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| Reading Comprehension is a typically weak area in CAT. Long passages, esoteric subjects, difficult to understand... We can help. We have a series of passages and tests designed to get you into the reading habit. At present we can send you some 500 questions in about 50-60 passages. To order, please send a DD for Rs 250 to the following address. Please allow one week for delivery of material. We are sure that if you read our selected texts, you will achieve a better understanding of issues and also increase you comprehension and speed. Write to: mmindchd@hotmail.com God bless! A sample comprehension passage and questions based on it is given below. TRY IT NOW!!! Rc-10 Passage 1 This is how it's supposed to be. You walk into a gallery and look at a picture. Interesting, you think. I wonder what it means. You look at the title for help. It's called something informative such as Landscape in the Silesian Mountains or Violin with Grapes. Perhaps it tells you something of the identity of the subject: Jan Six, An Amsterdam Patrician or Portrait of Miss Bowles with her Dog. Or maybe it sets out a philosophical view which, looking back from title to picture, you now see dramatised in the work: Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego (a somewhat gnomic title, yes, but one that directs our attention to the ubiquity of death). Quite possibly it's the other way round: you see something in the picture and look to the title, delighted to see your interpretation confirmed. Two Haystacks, for instance. Either way, there's a reassuringly stable relationship between signifier and signified. Nobody's having you on. And the title, quaint notion this, is at your service, the handmaiden of aesthetic appreciation. It's all very different with abstract art. Take Ellsworth Kelly, just an exhibition of burly signifieds, great sunny blocks of colour that defy you to read something into them, challenging you to look for an identity other than what's on the canvas. You study four panels of colour, green, red, yellow and blue. You look at the title for a hint about what's going on, a nod at a subtext perhaps, an explanation. But no, it's called Green Red Yellow Blue, and consists of four big panels separated by nine-inch intervals. Perhaps there's some significance in that? Maybe Kelly is a numerologist or a nutty theosophist, for whom something always means something else. You flail, increasingly desperate, for a textual clue to the significance of this sumptuous world of colour. Further along there are panels of five colours, and once more you look for a hidden meaning. But no: the work's entitled Red Yellow Blue White and Black. Ellsworth, baby, you can't help saying, we get the picture. We really do. But what is it that you're trying to tell us? Kelly's telling us that the painting is the thing; it's autonomous, self-contained. We get the picture without the rifle, and so the additional information serves as a tart commentary on the history of rifles, those that serve to inform the spectator about what's really going on in the picture, those that tell you what is depicted or what is the symbolic significance. Without this historical context, Kelly's rifles would have no point. But given that context, they function as an art historical joke. A joke, to be sure, of the lumbering kind typical of much 20th-century title--gagging, but a joke nonetheless. This is part of Kelly's project, to confound one's literary expectations, to reject the notion of title as explanation. Just let the eyes do the work and savour the relationships between the colours. "I think if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract," he wrote. Although he is pivotal in any story of the evolution of titles, Whistler's revolution was neither permanent nor totalitarian. Long after him, the cubists were giving their paintings handy rifles that helped spectators to spot what was depicted: Picasso's reassuring Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, Braque's undeniable Man With a Guitar. Here the title served to effect a perspectival shift: as when one sees a rabbit and then, looking at the figure again, sees a duck. Titles here were perhaps necessary to induct spectators into the new, strange language of cubism. Even the surrealists could be disturbingly literal. The title of Max Ernst's Two Children are Menaced by a Nightingale was no more reassuring for accurately describing what was depicted. Dali's rifles, for me at least, convey a glee, a showy quality that underlines the nature of the paintings: Average Atmospherocephalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Milking a Cranial Harp is, we are to believe, exactly what it says. But Dali, in his glee, sometimes commits grammatical errors. In Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity, for instance, what does the "auto" refer to? Is she sodomised by herself, and what would that involve? Or is she sodomised by some quality not identical with herself, namely her chastity? One doesn't like to pry. But after Whistler the descriptive title was no longer the norm. Gauguin, for instance, did not call his painting Happy Tahitian People, Some Nearly Nude and Some Picking Fruit, Some Both, but went in for existential moralising: Where Do We Come From? What are We? Where are We Going? Personally, I prefer my title. By the time we got to pop art, the title had often become part of the commodified circus that the paintings were in effect satirising: Richard Hamilton's Just What is it That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? recalls Gauguin's title. But with Hamilton, advertising has been substituted for moralising, or at least a satire on advertising. Once the Pandora's box of nondescriptive titles was opened, nothing would be the same again. Even descriptive rifles often took on an ironic subtext. One of Agnes Martin's minimalist paintings is called Leaf, but what one sees is more akin to a piece of finely drawn graph paper, the curvilinear natural form surrendered to the Mondrianosity of formalist aesthetics. R B Kitaj's Self-Portrait as a Woman is more self-consciously playful, but its pithy paradox is explained into tedium by the accompanying text. This was one of the reasons that viewing his 1994 Tate retrospective was so irksome: text after text stood in the way of the pictures; the words effecting their own alienating closure, hermetically sealing them from the spectator's imaginative engagement. Better perhaps to edit oneself into silence, to call one's work Untitled. Cindy Sherman's photographs obey that injunction and with her works, perhaps more than any of the many others who have refused to rifle their work, one can understand why. Here only the numbers individuate the photographs. Untitled No 122, for example, depicts the artist dressed in a blonde wig through which one bloodshot eye stares madly; her clenched fists stick out from the tautly down-pointed sleeves of her business suit; the whole image bespeaks fury and desperation. What could she have called this photograph? Blondes Have Less Fun (Anti-Homage To Hitchcock)? It's hard to think of anything appropriate that would not reductively suggest a meaning; still less could one imagine giving the photograph a helpful handle. Other artists have had more fun with rifles. An indeterminate figure in a blanket is tied up with string, the card "Do Not Disturb" attached. All very well, but it takes the title of Man Ray's 1920 work to bring out the latent menace. It's called L 'Enigme d'Isodore Ducasse. The title sends the mind racing: has poor Isodore been chopped up and pickled under a blanket? Or is she a spectre come back from the dead? Is she under the blanket at all? Can we look, please? This article has dallied too long without mentioning Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe. As the artist remarked: "If I had written 'This is a pipe' under my picture, I would have been lying." A lesson easily taught: a painting that draws attention to the treason of the representational picture, the lie at the heart of even the most realistic Courbet. This is what Whistler was doing with his formalist titles: telling the spectator the subject was not crucial. He could have called his picture Ceci n'est pas seulement maman, c'est aussi et surtout un architectonique du couleur. Though his title was more succinct. Perhaps a great title can make a great work of art, can transform the work and at the same time underwrite its quality. "It may be, then, that, in both senses of the word, great titles become great plays," claims Gilbert Adair in his new book of essays. This is either false or a truism. It is false because a great title can never become, in the sense of grow into, a great play: that's just a silly putative bonne bouche. On the other hand, it is a truism that even a plain title such as King Lear becomes the play, in the sense of being appropriate to it, because of the trite truth that the title is always associated with it. The more substantial math, surely, is that titles have lives of their own and, as a result, become deceptive signifiers for the signifieds they advertise. Adair's earlier collection of essays was called The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice, droller and more becoming by far than the title of his new collection, Surfing the Zeitgeist. Perhaps this concentration on titles has created a breed of artists who are really creative in their rifles. Adair cites Eugene O'Neill's extraordinary way with titles - Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten - and suggests, only slightly flippantly, that O'Neill put his genius into his titles and his talent into his plays. The same is true of Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Great tide, shame about the shark. This is a theme of Hirst's: verbose titles such as Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purposes of Understanding that provide handles for some cunningly pickled fish. Only a few artists have produced titles to match the ingenuity of their work: Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, a disturbing, confusing rifle that fits this disquisition on the mechanisms and onanisms of male sexuality very well indeed. Like this drawing on glass, it leaves many questions open: why bachelors? Can we see the bride in the painting? What is the force of the "even"? 1. What does the author mean to convey through the line, “the title is at your service, the handmaiden of aesthetic appreciation?” a) that the title is essential for the appreciation of the art. b) that aesthetic appreciation is helped by an interesting title c) the meaning of the work becomes obvious if a good title is given. d) the title serves the purpose of aesthetic appreciation. 2. The titles in the case of abstract art of Ellsworth Kelly: a) help you achieve aesthetic appreciation b) do not help you in understanding the art. c) are meaningless d) convey a deeper meaning that what is depicted on canvas. 3. Kelly’s titles, says the author, “function as an art historical joke.” On what is this joke? a) on the fact that abstract art is often meaningless b) that both the title and the painting are quite meaningless. c) that the panting is actually self-contained and requires no title at all. d) a comment on the history of titles. 4. How did the cubists use titles? a) to explain their paintings b) to bring about a change in perspective c) by forcing a spectator to think about the painting d) by misguiding the spectator 5. Gauguin’s painting “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” most likely depicts which of the following? a) people wearing few clothes, some picking fruit b) the cycle of birth and death c) abstract surrealism that depicts the title d) none of these 6. The author uses the word “rifle” as synonymous to “title”. What additional meaning does he covey through “rifle”? a) a handle to understand the title the work b) telescope, through which to focus on the work c) gun or weapon to shoot the artist d) an irksome text that confuses people. 7. What is the author’s opinion about Cindy Sherman’s untitled photograph? a) She should have given it a title b) A title would have reduced the meaning of her work c) Untitled is an appropriate title for the work d) None of the above. 8. Gilbert Adair’s quote is labelled as a truism by the author, because: a) Great plays have their titles associated with them and hence look like great titles b) The title becomes a deceptive signifier for the signifieds they advertise. c) The title hardly makes a painting great; it is vice versa. d) The title and the painting convey a meaning together. 9. What should logically come after the last paragraph of the passage? a) an explanation of Duchamp’s intriguing title that has been introduced in the last paragraph. b) a summing up and conclusion about paintings and their titles. c) a description of titles and modern paintings d) more examples of confusing and intriguing titles. 10. What would be the best title for the passage? a) Paintings and their titles b) Signifier and signified. c) The Role of Titles in Understanding Paintings d) What Paintings Hide, Titles Explain Passage 2 No revolutions in technology have as visibly marked the human condition as those in transport. Moving goods and people, they have opened continents, transformed living standards, spread diseases, fashions and folk around the world. Yet technologies to transport ideas and information across long distances have arguably achieved even more: they have spread knowledge, the basis of economic growth. The most basic of all these, the written word, was already ancient by 1000. By then China had, in basic form, the printing press, using carved woodblocks. But the key to its future, movable metal type, was four centuries away. The Chinese were hampered by their thousands of ideograms. Even so, they quite soon invented primitive movable type, made of clay, and by the 13th century they had movable wooden type. But the real secret was the use of an easily cast metal. When it came, Europe -- aided by simple western alphabets -- leapt forward with it. One reason why Asia's civilisations, in 1000 far ahead of Europe's, then fell behind was that they lacked the technology to reproduce and diffuse ideas. On Johannes Gutenberg's invention in the 1440s were built not just the Reformation and the Enlightenment, but Europe's agricultural and industrial revolutions too. Yet information technology on its own would not have got far. Literally: better transport technology too was needed. That was not lacking, but here the big change came much later: it was railways and steamships that first allowed the speedy, widespread dissemination of news and ideas over long distances. And both technologies in turn required people and organisations to develop their use. They got them: for individual communication, the postal service; for wider publics, the publishing industry. Throughout the 19th century, the postal service formed the bedrock of national and international communications. Crucial to its growth had been the introduction of the gummed postage stamp, combined with a low price, and payment by the sender (not, as till then, the recipient). Britain put all three of these ideas into effect in 1840 (50 years later, alas, than its first plan for a penny post). By then, the world's mail was taking off. It changed the world. Merchants in America's eastern cities used it to gather information, enraging far-off cotton growers and farmers, who found that New Yorkers knew more about crop prices than they did. In the American debate about slavery, it offered abolitionists a low-cost way to spread their views, just as later technologies have cut the cost and widened the scope of political lobbying. The post helped too to integrate the American nation, tying the newly opened west to the settled east. Everywhere, its development drove and was driven by those of transport. In Britain, travellers rode by mail coach to posting inns. In America, the post subsidised road-building. Indeed, argues Dan Schiller, a professor of communications at the University of California, it was the connection between the post, transport and national integration that ensured that the mail remained a public enterprise even in the United States, its first and only government-run communications medium, and until at least the 1870s, the biggest organisation in the land. And in most countries -- the United States was an exception -- the carriers of mail became in turn the providers of telegraphy and then of telephony. The change has not only been one of speed and distance, though, but of audience. At the start of the millennium, with rare exceptions -- kings, chiefs and churchmen -- a man's words could reach no further than his voice, not just in range but in whom they reached. Gossip moves fast, be it from medieval mouth to ear or mobile phone to phone. But, for some purposes, efficient communication is mass communication, regular, cheap, quick and reliable. When it became possible it transformed the world. Now one voice could reach distant thousands. 11. According to the passage, the reason that Asia’s civilisations, which were ahead of Europe’s, fell behind was that: a) the alphabet of European scripts was simple and reproducible. b) the invention of movable type c) Europe developed the technology of communication. d) the invention of the printing press created a revolution. 12. Why did information technology require better transport technology in order to succeed? a) it allowed wide dissemination of news and ideas over long distances b) both technologies required people and organisations to develop their use c) it formed the basis of postal service and publishing industry. d) none of the above. 13. Which of the following could be a basis for the statement that “the post subsidised road-building”? a) better communication meant better transport, which in turn meant better roads. b) there was a connection between the post, transport and national integration. c) the delivery of mail entailed better transport and better roads. d) the carriers of mail became the providers of telegraphy and then of telephony 14. Which of the following is NOT an effect of the mail service, as mentioned in the passage? a) collection of market prices of goods b) a low cost way to spread ideas c) the scope of political lobbying has widened and costs reduced d) integrating the American nation. 15. In terms of communication, which of the following have transformed the world, according to the passage? a) transport b) painting press c) postal service d) mass communication. |
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