Overcome cultural barriers to communication: The passage states that studying languages helps students understand cultural biases and communicate across linguistic and cultural differences. This empowers students to overcome cultural barriers.
Establish schools to preserve endangered languages: While the passage notes that some communities establish schools for language preservation, the author points out that few students will directly create such schools. Most will support preservation efforts passively rather than actively establish institutions. Therefore, this is not a direct empowerment from a liberal arts education.
Learn different languages: The author discusses extensive language study as part of a liberal arts education, which naturally involves learning new languages and fostering cultural understanding and empathy. This is an emphasized form of empowerment.
Develop a better understanding of their own culture: Studying other languages and cultures allows students to better recognize their own cultural biases and viewpoints. This is an aspect of empowerment promoted by the author.
Based on this analysis, the unsupported statement is: "establish schools to preserve languages spiraling towards extinction." This activity is not directly empowered by a liberal arts education and general language preservation efforts.
| Option | Analysis |
| Schools that teach endangered languages can preserve the language only for a generation. | This option points out a limit in language preservation efforts. However, it agrees with the passage's acknowledgement of the difficulties in stopping language extinction. Therefore, it does not weaken the main idea. |
| Most liberal arts students will pursue jobs in publishing and human resource management rather than doctorates in linguistics. | This situation notes the likely career paths of liberal arts students. This does not contradict the passage, as it states that most students won't become linguists but will still gain cultural exposure from their education. |
| Recording a dying language that has only a few remaining speakers freezes it in time: it stops evolving further. | Although this points out a possible drawback of documenting languages, it does not oppose the broader educational and cultural benefits and support that the passage champions. |
| A liberal arts education requires that, in addition to being fluent in English, students gain fluency in two of the top five most spoken languages globally. | This requirement goes against the passage's focus on students learning various languages, especially endangered ones, to build cultural understanding and empathy. It weakens the argument that liberal arts education should support endangered languages instead of concentrating on widely spoken ones. |
You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it, -- the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have de ned man as "an animal which laughs." They might equally well have de ned him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.
Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unru ed. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or evenwith affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is being said and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the imsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound of music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similar test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple
This uidity and situational dependence is uniquely human. In other species, in-group/outgroup distinctions re ect degrees of biological relatedness, or what evolutionary biologists call “kin selection.” Rodents distinguish between a sibling, a cousin, and a stranger by smell—xed, genetically determined pheromonal signatures—and adapt their cooperation accordingly. Those murderous groups of chimps are largely made up of brothers or cousins who grew up together and predominantly harm outsiders. Humans are plenty capable of kin-selective violence themselves, yet human group mentality is often utterly independent of such instinctual familial bonds. Most modern human societies rely instead on cultural kin selection, a process allowing people to feel closely related to what are, in a biological sense, total strangers. Often, this requires a highly active process of inculcation, with its attendant rituals and vocabularies. Consider military drills producing “bands of brothers,” unrelated college freshmen becoming sorority “sisters,” or the bygone value of welcoming immigrants into “the American family.” This malleable, rather than genetically xed, path of identity formation also drives people to adopt arbitrary markers that enable them to spot their cultural kin in an ocean of strangers—hence the importance various communities attach to ags, dress, or facial hair. The hipster beard, the turban, and the “Make America Great Again” hat all fulfill this role by sending strong signals of tribal belonging. Moreover, these cultural communities are arbitrary when compared to the relatively axed logic of biological kin selection. Few things show this arbitrariness better than the experience of immigrant families, where the randomness of a visa lottery can radically reshu e a child’s education, career opportunities, and cultural predilections. Had my grandparents and father missed the train out of Moscow that they instead barely made, maybe I’d be a chain smoking Russian academic rather than a Birkenstock-wearing American one, moved to tears by the heroism during the Battle of Stalingrad rather than that at Pearl Harbor. Scaled up from the level of individual family histories, our big-picture group identities—the national identities and cultural principles that structure our lives— are just as arbitrary and subject to the vagaries of history.