2025 OAC State Round 2 Practice Flashcards

A comprehensive collection of vocabulary-style flashcards derived from the OAC State Round 2 lecture notes, covering American and World Literature, History, Fine Arts, Sciences, and Math.

William Faulkner

The American author whose novel Light in August opens its sixth chapter with the line, “Memory believes before knowing remembers.”

Tom Wingfield

A character in Tennessee Williams' play The Glass Menagerie who introduces the setting by stating, “The play is memory.”

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish”

A J.D. Salinger story from the collection Nine Stories featuring character Seymour Glass and a title creature that supposedly eats itself to death.

Equilateral Triangle Perimeter (Area = $\sqrt{3}$)

The perimeter of this equilateral triangle is $6$.

Equilateral Triangle Perimeter (Altitude = $2$)

The perimeter of this equilateral triangle is $4\sqrt{3}$.

Fractals

Objects including the Sierpiński triangle and the Koch snowflake that are similar to themselves at arbitrarily small scales and may have non-integer Hausdorff dimensions.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi

A “Great Unifier” of Japan with a peasant upbringing who consolidated power at the Battle of Yamazaki following the Honno-ji incident.

Battle of Sekigahara

A 1600 battle where the forces of Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the Toyotomi clan led by Ishida Mitsunari.

Osaka

The Japanese city whose fall ended the Sengoku Jidai; it featured a fortress built by Toyotomi Hideyoshi to surpass the castle at Azuchi.

Ludwig van Beethoven

The composer who wrote Wellington’s Victory and dedicated his Violin Sonata Number 9, the “Sonata mulattica,” to mixed-race violinist George Bridgetower.

Richard Wagner

The composer of the opera Rienzi and a final Arthurian opera, Parsifal, which is part of a ten-work canon performed at an annual festival.

Charles Ives

The American composer of Three Pieces in New England and The Unfinished Question who included the movement “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” in his work.

Lymphoma

A type of cancer that can be identified by the presence of Reed-Sternberg cells, which are malignant B-cells.

Pancreatic Cancer

A cancer frequently associated with mutations in the K-Ras gene; tumors in the head of the namesake organ are often removed via the Whipple procedure.

Asbestos

A silicate mineral fiber used in fireproofing until the 1980s that causes pleural membrane plaques and approximately 80% of mesothelioma cases.

Guy de Maupassant

The French author of “Mademoiselle Fifi” and “Two Friends,” known for a story about soldiers occupying a chateau and defacing a painting.

Joseph Stalin

The Soviet leader described as a “huge laughing cockroach” in an Osip Mandelstam epigram and allegorized as “Number One” in Darkness at Noon.

English

The language of the wildly influential 1755 dictionary published by Samuel Johnson and the adjective describing the “Decline of” murder in a George Orwell essay.

Friedrich Hayek

An Austrian economist who wrote The Road to Serfdom and proposed that information flow leads to a state of “spontaneous order.”

John Stuart Mill

The author of the 1848 Principles of Political Economy and the 1859 paper On Liberty, which warned against the “tyranny of the majority.”

David Ricardo

The British economist who developed the theory of comparative advantage and authored Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.

Rift valleys

Depressions often forming at triple junctions; the longest on Earth stretches from Jordan to Mozambique.

Mid-ocean ridges

Features formed at divergent plate boundaries which serve as sites for seafloor spreading.

Fjords

U-shaped geologic features formed by glacial recession and filled with sea water; they are often sites of “dead water” caused by density stratification.

Nova Scotia

A Canadian province with the capital Halifax, connected to New Brunswick by the Isthmus of Chignecto.

Chihuahua

The largest state in Mexico by area, which contains the border city Ciudad Juarez.

Punjab

A majority-Sikh state in northwestern India with the nickname “Land of the Five Waters,” culturally similar to a Pakistani province with the capital Lahore.

Pontiac

The Ottawa chief, also known as Ob-wan-di-yag, who led a 1763 surprise attack on Fort Detroit.

Geronimo

Also known as Go-ya-thlay, this Apache leader conducted raids on Mexican and American settlements between 1850 and 1886.

Sitting Bull

The Lakota Sioux leader who defeated George Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn and was later killed at Standing Rock.

Ems Dispatch

A document detailing a conversation between the French ambassador and Kaiser Wilhelm I whose edit led to the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine.

Eutrophication

A process caused by excessive nutrient inputs leading to algal blooms and hypoxic “dead zones” in aquatic ecosystems.

Shusaku Endo

The Japanese Catholic author who wrote Silence, a novel about the persecution of a Jesuit priest during the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Medgar Evers

The activist who led a boycott of segregated gas stations in Mississippi and was murdered in his driveway in 1963.

Edward Elgar

The composer of “Pomp and Circumstance,” a work used at American graduation commencements since 1905.

Euphonium

A large brass instrument featuring larger tubing than the Baritone horn, with which it is often confused.

Eschatology

A term referring to the theological study of the end times.

Enlil

The Mesopotamian god of earth, wind, and storms, believed to be the creator who controlled the destinies of humanity.

Elasticity

The ability of a material to deform a certain distance and return to its original shape.

T. S. Eliot

The poet whose work “Journey of the Magi” inspired the title of Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease.

Epidural

An analgesia administered directly into the spine via injection, commonly used to manage pain during labor.

Empedocles

A Presocratic philosopher who taught that matter is comprised of four roots mediated by Love and Strife; he reportedly died by jumping into Mt. Etna.

Erik Erikson

The psychologist famous for developing the eight psychosocial stages of human development.

Lake Eyre

Australia’s lowest point and largest lake, a dry lake bed located $50\,ft$ below sea level.

Enron

A company whose 2001 bankruptcy due to accounting fraud prompted the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Everyman

A medieval morality play in which the title character is abandoned by his cousin Kindred before facing Death.

Emulsion

A mixture containing two immiscible liquids created by dispersing one phase into tiny droplets.

Battle of Eddington

The battle where Alfred the Great defeated Guthrum, halting the Viking invasion of Britain.

Encaustic

A painting method used by Jasper Johns involving pigments suspended in hot wax.

Umberto Eco

The author of the novels The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and The Island of the Day Before.

Boudicca

The Iceni queen who led a revolt against the Romans and sacked Camulodunum before being defeated at Watling Street.

Yellow River

Known as “China's Sorrow,” this river carries large amounts of silt and has a failed dam at Three Gate Gorge.

Continuity

A property of functions defined by the epsilon-delta limit definition, required for the intermediate value theorem and the Picard–Lindelöf theorem.

Alien and Sedition Acts

Unpopular laws passed under John Adams that allowed for the imprisonment of government critics and non-citizens.

John Everett Millais

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artist who painted Ophelia and Christ in the House of His Parents.

Noam Chomsky

A linguist who developed the hierarchy of formal grammars and wrote Syntactic Structures.

X

The letter adopted by Malcolm Little to replace his “white slavemaster name” and symbolize his unknown African family name.

Congress of Vienna

An 1814-1815 meeting convened by Klemens von Metternich to establish the “Concert of Europe” after the Napoleonic Wars.

RNA

A single-strand nucleic acid containing uracil that includes messenger and transfer types and is capped with a guanine nucleotide.

Epicurus

The Greek philosopher who founded a namesake school of thought focusing on reaching ataraxia, or a state of inner tranquility.

Bernoulli’s Principle

A statement relating a liquid's velocity to its pressure, which is applied in Venturi meters and pitot tubes.

Freyr

The Norse god of summer and twin brother of Freyja who gives away his sword to marry the jötunn Gerdr.

Narrow Road to the Deep North

A travelogue written by the poet Basho in the haibun form describing a journey to Oku.

Banksy

An anonymous street artist known for politically charged graffiti and the self-shredding work Love is in the Bin.

Egypt

The country home to the Coptic church in Alexandria, the Al-Azhar University, and the origins of Christian asceticism under St. Anthony the Great.

Brazil

The last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery; it was ruled by the House of Braganza and originated as a Portuguese colony.

Tritone

Also called the “Devil’s Interval,” this augmented fourth or diminished fifth interval divides the octave in half.

Carbon nanotubes

Allotropes of carbon that roll into cylindrical configurations like zigzag or armchair forms, acting as an intermediate between graphene and buckyballs.

King Lear

A Shakespearean tragedy featuring the characters Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan, in which the title character wanders a stormy heath.