An enthusiast of sprightly music, Mendler surprised us all by proclaiming the final piece on the concert program, a lugubrious______as his favorite.

(A) An area of a country smaller than the nation considers itself to be a nation.
(B) A boundary is demarcated around a nation which does not include the people of the nation.
(C) A continent is divided into two areas for implicit ideological purposes.
(D) Two nations dispute the exact geography of a border based on an ancient historical claim.
(E) The history of a nation is erroneously conflated with the character of one particular region.

(A) signal his reservations about the way these terms have been used to define geography through human categories
(B) draw attention to the discrepancies between the way historiographers treat the supra-national and sub-national levels
(C) emphasize historiography’s unique tendency to rely upon social categories to draw geographic distinctions
(D) question the notion of the spatial marker itself by asserting the general ambiguity of these terms
(E) argue for the replacement of these terms by historiographers with more politically correct substitutes