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A Concise Introduction to World Religions 2e: Chapter 2

Instructions: For each question, click on the radio button beside your answer. When you have completed the entire quiz, click the 'Submit my answers' button at the bottom of the page to receive your results.

Question 1:


a) Indigenous religions
b) Primal religions
c) Primitive religions
d) Pre-literate religions

Question 2:


a) Field research (ethnography)
b) Examination of material remains (archeology)
c) Study of the historical accounts of explorers and missionaries (textual analysis)
d) All of the above

Question 3:


a) Vision quest
b) Worship of supreme creator
c) Peyote ceremonies
d) The Sun Dance

Question 4:


a) The ‘World Tree’
b) The axis mundi
c) The Treppenhaus zum Himmel
d) The funis sanctus

Question 5:


a) Respectful hunting practices (such as offering prayers of thanksgiving to a deceased animal)
b) The explicit association between certain tribes/families and particular animal spirits (totems)
c) The protection of animals by guardian spirits (the Keepers of the Game)
d) Animal sacrifice for the glorification of a creator deity

Question 6:


a) Dream Time (or uncreated time)
b) Timeless Time
c) Infinite Time (or Eternity)
d) Untime (or Evertime)

Question 7:


a) Disenchantment/dissatisfaction with traditional religions
b) Conversion to the religion of the colonizers
c) Syncretistic combination of indigenous and colonial religions
d) Reform of indigenous tradition in response to colonialism
e) All of the above

Question 8:


a) Because they do not revere the supreme being and only worship ancestors and nature deities.
b) Because they worship the supreme being in large temples, not small shrines.
c) Because the supreme being has no need of sacrificial offerings, as it transcends petty human concerns.
d) Because African religions downplay ritual entirely, tending to concentrate on quiet meditation on the natural world.

Question 9:


a) Male
b) Female
c) Either male or female
d) Hermaphrodites

Question 10:


a) Taboo
b) Totem
c) Prophet
d) Shaman

Question 11:


a) The tradition of recording scripture as a written text
b) The communal feasts that form essential ritual practices in a religious community
c) The religious wisdom that is verbally transmitted from generation to generation
d) The ritual of storytelling during important rites of passage

Question 12:


a) A specific variety of nature spirit
b) Sacred power bestowed upon people and objects
c) Rituals intended to exorcise malignant influences
d) Magical ability

Question 13:


a) Belief that daytime represents the forces of goodness and that darkness represents the forces of evil, and that the two are forever locked in a struggle for dominance
b) Belief that all human beings receive their souls from nature spirits
c) Belief that worldly existence is an illusion and that we are all part of a cosmic oneness
d) Belief that the divine creative process depends on both chaos (represented by darkness, barrenness, and winter) and order (represented by light, fertility, and summer) in order to function

Question 14:


a) Bisnu Trigri (Siberia)
b) Nongqawuse (South Africa)
c) Handsome Lake (Eastern Woodlands of North America)
d) Pai Marire (New Zealand)

Question 15:


a) Cargo Cults
b) The Iroquois Confederacy
c) The Pai Marire movement
d) Vaudou