The Cultured Man

Ashley Montagu

• Editorial: Muriwai Books
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789121698
• Categoría: Psicología
• Categoría: Historia y teoría en psicología

"THIS BOOK'S purpose is to tell you what a cultivated person is, what the value of the cultured person is to himself, his fellows, and his society, and finally, the kind of things the cultured person knows, thinks, and feels. The point of the book is that it may succeed in giving you a fair idea of where you stand in relation to the continuum of culture, and help you understand in what further direction you need to proceed."—Ashley Montagu, Ph. D.This provocative book, first published in 1958, is an inquiry into, and an answer to, three very important questions: 1) What is a cultured man?2) What does "culture" mean in America?3) What is YOUR "culture quotient"?Dr. Montagu analyzes and evaluations the first two questions above in a brilliant opening essay. He then provides 50 tests (1, 500 questions with answers) which explore YOUR knowledge and attitudes and which enable you not only to determine where you stand as a truly cultured person but also to find out precisely in what directions you need to move to improve your "culture quotient."From ballet to biology, from psychology to sex, this is an instructive test of your own intellectual status, a challenge and a guide to self-improvement.Dr. Montagu was a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University before retiring in order to devote all his time to writing. He was well-known for his TV and radio appearances, and became a renowned author.

THE ANSWERS

SCORING

Let me say once more that the purpose of the questions is to help you achieve an appraisal of your cultural status, and not to have you sit for an examination for a diploma. Hence, you are not going to be told that if you achieve a certain score you pass, and if you don’t you don’t. However, as an accommodation to those who would like some sort of rating on the questions, such ratings are provided below.

Since the questions of attitude are worth more than those of knowledge they are doubled in value. Questions of knowledge are assigned a value of 5 points each. Questions of attitude have a value of 10 points each. For our purposes these scales do all that we require of them. Since there are usually 25 questions of knowledge in each category, the achievable possible total knowledge score for most categories is 125 points, and the total possible score on questions of attitude is 50 points, the possible total score for each whole category being 175 points.

The possible grand total score for the 50 categories is 8,770 points, there being four categories composed entirely of factual questions and one category consisting almost entirely of attitude questions. No one is likely to achieve that score. The perfect score for questions on knowledge would be 6,230 points. It is unlikely that anyone will ever achieve that score. The total possible score on questions of attitude is 2,540. It is possible that some will achieve that.

For Each Category if Your Total Score Is:—You Are:

100 or more—Excellent

80 or more—Good

70 or more—Better than average

55 or more—Average

On Questions of Knowledge if Your Score Is:—You Are:

75 or more—Excellent

65 or more—Good

55 or more—Better than average

45 or more—Average

On Questions of Attitude if Your Score Is:—You Are:

40 or more—Excellent

30 or more—Good

25 or more—Better than average

20 or more—Average

For achievement on the total scores for all categories the ratings are:

On Questions of Knowledge:—On Question of Attitude:

3,125 Excellent—2,000 Excellent

3,000 Good—1,950 Good

2,875 Above average—1,900 Above average

2,750 Average—1,850 Average

2,600 Passing—1,800 Passing

“Average” in the above classifications means not that you belong in the same class as the average man, but in the class of the average cultured man. Any score ranking below average suggests a certain weakness in your status as a cultured person.

Agriculture, Botany, and Horticulture

1. Agriculture is the art or science of cultivating food plants and animals and other crops.

2. Botany is the science that deals with plants, their life, structure, growth, classification, etc.

3. Horticulture is the art or science of growing flowers, fruit and vegetables.

4. A truck farm is a farm on which vegetables are grown to be marketed.

5. Hydroponics is the art or science of growing plants in solutions containing the necessary minerals, instead of in the soil.

6. Plants do possess hormones.

7. The largest ranch in the United States is the King Ranch, South Texas, covering nearly a million acres.

8. Agronomy is the art and science of crop production and management of soils.

9. The earliest known sickles were found in Palestine, in caves on Mount Carmel, in the Wadi-en-Natuf, dating back to about 7000 years ago.

10. The date palm has to be artificially fertilized if it is to bear fruit.

11. Plant ecology is the science of the relations of plants to their environment and to each other.

12. The bark of the tree is analogous to the skin in man.

13. A cotyledonous plant is one in which the food of the embryo is mainly stored in the leaves (cotyledons) within the seed coat. A grain of corn contains a single cotyledon, a peanut contains two cotyledons.

14. Pomology is the science of fruit cultivation.

15. Photosynthesis is the formation of carbohydrates in living plants from water and carbon dioxide by the action of sunlight on the chloroplasts.

16. A stamen is a pollen-bearing organ in a flower consisting of a slender stalk (filament) and a pollen sac (anther).

17. The pistil is the seed-bearing organ of a flower consisting of the ovary, stigma, and style.

18. Some cultivated grasses are wheat, rye, barley, oats, sugar cane.

19. Corn (maize) originated in the Americas.

20. The corolla consists of the petals, or inner leaves, of a flower.

21. The calyx is the outer whorl of leaves, or sepals, at the base of a flower.

22. Indian pipes and pinedrops derive their food from dead or decaying vegetable growth.

23. The white potato is believed to have originated in South America.

24. True mahogany comes from the West Indies and some parts of Central America—not Africa.

25. Silviculture is the art of producing and cultivating a forest.

26. Every community ought to have a botanical garden, because of the knowledge it serves to diffuse concerning plants, and the interests it creates and satisfies.

27. If you have cultivated plants give yourself full marks.

28. If you do take care with matches in the open take full marks.

29. The probabilities are the population will outrun the food supply on a world basis unless people learn to control the size of their families.

30. It is better to have the paper. Some trees have to be cut, and modern methods of silviculture are making up for the errors of earlier days. So we can have both the tree and the paper.

Americana

1. The title of Thomas Paine’s most famous work is The Rights of Man, 1791–92, or, if you prefer, The Age of Reason, Part I, 1794, and Part II, 1796.

2. The two best works written on America are Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 2 volumes, 1835 and 1840, and Viscount James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth, 2 volumes, 1888.

3. The American autograph regarded as of highest value is that of Button Gwinnett (1735?–1777), a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

4. ASCAP, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

5. The first Woman’s Rights Convention was held at Seneca Falls, N.Y. on July 19, 1848.

6. The Acushnet was the whaler in which Herman Melville (1819–91) spent 18 months in the years 1841–42.

7. New Harmony was a colony founded in 1815 by George Rapp, and in 1825 sold to Robert Owen who turned it into a thoroughgoing communistic society. Owing to internal dissension it ceased to exist as an organized community in 1828.

8. Edward Livingston Youmans (1821–87), American popularizer of science.

9. The first American musical composer was Francis Hopkinson (1737–91).

10. The Clermont was Robert Fulton’s (1765–1815) steamboat which, starting on August 17, 1807, steamed up the Hudson from New York to Albany in 32 hours.

11. The G.A.R. was The Grand Army of the Republic.

12. Scientific activities were late in getting started in America because of the stated policy of the British government which required that its colonies function only as sources of raw materials to be shipped back to England in English ships. Local manufactures were discouraged. This restriction on the use of tools meant that science and invention were inhibited. Clearly perceiving the evil, Adam Smith wrote in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations: “To prohibit a great people from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in a way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.”

13. The most significant provision of the Fourteenth Amendment is the clause “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Its importance lies in the fact that it guarantees the individual, and the corporation, civil rights.

14. The Mason-Dixon Line is the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, surveyed by Charles Mason (1730–1787) and Jeremiah Dixon from 1763 to 1767, and regarded as the line of demarcation between the North and the South.

15. The Volstead Act, introduced by Rep. Andrew J. Volstead (1860–1947), was passed by Congress October 28, 1919 to prohibit the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors. It was repealed in 1933.

16. The Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, 1920, granted suffrage to women.

17. The first real graduate school in America was at Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, which is also the foundation date of the University. Its first graduate degrees were granted in 1878—four Ph.D.’s.

18. The first telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) and perfected on May 10, 1876.

19. The first motor...

Índice

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENT
• PREFACE
• THE CULTURED MAN
• THE QUESTIONS
• THE ANSWERS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER