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GRE Exam
A divide between aesthetic and technical considerations has played a crucial role in mapmaking and cartographic scholarship. Some nineteenth-century cartographers, for instance, understood themselves as technicians who did not care about visual effects, while others saw themselves as landscape painters. That dichotomy structured the discipline of the history of cartography. Until the 1980s, in what Blakemore and Harley called "the 'Old is Beautiful' paradigm.* scholars largely focused on maps made before 1800. marveling at their beauty and sometimes regretting the decline of the pre-technical age. Early mapmaking was considered art while modem cartography was located within the realm of engineering utility. Alpers. however, has argued that this boundary would have puzzled mapmakers in the seventeenth century, because they considered themselves to be visual engineers.
According to the passage. Alpers would say that the assumptions underlying the "paradigm" were
Sensationalism—the purveyance of emotionally charged content. focused mainly on violent crime, to a broad public—has often been decried, but the full history of the phenomenon has yet to be written. Scholars have tended to dismiss sensationalism as unworthy of serious study, based on two pervasive though somewhat incompatible assumptions: first, that sensationalism is essentially a commercial product, built on the exploitation of modern mass media, and second, that it appeals almost entirely to a simple, basic emotion and thus has tittle history apart from the changing technological means of spreading it. An exploration of sensationalism's early history, however, challenges both assumptions and suggests that they have tended to obscure the complexity and historicity of the genre.
According to the passage, scholars have not given sensationalism serious consideration because they believe sensationalism

A list of the names of the people of the entire 1990 foreign-born population in neighborhood V was generated, with each person's name appearing once. The names of 2 different people will be randomly selected from the list. Which of the following is closest to the probability that both names selected will be names of people whose region of origin was "Other"?