The passage indicates that the royal office of the Luparii, established in the ninth century to manage wolves, became obsolete after the last wolf was eliminated. Consequently, the reappearance of wolves cannot be attributed to the dissolution of this office.
Alternative explanations offer greater clarity:
Option A: The recovery of wolf populations is also facilitated by their protected status in Europe, which prohibits hunting except for authorized state culls, and by NGO initiatives for tracking and population monitoring.
Option B: Rural depopulation plays a role. For instance, in Lozère, the population has decreased from over 140,000 in the mid-19th century to under 80,000 currently due to the decline in agriculture and mining.
Option D: As human presence diminishes, forests are expanding. Between 1990 and 2015, France experienced an annual increase of 102,000 hectares in forest cover, with approximately one-third of mainland France now forested.
The correct option is (C): The closure of the royal Luparii office.
Residents in the rural, hilly region of Lozère, southern France, express common local grievances. In isolated hamlets such as Le Bacon and Le Bacon Vieux, mayors report shortages of schools, employment opportunities, and telecommunications infrastructure. Farmers are also apprehensive due to the resurgence of wolves, which, after being eliminated from France in the past century, are now re-establishing themselves in the woodlands and uplands. Francis Palombi, a parliamentary candidate, highlighted this concern during his election campaign, stating, "The wolf must be managed." Although tourists find a wolf sanctuary in Lozère appealing, farmers fear for their livestock and economic stability.
Options B, C, and D are directly supported by the provided text:
The text also notes that despite many individuals possessing hunting permits, active hunting participation is low. Consequently, Option A, asserting a reduction in the quantity of hunting licenses, is deemed inaccurate.
To challenge the author's argument, we must find a statement that contradicts the passage's assertions or implications. The author addresses the reintroduction of wolves in Lozère, stating:
A potent method to discredit these points is to present outcomes of the wolf's return that oppose the author's sanguine perspective, particularly concerning tourism. The assertion, "Wolf attacks on tourists in Lozère are on the rise", directly refutes the third point. If wolves represent a threat to tourists, this would likely discourage visitors, resulting in adverse economic and social repercussions, and consequently undermining the author's favorable depiction of tourism prospects.
Conclusion: This statement introduces a significant issue that the author neglects, positioning it as a robust means to weaken the overall argument.
"With the European wolf population expanding westward and wolves appearing near urban centers, anticipate increased conflict between agriculturalists and proponents of the predators' reintroduction. While farmers incur genuine losses, this is not the sole economic consideration. Tourist destinations, such as wolf parks and educational centers on wolf range expansion, also contribute to rural economies through revenue and employment."
The text indicates that farmers in Lozère are concerned about wolf resurgence and its impact on livestock. Conversely, conservationists view wolf presence as an indicator of ecosystem well-being. The suggested economic strategy proposes developing wolf-themed tourist facilities, such as parks. These initiatives aim to mitigate farmers' economic challenges by creating revenue streams and resonate with conservationists' objectives regarding wolf recovery. Consequently, Option D accurately encapsulates the cooperative approach between farmers and environmentalists in the proposed resolution.
Directions: There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (Option 1, 2, 3, or 4) the following sentence would best fit.
Sentence: This philosophical cut at one's core beliefs, values, and way of life is difficult enough.
Paragraph:
The experience of reading philosophy is often disquieting. When reading philosophy, the values around which one has heretofore organised one's life may come to look provincial, flatly wrong, or even evil. __(1)__ When beliefs previously held as truths are rendered implausible, new beliefs, values, and ways of living may be required. __(2)__ What's worse, philosophers admonish each other to remain unsutured until such time as a defensible new answer is revealed or constructed. Sometimes philosophical writing is even strictly critical in that it does not even attempt to provide an alternative after tearing down a cultural or conceptual citadel. __(3)__ The reader of philosophy must be prepared for the possibility of this experience. While reading philosophy can help one clarify one's values, and even make one self-conscious for the first time of the fact that there are good reasons for believing what one believes, it can also generate Un remediated doubt that is difficult to live with.
The sentence, "This philosophical cut at one's core beliefs, values, and way of life is difficult enough.", is best placed at Option 2 within the paragraph because it effectively bridges the preceding and subsequent points. The paragraph first addresses how philosophical engagement can challenge existing values and beliefs, potentially rendering them implausible. The inserted sentence then highlights the inherent difficulty of this introspective philosophical process. Subsequently, the text discusses the further challenge posed by philosophers who may present critical arguments without offering alternatives. The structural placement at Option 2 therefore creates a coherent flow, linking the unsettling nature of philosophical inquiry with the reader's potential exposure to unresolved doubt. The paragraph's arrangement with the inserted sentence is as follows:
The experience of reading philosophy is often disquieting. When reading philosophy, the values around which one has heretofore organised one's life may come to look provincial, flatly wrong, or even evil. When beliefs previously held as truths are rendered implausible, new beliefs, values, and ways of living may be required. This philosophical cut at one's core beliefs, values, and way of life is difficult enough. What's worse, philosophers admonish each other to remain unsutured until such time as a defensible new answer is revealed or constructed. Sometimes philosophical writing is even strictly critical in that it does not even attempt to provide an alternative after tearing down a cultural or conceptual citadel. The reader of philosophy must be prepared for the possibility of this experience. While reading philosophy can help one clarify one's values, and even make one self-conscious for the first time of the fact that there are good reasons for believing what one believes, it can also generate unremediated doubt that is difficult to live with.
Consequently, the placement at Option 2 provides a concise transition between the ideas of philosophical disruption and the potential for unresolved uncertainty.
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.