The following passage and questions are reprinted from earlier editions of the text and the test booklets. This exercise is not graded, but working through each question carefully will give you excellent practice to prepare for either a midterm or a final examination, depending on your instructor's course schedule. You can print-out your answers if you like.

Good luck!

(1) Our sense of smell can be extraordinarily precise, yet it's almost impossible to describe how something smells to someone who hasn't smelled it. (2) The smell of the glossy pages of a new book, for example, or the first solvent-damp sheets from a mimeograph machine, or a dead body, or the subtle differences in odors given off by flowers like bee balm, dogwood, or lilac. (3) Smell is the mute sense, the one without words. (4) Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasure and exaltation. (5) We see only when there is light enough, taste only when we put things into our mouths, touch only when we make contact with someone or something, hear only sounds that are loud enough. (6) But we smell always and with every breath. (7) Cover your eyes and you will stop seeing, cover your ears and you will stop hearing, but if you cover your nose and try to stop smelling, you will die.

1			In your own words, list the two main points Ackerman makes about our sense of smell.
2			In the last sentence, Ackerman writes, "try to stop smelling, [and] you will die." Explain what she means in your own words.