, wonderful Borders Bookstore, and any number of hippie-ish restaurants and bars such as the Fleetwood Diner, the Del Rio, and the Blind Pig. Musically, it prided itself on its vintage music (it hosted one of the earliest blues festivals), but at heart it was a rock town besotted with Iggy Pop and the Stooges and Sonic's Rendezvous, a band fronted by Patti Smith's future husband, Fred Smith. Its leading music store, Schoolkids' Records, stocked disco, but never played it. All of this is to say that disco-averse Ann Arbor came close to providing something of a safe haven from glitterball culture.
The Rubaiyat was no red-velvet-rope disco where fashionista doormen determined who was sufficiently fabulous to gain entry. This would never have worked in a town where down jackets and army surplus were hardly an unusual sight. The club did have some pretensions to classiness, but the mismatched, sagging booths and bordello red defeated occasional efforts at upmarket sophistication. What the Rubaiyat did have were better-than-average speakers, a heterogeneous clientèle, and a weekend cover of three dollars."
Echols, A. (2011). Hot stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York: W. W. Norton.
The passage implies that cultural commentators tend to agree on which of the following ideas about music?

As Alice Echols went on to claim, "Nothing seems to conjure up the 1970s quite so effectively as disco. Even at the time, critics remarked upon disco's neat encapsulation of that decade's zeitgeist. `It must be clear by now to everyone with an ear or an eye that this era,' wrote journalist Andrew Kopkind in 1979, `is already the Disco Years, whether it will be called by that name or not.' A former sixties radical, Kopkind was by turns fascinated, bemused, and appalled by the disco epoch, and he likely imagined that in years to come fellow cultural critics would share his interest. But the seventies have not loomed large in our national imagination, except perhaps as comic relief. For many Americans, these were the forgettable years.

That forgettability owes a lot to the 1960s, the outsized decade that dwarfs all others in recent memory. The sixties will always be remembered for their audacity, whether found in the courage of civil rights protesters who put their bodies on the line or in those doomed but beautiful rock stars who tried breaking through to the other side. By contrast, the seventies seem the decade when nothing, or nothing good, happened ­ an era memorable for the country's hapless presidents, declining prestige, bad fashions, ludicrous music, and such over-the-top narcissism that Tom Wolfe dubbed it the `Me Decade.' Before the decade was out, this narrative of decline had become routine. `After the poetry of the Beatles comes the monotonous bass-pedal bombardment of Donna Summer,' huffed one New York Times writer in 1979. It is a measure of the era's persistent bad press that a recent book challenging this view carries the pleading title Something Happened.
As for the sixties, it doesn't matter how much silliness went down, we still invest those times with seismic significance. Take Joe Cocker's performance at Woodstock. His spasmodic thrashing about and his vocals, slurred to the point of incomprehensibility, are something of a joke today. Cringe-inducing though it may be, however, Cocker's performance is never made to stand in for the whole of the sixties. The sixties remain enveloped in the gauzy sentimentalism of what might have been. Yet the iconic image of John Travolta as dance-floor king Tony Manero in white polyester suit, arm thrust to the disco heavens, has come to symbolize the narcissistic imbecility and inconsequentiality of the disco years.
Were it not for the Rubaiyat, I, too, might well regard the seventies as a lamentable and regrettable period in American history. The Rubaiyat was, yes, a disco. It was located in the heart of sixtiesland: Ann Arbor, Michigan, the home of the University of Michigan and legendary incubator of radical activism. At the height of the seventies, the town's annual Hash Bash ­ a smoke-in to reform marijuana laws ­ was still going strong and so were its two food co-ops-one reform, the other orthodox when it came to selling white foods (that is, rice, sugar, and flour of the white variety). Ann Arbor also had bookstores galore, including the original, wonderful Borders Bookstore, and any number of hippie-ish restaurants and bars such as the Fleetwood Diner, the Del Rio, and the Blind Pig. Musically, it prided itself on its vintage music (it hosted one of the earliest blues festivals), but at heart it was a rock town besotted with Iggy Pop and the Stooges and Sonic's Rendezvous, a band fronted by Patti Smith's future husband, Fred Smith. Its leading music store, Schoolkids' Records, stocked disco, but never played it. All of this is to say that disco-averse Ann Arbor came close to providing something of a safe haven from glitterball culture.
The Rubaiyat was no red-velvet-rope disco where fashionista doormen determined who was sufficiently fabulous to gain entry. This would never have worked in a town where down jackets and army surplus were hardly an unusual sight. The club did have some pretensions to classiness, but the mismatched, sagging booths and bordello red defeated occasional efforts at upmarket sophistication. What the Rubaiyat did have were better-than-average speakers, a heterogeneous clientèle, and a weekend cover of three dollars."
Echols, A. (2011). Hot stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York: W. W. Norton.
The author most closely means which of the following in paragraph 2 by "narrative of decline"?

Gauguin's attitude toward art marked a break from the past and a beginning to modern art. Like all Post- Impressionist artists, he passed through an Impressionist phase but became quickly dissatisfied with the limitations of the style, and went on to discover a new style that had the directness and universality of a symbol and that concentrated on impressions, ideas and experiences. The beginning of his modern tradition lay in his rejection of Impressionism. He considered naturalism an error to be avoided. He was preoccupied with suggestion rather than description, seeking to portray not the exterior, but the essence of things in their purest, simplest, and most primitive form, which could only be achieved through simplification of the form. He firmly believed throughout his life that "art is an abstraction" and that "this abstraction [must be derived] from nature while dreaming before it." One must think of the creation that will result rather than the model, and not try to render the model exactly as one sees it. This was the birth of "Synthetism" or rather Synthetist-Symbolic, as Gauguin referred to it, using the term "symbolic" to indicate that the forms and patterns in his pictures were meant to suggest mental images or ideas and not simply to record visual experience.
Symbolism flourished around the period of 1885 to 1910 and can be defined as the rejection of direct, literal representation in favor of evocation and suggestion. Painters tried to give a visual expression to emotional experiences, and therefore the movement was a reaction against the naturalistic aims of Impressionism. Satisfying the need for a more spiritual or emotional approach in art, Symbolism is characterized by the desire to seek refuge in a dreamworld of beauty and the belief that color and line in themselves could express ideas. Stylistically, the tendency was towards flattened forms and broad areas of color, and features of the movement were an intense religious feeling and an interest in subjects of death, disease, and sin.
Similarly, "Synthetism" involved the simplification of forms into large-scale patterns and the expressive purification of colors. Form and color had to be simplified for the sake of expression. This style reacted against the "formlessness" of Impressionism and favored painting subjectively and expressing one's ideas rather than relying on external objects as subject matters. It was characterized by areas of pure colors, very defined contours, an emphasis on pattern and decorative qualities, and a relative absence of shadows.
Gauguin's new art form merged these two movements and succeeded in freeing color, form, and line, bringing it to express the artists' emotions, sensibilities, and personal experiences of the world around them. His style created a break with the old tradition of descriptive naturalism and favored the synthesis of observation and imagination. Gauguin sustained that forms are not discovered in nature but in one's wild imagination, and it was in himself that he searched rather than in his surroundings. For this reason, he scorned the Impressionists for their lack of imagination and their mere scientific reasoning. Furthermore, Gauguin used color unnaturalistically for its decorative or emotional effect and reintroduced emphatic outlines. "Synthetism" signified for him that the forms of his pictures were constructed from symbolic patterns of color and linear rhythms and were not mere scientific reproductions of what is seen by the eye.
Dempsey, A., & Dempsey, A. (2010). Styles, Schools and Movements: The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art. London: Thames & Hudson.
Based on passage information, which of the following can you infer to be among the principles of Impressionism?

Gauguin's attitude toward art marked a break from the past and a beginning to modern art. Like all Post- Impressionist artists, he passed through an Impressionist phase but became quickly dissatisfied with the limitations of the style, and went on to discover a new style that had the directness and universality of a symbol and that concentrated on impressions, ideas and experiences. The beginning of his modern tradition lay in his rejection of Impressionism. He considered naturalism an error to be avoided. He was preoccupied with suggestion rather than description, seeking to portray not the exterior, but the essence of things in their purest, simplest, and most primitive form, which could only be achieved through simplification of the form. He firmly believed throughout his life that "art is an abstraction" and that "this abstraction [must be derived] from nature while dreaming before it." One must think of the creation that will result rather than the model, and not try to render the model exactly as one sees it. This was the birth of "Synthetism" or rather Synthetist-Symbolic, as Gauguin referred to it, using the term "symbolic" to indicate that the forms and patterns in his pictures were meant to suggest mental images or ideas and not simply to record visual experience.
Symbolism flourished around the period of 1885 to 1910 and can be defined as the rejection of direct, literal representation in favor of evocation and suggestion. Painters tried to give a visual expression to emotional experiences, and therefore the movement was a reaction against the naturalistic aims of Impressionism. Satisfying the need for a more spiritual or emotional approach in art, Symbolism is characterized by the desire to seek refuge in a dreamworld of beauty and the belief that color and line in themselves could express ideas. Stylistically, the tendency was towards flattened forms and broad areas of color, and features of the movement were an intense religious feeling and an interest in subjects of death, disease, and sin.
Similarly, "Synthetism" involved the simplification of forms into large-scale patterns and the expressive purification of colors. Form and color had to be simplified for the sake of expression. This style reacted against the "formlessness" of Impressionism and favored painting subjectively and expressing one's ideas rather than relying on external objects as subject matters. It was characterized by areas of pure colors, very defined contours, an emphasis on pattern and decorative qualities, and a relative absence of shadows.
Gauguin's new art form merged these two movements and succeeded in freeing color, form, and line, bringing it to express the artists' emotions, sensibilities, and personal experiences of the world around them. His style created a break with the old tradition of descriptive naturalism and favored the synthesis of observation and imagination. Gauguin sustained that forms are not discovered in nature but in one's wild imagination, and it was in himself that he searched rather than in his surroundings. For this reason, he scorned the Impressionists for their lack of imagination and their mere scientific reasoning. Furthermore, Gauguin used color unnaturalistically for its decorative or emotional effect and reintroduced emphatic outlines. "Synthetism" signified for him that the forms of his pictures were constructed from symbolic patterns of color and linear rhythms and were not mere scientific reproductions of what is seen by the eye.
Dempsey, A., & Dempsey, A. (2010). Styles, Schools and Movements: The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art. London: Thames & Hudson.
According to passage information, what can we infer that Symbolism and Impressionism had in common?