Write a short essay (one page double-spaced or 300 words) on Pascal: Pick what strikes you as one of his most meaningful, distinctively Pascalian, and paradoxical thoughts–selection is up to you.
Such as for example his claim in a discussion of habit and nature that “I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.” (# 126, p. 32).   [You may write on this is you want.]
I don’t insist that it has to be so expressly paradoxical as this but that might make it easier for you if you think you can explain the paradox. But it should be a passage that raises a problem, a dilemma or conundrum in the nature of man, Pascal’s general theme.
Pascal is full of such paradoxes, not surprisingly since for him man is a contradiction, a bundle of connected opposites reflecting his greatness and wretchedness.
 
Write a one page essay (300 words) explaining what “ideology” is according to Marx in The German Ideology, and what his main argument about it is in the same book.