#11 - Concept Reference, Must Be True

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

The correct answer choice is (D).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D): This is the correct answer choice.

Answer choice (E):

This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[delialsat02]

Hi. I was wondering why D was a better answer than B. I assumed that photography/journalism from the time period did not reveal instances of individual human suffering since the passage says "Through his depiction of the unemployed in New York's Harlem he was able to move beyond the usual "protest painting" of the period to reveal instances of individual human suffering."

[Robert Carroll]

delialsat02,

You're looking in the wrong place for the information to answer the question. The part you cite is about painting, not journalistic and photographic records at all. There is an explicit mention of the latter in the final paragraph, and there is says that they engaged in "simplifications." So, those records were too simplified. We therefore want an answer that's the opposite of that, which answer choice (D) is.

Robert Carroll

[dodreforn@gmail.com]

I'm having difficulty understanding why D is correct and B is incorrect. I spent a significant amount of time on this question! " Bearden sought in his work to reveal in all its fullness a world long hidden by the clichés of sociology and rendered cloudy by the simplifications of journalism and documentary photography. " I interpreted his work to focus on human suffering and African-American life, which ultimately led me to choose B as my answer. I sort of understand why because of the word 'richness', but I'd like a clear explanation.

Marie

[Luke Haqq]

Hi Marie!

You cite to the right part of the passage for this question. Ultimately, that part of the passage doesn't let us know that (B) is true, though it could possibly be true. Since this is a must be true question, however, that's not good enough for (B) to be correct.

The passage doesn't talk about journalism and documentary photography except for in the third paragraph, in the specific sentence you cited. All we know from that sentence is that there is a "fullness" of a particular world that has been "long hidden" and "rendered cloudy" by what we are told are the "simplifications" of journalism and documentary photography. So it's possible that what has been hidden includes instances of human suffering, but we don't know that to be definitely true based off of that sentence, which is why we can eliminate answer choice (B). By contrast, the mention in the passage of a "fullness" that is obscured by journalism and documentary photography makes (D) and its reference to the "richness" of African-American life to be an answer choice supported by that single sentence.