It can be inferred from the passage that the author believes the conflict ... ?

[tesoke]

Hi, I read a reading comprehension test in a book and could not understand the true answer for 2 questions of that. I hope you help me and I will appreciate it.

Reading:
My objective is to analyze certain forms of knowledge, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power. But the word power is apt to lead to misunderstandings about the nature, form, and unity of power. By power, I do not mean a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizenry. I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation that, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The sovereignty of the state, the form of law, or the overall unity of a domination are only the terminal forms power takes.


It seems to me that power must be understood as the multiplicity of force relations that are immanent in the social sphere; as the process that, through ceaseless struggle and confrontation, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support that these force relations find in one another, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions that isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.


Thus, the viewpoint that permits one to understand the exercise of power, even in its more “peripheral” effects, and that also makes it possible to use its mechanisms as a structural framework for analyzing the social order, must not be sought in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms of power emanate but in the moving substrate of force relations that, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender local and unstable states of power. If power seems omnipresent, it is not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And if power at times seems to be permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, it is simply because the overall effect that emerges from all these mobilities is a concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. One needs to be nominalistc, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society.

Question 21:
The author‟s attitude toward the various kinds of compulsion employed by social institutions is best described as
(A) concerned and sympathetic
(B) scientific and detached
(C) suspicious and cautious
(D) reproachful and disturbed
(E) meditative and wistful

Answer 21:
The correct answer is B and opted E and do not know why B is correct and E not. Please explain.


Question 23:
It can be inferred from the passage that the author believes the conflict among social forces to be
(A) essentially the same from one society to another even though its outward manifestation may seem different
(B) usually the result of misunderstandings that impede social progress
(C) an inevitable feature of the social order of any state
(D) wrongly blamed for disrupting the stability of society
(E) best moderated in states that possess a strong central government

Answer 23:
The correct answer is C, I know that C is correct but I think A is correct too. Why A is false?

[SoothingDave]

My recommendation would be to take this page, and any text with similar academic writing, locate a suitable receptacle and light it on fire. Your brain can only be damaged by attempting to follow this pseudo-intellectual gibberish.

As soon as this author stops talking about what power isn't, he becomes incoherent, spewing buzzwords in a seemingly random fashion.

As for your questions, if you know what "wistful" means I don't see how you see that in this text. I see no emotion in this text.

And there is no mention of "outward manifestations" so I don't see how that can be the correct answer.

This is not English, this is academic gobbledygook.

[Tdol]

I thought you were being a bit harsh on the writer until I got to the meltdown of the third paragraph. I agree that the problem is wistful- where's the emotional content for this adjective to be correct? Where exactly do you infer a) from in the text? There has to be textual evidence even in stuff this painful to read.

[Rover_KE]

tesoke, as I remember, you are doing these exercises voluntarily. Please remind us what you are hoping to gain by punishing yourself (and us) by grappling with this sort of stuff.

Life's too short, in my opinion.

[tesoke]

Rover_KE! I should read this stuff to improve my reading skill for GRE exam. I do not like these texts but I am obligated :)

Thank you. I got answer 21 but about answer 23: I think C and A have a similar meaning and if C is correct, A is correct too. What are you thinking?

[Tdol]

Underline or quote the words that give you the second answer. If you cannot underline them, you are probably not correct.