# WCIV Exam Practice Question Bank

Total questions: 43

## 1. Seminar 1 (5 marks)

Briefly explain why Plato’s ‘wonder’ and Aristotle’s ‘desire to know’ are presented as foundations for the unit.

**Marking guide:**
- Plato treats wonder as the beginning of philosophy.
- Aristotle says human beings naturally desire knowledge.
- Together they frame the course as a disciplined search for understanding rather than passive information intake.
- A strong answer may connect this to the unit title, ‘The Desire to Understand’.

## 2. Seminar 1 (5 marks)

What warning do Walter Benjamin and George Steiner raise about civilisation and high culture?

**Marking guide:**
- Benjamin warns that documents of civilisation can also be documents of barbarism.
- Steiner observes that familiarity with great art or literature does not automatically prevent moral atrocity.
- The shared point is that tradition and culture are not self-guaranteeing moral forces.
- A strong answer distinguishes cultural refinement from moral goodness.

## 3. Seminar 1 (4 marks)

What is the significance of Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire for the unit’s treatment of civilisation?

**Marking guide:**
- The paintings depict a cycle from beginnings, to splendour, to destruction, to desolation.
- They raise questions about rise, decadence, and decline.
- They suggest that civilisation is historically fragile, not permanent.
- They frame the unit’s concern with monuments, inheritance, and collapse.

## 4. Seminar 2 (4 marks)

Explain the terms ‘Neolithic Revolution’ and ‘Urban Revolution’.

**Marking guide:**
- The Neolithic Revolution refers to the shift toward agriculture, animal domestication, and settled life.
- The Urban Revolution refers to the growth of cities and complex organised societies.
- A strong answer may note that these developments reshape social structure, labour, and political organisation.

## 5. Seminar 2 (5 marks)

What problems arise when defining ‘the West’ or ‘Western Civilisation’?

**Marking guide:**
- The terms are historically and geographically unstable.
- They may refer to Europe, the Anglosphere, Christianity, liberal institutions, classical inheritance, or modern geopolitical blocs.
- Border cases such as Russia, Turkey, Australia, or Latin America complicate the category.
- A strong answer notes that ‘the West’ is debated rather than self-evident.

## 6. Seminar 3 (5 marks)

What were the Seven Liberal Arts in Antiquity and the Middle Ages? Distinguish the Trivium and Quadrivium.

**Marking guide:**
- The Trivium comprises grammar, rhetoric, and logic/dialectic.
- The Quadrivium comprises arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
- Together they form the Seven Liberal Arts.
- They were understood as preparatory arts for free intellectual life and higher study.

## 7. Seminar 3 (5 marks)

What do critics and scholars mean by ‘canon’ and ‘canonicity’?

**Marking guide:**
- A canon is a body of works treated as authoritative, exemplary, or especially worthy of preservation and study.
- Canonicity concerns how and why texts come to hold that status.
- A strong answer may note that canon formation involves tradition, judgment, institutions, and contestation.
- The term has religious and literary uses.

## 8. Seminar 3 (5 marks)

What is meant by the ‘Great Conversation’ in Great Books education?

**Marking guide:**
- It refers to an ongoing dialogue across major works of the Western tradition.
- Later thinkers respond to, revise, and contest earlier thinkers.
- The idea underpins a curriculum built around enduring questions rather than isolated information.
- A strong answer may connect it to Hutchins or Adler.

## 9. Seminar 3 (5 marks)

What is the relationship between ‘classic’ and ‘tradition’ in T. S. Eliot’s account?

**Marking guide:**
- A classic is not merely old or famous, but a work with lasting maturity, order, and cultural significance.
- Tradition is not passive inheritance; it is a living relation between present works and the historical order of prior works.
- New works can alter how earlier works are perceived.
- A strong answer stresses continuity and judgment rather than nostalgia.

## 10. Seminar 4 (5 marks)

What is meant by the Documentary Hypothesis in Biblical studies?

**Marking guide:**
- It is a model for explaining the composition of the Torah/Pentateuch through multiple sources or redactional strands.
- The classic formulation is associated with J, E, P, and D sources.
- The handbook notes that the classic consensus has weakened in favour of other models.
- A strong answer mentions composition history rather than treating the Pentateuch as a single simple authorial unit.

## 11. Seminar 4 (4 marks)

Explain the terms ‘ex nihilo’ and ‘felix lapsus’.

**Marking guide:**
- Ex nihilo means creation ‘out of nothing’.
- Felix lapsus means the ‘happy’ or fortunate Fall.
- The latter names the idea that the Fall becomes the occasion for Incarnation and Redemption.
- A strong answer keeps cosmology and salvation history distinct.

## 12. Seminar 4 (5 marks)

What is distinctive about God’s role in Genesis 1 compared with many ancient cosmogonies?

**Marking guide:**
- Creation is ordered by divine speech and will, not by conflict among gods.
- The world is repeatedly declared good.
- God stands above creation rather than emerging from it.
- A strong answer may mention structure, order, and the dignity of creation.

## 13. Seminar 4 (5 marks)

Briefly sketch the Divine Watchmaker argument and name one thinker associated with it.

**Marking guide:**
- The argument reasons from apparent order, complexity, or purposiveness in nature to a designing intelligence.
- The watch analogy treats nature as analogous to a crafted mechanism.
- William Paley is the thinker most strongly associated with the watchmaker formulation.
- A strong answer may note its relation to natural theology.

## 14. Seminar 4 (4 marks)

What are the implications of humanity being granted ‘dominion’ in Genesis 1:28?

**Marking guide:**
- Dominion grants a distinctive human vocation or responsibility within creation.
- It can be interpreted as authority, stewardship, cultivation, or accountability.
- A strong answer avoids reducing it simply to licence for exploitation.
- The issue connects theology with environmental ethics.

## 15. Seminar 5 (5 marks)

Briefly sketch Pico della Mirandola’s view of human nature in the Oration on the Dignity of Man.

**Marking guide:**
- Human beings are not fixed in a single predetermined rank.
- They possess freedom to shape themselves upward or downward.
- Human dignity is tied to this open, self-forming capacity.
- A strong answer may mention ascent, choice, and the microcosmic status of humanity.

## 16. Seminar 5 (4 marks)

Explain the terms Imago Dei and theosis.

**Marking guide:**
- Imago Dei means the ‘Image of God’ in which humanity is made.
- Theosis refers to participation in divine life or divinization by grace.
- Both terms elevate human dignity, though they belong to different theological emphases.
- A strong answer distinguishes created image from transformative participation.

## 17. Seminar 5 (4 marks)

What is the Scala naturae or Great Chain of Being?

**Marking guide:**
- It is a hierarchical ordering of beings from lower to higher forms.
- It places creatures within a structured cosmos.
- In the handbook it appears in discussion of humanity, microcosm, and natural order.
- A strong answer may note its importance for premodern world-pictures.

## 18. Seminar 5 (3 marks)

Why does Diogenes carry a lamp in daylight?

**Marking guide:**
- He says he is ‘looking for a man’.
- The scene satirises conventional claims about humanity and virtue.
- It challenges complacent definitions of what a human being truly is.

## 19. Seminar 6 (5 marks)

How do the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament present both the value and the limits of human knowledge?

**Marking guide:**
- Wisdom is praised as worth seeking.
- Yet Ecclesiastes and Job stress the limits, burden, or partiality of human understanding.
- The tradition does not reduce wisdom to easy mastery.
- A strong answer holds together desire for wisdom and humility before mystery.

## 20. Seminar 6 (4 marks)

Describe Plato’s doctrine of recollection, or anamnesis.

**Marking guide:**
- Knowledge is understood as recollection rather than wholly new acquisition.
- Learning draws out what the soul in some sense already knows.
- The doctrine is associated with Plato’s account of truth and the soul.
- A strong answer identifies recollection as a theory of knowing.

## 21. Seminar 6 (4 marks)

What does it mean for a Platonic dialogue to be ‘aporetic’?

**Marking guide:**
- It ends in aporia: puzzlement, impasse, or unresolved difficulty.
- The dialogue exposes inadequate answers rather than offering a final definition.
- This can be philosophically productive because it reveals ignorance.
- A strong answer links aporia to inquiry.

## 22. Seminar 6 (4 marks)

What is the via negativa or negative theology?

**Marking guide:**
- It approaches God by saying what God is not rather than by claiming direct positive comprehension.
- It stresses the limits of human language and concepts before divine transcendence.
- A strong answer may connect it with learned ignorance or apophatic theology.

## 23. Seminar 6 (3 marks)

What does John Keats mean by ‘Negative Capability’?

**Marking guide:**
- The capacity to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without irritably reaching after fact and reason.
- It values imaginative receptivity where premature closure would be reductive.

## 24. Seminar 6 (5 marks)

Give a brief sketch of the function of scepticism within the Western tradition.

**Marking guide:**
- Scepticism questions claims to certainty and exposes weak reasoning.
- It can protect inquiry from dogmatism.
- It may function methodologically rather than simply as disbelief in everything.
- A strong answer may distinguish productive scepticism from mere cynicism or paralysis.

## 25. Seminar 7 (4 marks)

Distinguish myth, legend, and mytheme.

**Marking guide:**
- Myth is a culturally significant traditional story, often tied to gods, origins, or foundational meanings.
- Legend is traditionally linked more closely to persons, places, or events with some claim to historical grounding.
- A mytheme is a minimal unit of mythic narrative structure.
- A strong answer differentiates genre from analytic unit.

## 26. Seminar 7 (4 marks)

What is Euhemerism?

**Marking guide:**
- Euhemerism interprets myths as transformed memories of real historical persons or events.
- Gods or heroic figures may be read as deified rulers or historical agents.
- A strong answer identifies it as an interpretive approach to myth.

## 27. Seminar 7 (4 marks)

Why is the term Logos significant for a unit concerned with words, myth, and civilisation?

**Marking guide:**
- Logos can mean word, speech, account, reason, or ordering principle.
- It links language with intelligibility and order.
- It becomes important in philosophical and Christian theological traditions.
- A strong answer notes the density of the term rather than reducing it to one English word.

## 28. Seminars 8–9 (5 marks)

What do etymology, philology, and comparative linguistics contribute to understanding cultural inheritance?

**Marking guide:**
- Etymology studies word origins and historical development.
- Philology studies language and texts historically and comparatively.
- Comparative linguistics compares languages to identify relationships and reconstruct earlier forms.
- Together they illuminate inheritance, contact, and continuity across cultures.

## 29. Seminars 8–9 (4 marks)

Where does English sit within the Indo-European family tree? Name two closely related languages.

**Marking guide:**
- English belongs to the Germanic branch of Indo-European, specifically West Germanic.
- Two closely related languages include German and Dutch; Frisian is also relevant.
- A strong answer gives both larger family and immediate sub-branch.

## 30. Seminars 8–9 (4 marks)

Give six Romance languages.

**Marking guide:**
- Acceptable examples include Latin-derived languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, or Romansh.
- A strong answer supplies six recognisable Romance languages.

## 31. Seminars 8–9 (4 marks)

Name three modern European languages that do not belong to the Indo-European language family.

**Marking guide:**
- Examples include Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Basque, Maltese, or Turkish.
- A strong answer clearly selects three non-Indo-European languages spoken in Europe.

## 32. Seminars 8–9 (5 marks)

What is the Kurgan hypothesis, and why is it important for Proto-Indo-European studies?

**Marking guide:**
- It locates the Proto-Indo-European homeland on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.
- It is associated especially with Marija Gimbutas.
- It connects linguistic reconstruction with archaeology and migration models.
- A strong answer notes that it is a hypothesis about origin and spread.

## 33. Seminars 8–9 (5 marks)

What can Schleicher’s Fable suggest about reconstructed Proto-Indo-European culture, if one treats the reconstruction cautiously?

**Marking guide:**
- It features sheep, horses, wool, wagons, loads, and human control of animals.
- These imply pastoralism, transport technology, and social relations between humans and animals.
- The handbook frames such inferences as cautious and hypothetical.
- A strong answer avoids treating the fable as a direct historical document.

## 34. Seminar 10 (5 marks)

According to Deus caritas est, how are eros and agape related?

**Marking guide:**
- Eros and agape are distinct but should not be torn apart absolutely.
- Eros needs purification and maturation rather than simple rejection.
- Agape expresses self-giving love, but human love also involves receiving.
- A strong answer notes Benedict XVI’s insistence on their proper unity.

## 35. Seminar 10 (4 marks)

What is philautia, and why can self-love be morally ambiguous?

**Marking guide:**
- Philautia means self-love.
- It can be virtuous when ordered toward genuine good and responsible self-care.
- It can become disordered when it becomes narcissistic or selfish.
- A strong answer distinguishes healthy and corrupt self-love.

## 36. Seminar 10 (4 marks)

What contrast does the handbook draw between Christian love and an ‘intoxicated’ or undisciplined eros?

**Marking guide:**
- Undisciplined eros seeks possession or self-intoxication.
- Christian love calls for purification, care for the other, and integration of body and soul.
- The handbook’s Benedict XVI extract rejects both crude bodily reductionism and contempt for the body.

## 37. Seminar 11 (4 marks)

Explain the terms epyllion and Liebestod.

**Marking guide:**
- An epyllion is a miniature epic.
- Liebestod means ‘death in love’, joining erotic desire and death.
- Both are useful terms for reading Hero and Leander and related love narratives.

## 38. Seminar 11 (5 marks)

Explain the rhetorical terms blazon, ecphrasis, and sententia.

**Marking guide:**
- A blazon is a catalogue of bodily or beloved features.
- Ecphrasis is an elaborate verbal description of a work of art or vivid descriptive passage.
- A sententia is a short, pithy statement of general truth.
- A strong answer distinguishes each term’s rhetorical function.

## 39. Seminar 11 (4 marks)

What is occupatio or praeteritio?

**Marking guide:**
- It is a rhetorical device in which a speaker claims to pass over a topic while actually drawing attention to it.
- It works by pretending omission while performing emphasis.
- A strong answer identifies the paradoxical structure of the device.

## 40. Seminar 11 (4 marks)

What is barbarismus in the Hero and Leander rhetoric sheet?

**Marking guide:**
- It is the distortion of natural accent in order to fit rhyme or verse needs.
- The handbook lists it as a rhetorical or poetic effect relevant to Marlowe.
- A strong answer explains that it is about accentual deformation, not cultural barbarism.

## 41. Seminar 12 (5 marks)

How does the unit connect liberal arts education with citizenship and the common good?

**Marking guide:**
- The unit frames liberal arts education as preparation for judgment, communication, and civic responsibility.
- It links engagement with the Western tradition to democratic citizenship, human dignity, and the public good.
- A strong answer treats education as formative rather than merely instrumental.

## 42. Whole Unit (5 marks)

Why does the handbook repeatedly return to the relationship between tradition and critique?

**Marking guide:**
- The course values inheritance, memory, and sustained conversation with the past.
- At the same time, Benjamin, Steiner, and other materials warn that tradition can coexist with domination or moral failure.
- The task is neither blind celebration nor total rejection, but critical reception.
- A strong answer captures both gratitude and judgment.

## 43. Whole Unit (5 marks)

What is meant by treating WCIV100 as an ‘overture’ or ‘toolkit’ for later study?

**Marking guide:**
- The handbook describes the unit as preparing major themes, habits, and intellectual tools for the wider course.
- It introduces recurring questions about civilisation, texts, interpretation, knowledge, and human dignity.
- A strong answer explains that the unit is foundational and integrative, not merely introductory in a superficial sense.