hard · GRE Verbal

Passage: It is tempting to read the sudden nineteenth-century vogue for wilderness landscapes as a spontaneous awakening to nature's beauty. The timing, however, is suspicious. The taste for untamed scenery surged precisely as industrial cities were rendering such scenery scarce and as railways were making it, for the first time, conveniently reachable. What presented itself as pure aesthetic sensibility may have been the cultural byproduct of scarcity and access working in tandem — a longing manufactured by the very forces that seemed to threaten its object. The author's tone can best be described as

1. Nostalgically mournful about the loss of wilderness
2. Skeptically analytical toward a common assumption
3. Openly hostile to nineteenth-century landscape art
4. Dispassionately neutral about competing historical theories
5. Reverently admiring of the era's aesthetic sensibility

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