GRE出国考试的试题：GRE北美试题5

informativeness and imaginative formal beauty of many photographs, like Harold Edgerton's high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target or of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke. But as cameras become more sophisticated, more automated, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are not really armed, preferring to submit themselves to the limits imposed by pre-modern camera technology because a cruder, less high-powered machine is thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident. For example, it has been virtually a point of honor for many photographers, including Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson, to refuse to use modern equipment. These photographers have come to doubt the value of the camera a an instrument of "fast seeing." Cartier Bresson, in fact, claims that the modern camera may see too fast.
    This ambivalence toward photographic means determines trends in taste. The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates over time with the wish to return to a purer past-when images had a handmade quality. This nostalgia for some pristine state of the photographic enterprise is currently widespread and underlies the present-day enthusiasm for daguerreotypes and the work of forgotten nineteenth century provincial photographers. Photographers and viewers of photographs, it seems, need periodically to resist their own knowingness.
    21. According to the passage, interest among photographers in each of photography's two ideals can be described as
    (A) rapidly changing
    (B) cyclically recurring
    (C) steadily growing
    (D) unimportant to the viewers of photographs
    (E) unrelated to changes in technology
    22. The author is primarily concerned with
    (A) establishing new technical standards for contemporary photography
    (B) analyzing the influence of photographic ideals on picture-taking
    (C) tracing the development of camera technology in the twentieth century
    (D) describing how photographers' individual temperaments are reflected in their work
    (E) explaining how the technical limitations imposed by certain photographers on themselves affect their work
    23. The passage states all of the following about photographs EXCEPT:
    (A) They can display a cropped reality.
    (B) They can convey information.
    (C) They can depict the photographer's temperament.
    (D) They can possess great formal beauty.
    (E) They can change the viewer's sensibilities.
    24. The author mentions the work of Harold Edgerton in order to provide an example of
    (A) how a controlled ambivalence toward photography's means can produce outstanding pictures
    (B) how the content of photographs has changed from the nineteenth century to the twentieth
    (C) the popularity of high-speed photography in the twentieth century
    (D) the relationship between photographic originality and technology
    (E) the primacy of formal beauty over emotional content
    25. The passage suggests that photographers such as Walker Evans prefer old-fashioned techniques and equipment because these photographers
    (A) admire instruments of fast seeing
    (B) need to feel armed by technology
    (C) strive for intense formal beauty in their photographs
    (D) like the discipline that comes from self-imposed limitations
    (E) dislike the dependence of photographic effectiveness on the powers of a machine