New SAT Reading Practice Test 32

Passage 1 is adapted from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Originally published in 1790. Passage 2 is adapted from Thomas Paine, Rights of Man. Originally published in 1791.

Passage 1
To avoid . . . the evils of inconstancy and
versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of
obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have
consecrated the state, that no man should approach
5 to look into its defects or corruptions but with due
caution; that he should never dream of beginning its
reformation by its subversion; that he should
approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of
a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By
10 this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror
on those children of their country who are prompt
rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him
into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their
poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may
15 regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate
their father’s life.
Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts
for objects of mere occasional interest may be
dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be
20 considered as nothing better than a partnership
agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or
tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken
up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved
by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with
25 other reverence; because it is not a partnership in
things subservient only to the gross animal existence
of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a
partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a
partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.
30 As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained
in many generations, it becomes a partnership not
only between those who are living, but between those
who are living, those who are dead, and those who
are to be born. . . . The municipal corporations of
35 that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at
their pleasure, and on their speculations of a
contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear
asunder the bands of their subordinate community,
and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil,
40 unconnected chaos of elementary principles.

Passage 2

Every age and generation must be as free to act for
itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which
preceded it. The vanity and presumption of
governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous
45 and insolent of all tyrannies.
Man has no property in man; neither has any
generation a property in the generations which are to
follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of
any other period, had no more right to dispose of the
50 people of the present day, or to bind or to control
them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or
the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind,
or control those who are to live a hundred or a
thousand years hence.
55 Every generation is, and must be, competent
to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is
the living, and not the dead, that are to be
accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power
and his wants cease with him; and having no longer
60 any participation in the concerns of this world, he
has no longer any authority in directing who shall be
its governors, or how its government shall be
organized, or how administered....
Those who have quitted the world, and those who
65 are not yet arrived at it, are as remote from each
other, as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination
can conceive. What possible obligation, then, can
exist between them; what rule or principle can be laid
down, that two nonentities, the one out of existence,
70 and the other not in, and who never can meet in this
world, that the one should control the other to the
end of time?...
The circumstances of the world are continually
changing, and the opinions of men change also; and
75 as government is for the living, and not for the dead,
it is the living only that has any right in it. That
which may be thought right and found convenient in
one age, may be thought wrong and found
inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to
80 decide, the living, or the dead?