Vocabulary 7

Reading Comprehension
Marks/Pattisall
Winter 2012

Directions: Read the following passage, in which some of the words you have studied in
this unit appear in boldface type. Then complete each statement given below the passage
by circling the letter of the item that is the same or almost the same in meaning as the
boldfaced word.

Walker Evans: Life As It Is

In the 1920s still cameras were considered mere gadgets. They took only black-and-white
pictures and one used them to record weddings or to let friends see how fast the children were
growing. Almost no one encouraged Walker Evans, a shy young Midwesterner, in his belief that
photography could be an art.
The few older photographers who shared Evans’ view chose foreign locations or poetical
subjects in which billowing mists or sharply contrasted tones made the viewer marvel that a
photo could so dramatically resemble a painting. But Evans thought that imitating paintings
debased photography. He wanted to show life as we ourselves commonly see it-but show it more
clearly than we usually see. As with this photo of a cotton harvest worker in Alabama, Evans
learned to find the wonderful within the ordinary.
In 1936 Evans was hired to go South with the writer James Agee to produce a magazine
article on tenant farmers, the largest group of abjectly poor workers in the nation. Other articles
had presented these farmers as nobly heroic or pitifully vulnerable, or as cadaverous
scarecrows dramatic in their poverty, posed with lighting to match. Evans photographed them as
he found them, austere, likeable people dong their best with the little they had. No contrived
drama mitigated their terrible, actual lives. His pictures were disconcerting because they were
so clear and obviously true. But they also respected their subjects, and this aura of respect made
them unforgettable.
Though Evans died in 1975, his honest and evocative photographs of American life serve
as a testament to the art of the camera.

1. The meaning of debased is 4. The meaning of austere is

a. glorified c. depreciated a. unhappy b. unadorned
b. strained d. broke c. busy d. relaxed

2. Vulnerable most nearly means 5. Mitigated most nearly means

a. defenseless c. funny a. diminished b. broadcast
b. hungry d. poor c. hid d. saved

3. Cadaverous is best defined as 6. Disconcerting is best defined as

a. waving c. comical a. puzzling b. intersecting
b. emaciated d. menacing c. enlightening d. upsetting