Texts: Gilgamesh, Plato, Bible, Quran, Sophocles, Dao

You will find four or five of the following questions on your midterm. Please prepare them all, and be ready to respond with a couple of paragraphs per question.

Note that your handwriting has to be legible!

Note also that you may use your books, but you may not use notes you may have taken and used in your preparation.

I will assess your work in terms of whether or not it shows careful reading and thinking.

NO QUOTES FROM THE BOOKS, PLEASE!

1. Compare and contrast the flood stories in Gilgamesh and the Hebrew Bible. Explain the connections!

2. In Plato's "Apology," Socrates says that "The unexamined life if not worth living." Explain what that means, and give specific examples of this idea from at least two of the dialogues in our book.

3. Explain what it means to be a hero (your own personal opinion), and demonstrate how two characters from the books you have read is acting heroically.

4. Explain how three characters in the texts we have read so far abuse their power. (Choose one character per text.)

5. Choose three texts, and compare and contrast the concepts of immortality or life after death in them.

6. Choose three texts, and discuss the significance of laws on them. Give examples, and identify disagreements within and/or between the texts on which laws are binding and/or just.

7. Compare and contrast the Dao, the Bible, and Plato's dialogues to discuss the question of how we should live our lives.

8. Discuss the treatment of women in at least three of the texts you have been reading.