HELP WITH CRITICAL READING QUESTIONS!!!

CAN ANYONE PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME ANSWERS FROM SECTION 2(Question no:21,24,27) and from section 7 (Question 9 and 10)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-SjC2QWxqXRNkhZZkdHLWo4d1k/view

Do some of the work yourself. Make it easy for us to help you. Put the excerpt & questions in your post. People are busy and College Confidential, like God, helps those who help themselves.

These are the passages and questions.
‘Margaret greeted Henry with peculiar tender-ness. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that are never joined into an individual. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the fire. Happy are they who see from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of their souls lie clear, and they and their friends shall find easy going’.

Q.1 The author uses the terms “monks” and “beasts” in line 6 in order to

(A) distinguish between those who do and those who do not connect
(B) represent two extreme responses to desire
© suggest the impossibility of reconciling opposites
(D) remind the reader of the difference between animals and humans
(E) indicate the emotional phases through which an individual passes
I am confused between B and C.

"
In a.culture in which organ transplants, life extension machinery, microsurgery, and artificial organs have entered everyday medicine, we seem to be on the verge of realization of the seventeenth-century European view of the body as a machine. But if we seem to have realized that conception, it
can also be argued that we have in a sense turned it inside out. In the seventeenth century, machine
imagery reinforced the notion of the human body as a totally determined mechanism whose basic
functionings the human being is helpless to alter.
The then-dominant metaphors for this body - clocks, watches, collections of springs-imagined
a system that is set, wound up, whether by nature ,or God the watchmaker, ticking away in a
predictable, orderly manner, regulated by laws over which the human being has no control. Under-standing the system, we can help it perform efficiently and intervene when it malfunctions, but we cannot radically alter the conf~guration of things.

Western science and technology have now arrived, paradoxically but predictably (for it was a submerged, illicit element in the mechanistic conception all along), at a new, postmodern con-J ception of human freedom from bodily determination. Gradually and surely, a technology that was first aimed at the replacement of malfunctioning parts has generated an industry and a value system fueled by fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting, an ideology of limitless iI;nprove-ment and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and indeed the very rnateriality of the body.In place of that materiality, we now have

what I call “cultural plastic.” In place of God the watchmaker, we now have ourselves, the masters culptors of that plastic
Create a masterpiece; sculpt your body into a work of art," urges Fit magazine. “You visualize what you want to look like, and then you create that form.” The precision technology of body sculpting, once the secret of the Arnold Schwarze-neggers and Rachel McLishes of the professional bodybuilding world, has now become available toanyone who can afford the price of membership
in a health club. On the medical front, plastic surgery, whose repeated and purely cosmetic employment has been legitimated by popular music and film personalities, has become a fabu-lously expanding industry, extending its domain from nose jobs, face lifts, and tummy tucks to collagen-plumped lips and liposuction-shaped ankles and ca,lves. In 1989, 681,000 procedures were donel up by 80 percent since 1981; over half

of these were performed on patients between the ages of 18 and 35. The trendy Details magazine described such procedures as just “another fabu-lous [fashion] accessory” and used to invite readers
to share their cosmetic surgery experiences in the monthly column “Knife styles of the Rich and Famous.”

Popular culture does not apply any brakes to these fantasies of rearrangement and transforma-tion. “The proper diet, the right amount of exercise, and you can have, pretty much, any body you desire,” claims an ad for a bottled mineral water. Of course, the rhetoric of choice and self-determination and the breezy analogies comparing cosmetic surgery to fashion accessorizing are deeply misleading. They efface not only the inequalities of privilege, money, and time that prohibit 'most people from indulging in these prac-tices, but also the desperation that characterizes …,
the lives of those who do. “1 will do anything,”,anything, to make myself look and feel better," says a contributor to the “Knifestyles” column. Medical science has now designated a new category of “polysurgical addicts” (or, as more casually referred to, “scalpel slaves”) who return for opera-tion after operation, in perpetual quest of that elusive yet ruthlessly normalizing goal, the “perfect” body. The dark underside of the practices of body transformation and rearrangement reveals botched and sometimes fatal operations, exercise addictions, and eating disorders.
We are surrounded by homogenizing and normalizing images whose content is far from arbitrary but is instead suffused with dominant gender, class, racial, and other cultural archetypes. The very advertisements whose copy speaks of choice and self-determination visually legislate the efface-ment of individual and cultural differences and thereby circumscribe our choices. Despite the claims of the mineral water ad, one cannot have any body that one wants-for not every body will do.
Yet most contemporary understandings of the behaviors I have been describing do not recognize that cultural imagery functions in this way, and seek to preempt precisely such a critique as my own. Moreover,they represent, on the level of discourse and interpretation, the same principles that body sculptors act on: a construction of life as plastic possibility and weightless choice, unde-termined by history, social location, or even indi-vidual biography.
"
Q.2It can be inferred from the passage that in place of the clock as the dominant metaphor
for the body, contemporary culture has substituted

(A) advanced technology
(B) the universe
© impressionable clay
(D) the surgeon’s scalpel
(E) modern manufacturing

Q.3Which best expresses the change since the seventeenth century in the perception people have of their relationship to their bodies?

(A) From benefioiary to benefactor
(B) From preserver to despoiler
© From observer to investigator
(D) From caretaker to creator
(E) From admirer to detractor

I believe it’s (B) because (C) says reconciliation of those opposites is an “impossibility” but the passage seems to be urging people to make that reconciliation, which means that doing so must be possible.

I believe the answer must be (C) because the passage says “In place of that materiality, we now have what I call ‘cultural plastic.’ In place of God the watchmaker, we now have ourselves, the master sculptors of that plastic.” This suggests that the modern metaphor is one of sculpting. We can definitely rule out (A) and (B) very easily. (D) doesn’t work because while the author mentions “scalpel,” she doesn’t say the body is like a scalpel but that we can use exercise and plastic surgery like a scalpel to shape our bodies. (E) is somewhat tempting because the passage talks about “plastic” rather than “clay,” but it’s too broad–“modern manufacturing” is by no means limited to plastic.

I believe the answer is (D). The passage says that in the 17th c. we could "help it perform efficiently and intervene when it malfunctions, but we cannot radically alter the conf~guration of things.

thanks for the help …Your answers are all correct .I was struggling with the general questions which don’t have line references.Most of the time I used to make up my own answers ,believing that the answers are not in the passage.However,your explanations helped me a lot as I understood the questions and realized that all answers have concrete evidence from the passage.Thanks.

@dreamer123 -

This is a very, very important realization and one of the biggest, most basic keys to the CR section. Hold your answers to that accountability of proof and you’ll get better.

Just a suggestion but you should use practice test post-2004, because they changed up the SAT after that.

@ComputNerd - (CR passages from pre-2005 aren’t that different, though. They’re still useful, and in fact many of them have been adapted/repurposed for the CB Online Tests.)