CAE Reading and Use of English Part 6
You are going to read four extracts by academics about photography For questions 37-40, choose from the academics A-D. The academics may be chosen more than once.
Is photography art?
A
In my view, when a photograph is produced, this is not the result of genuinely creative camera work. A scientific technique is being applied, and with a good camera, even an amateur photographer with no artistic ability can reliably produce acceptable images. Compare this to the likelihood of someone with no idea how to paint or carve ever creating a decent watercolour or statue. Clearly, the creative quality of photography is far removed from that of such genuinely artistic endeavours. And yet there are those who persist in claiming that photography is the most significant contemporary art form. Perhaps I should qualify the extent to which I disagree: admittedly, when a photographer captures a moment of reality, it is done deliberately. It is perhaps this deliberateness that contains the germ of what might be called art.
B
Photography belongs both to the realms of reality and imagination: although it sometimes favours one over the other, it never quite relinquishes its hold on either. Little does it matter that a photograph can be printed out a thousand times, thus depriving the ‘original’ of its unique status. For me, it is sufficient that no two photographers are likely to create an identical image, and it is this which sets photography on par with more established artistic disciplines such as sculpture or painting when it comes to inventiveness and originality. And now, although the idea that photography could be art at one time appeared absurd to many people, it is without a doubt our foremost and most immediately accessible means of artistic expression. In no way is it undermined by the fact that everyone has a camera these days and can take excellent photos without formal instruction.
C
To draw comparisons between painting and photography as art forms is to miss the point; they are so very different. Moreover, photographs capture reality, and therefore can often have a far greater impact on the viewer. There are those who insist that unlike painting, which can take years of practice to master, photography is easy: anyone can pick up a camera and take a reasonable picture. However, I would contend that it is unlikely ever to match the creativity of one taken by a professional photographer, and if it does, its success is unlikely to be replicated. These issues have been debated by art critics for over a century, and yet, arguably, photography is not only one of the newest types of art, it is the ultimate form of modern art.
D
There are many thousands of important early art photographs in public and private collections worldwide and yet the majority were not made with the art exhibition in mind. Some were intended as demonstrations of what the new medium could do; others began life as documents, records or illustrations; only later were they seen as art objects. The central role photography currently plays in the international artistic realm would once have been unimaginable. There are still those who judge photography not to be a true art. One reason given is that it can be duplicated again and again. I would remind them that bronze sculpture, which no-one denies is an art form, can involve casting and recasting a large number of copies. Surely a photographer’s art, like that of a painter, is the ability to capture a moment of reality and turn it into an image of interest and beauty – a true measure of creativity.
Which academic …
37 shares an opinion with B on whether the fact that photographs can be reproduced devalues them as art?
38 has a different opinion from A on whether taking consistently good photographs requires professional training?
39 has a similar opinion to D about whether most photographs were originally regarded as works of art?
40 has a different view from all the others on the importance of photography in today’s art world?
CAE Reading and Use of English Part 7
You are going to read an article about sugar and its alternatives. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Finding an alternative to sugar
So much for the decades in which fats and oils were public enemy number one on our dinner plates
There is more and more evidence that sugar – or more precisely, carbohydrate – is behind our increasing rates of obesity and heart disease. Even if it is still not completely clear how it is bad for us, there are endless calls for reducing the quantity of sugar in the foods we eat.
41 …
Replacing the sweetness of sugar in foods is actually relatively straightforward. The first synthetic sweetener, saccharine, was discovered accidentally by a young Russian chemist named Constantin Fahlberg in 1879. While studying coal-tar derivatives, he unwittingly got some on his hands and then licked his fingers. Saccharine became widely used around World War I, when natural sugar was often in short supply. In the 1960s, scientists discovered several more sweeteners in similarly serendipitous ways, including aspartame and acesulfame K.
42 …
Yet while we have plenty of options for sweetness, there are several difficulties associated with using sugar substitutes in our diet. There have been various health scares over the years, which have negatively affected stevia, saccharine and aspartame, among others.
43 …
And there are other issues, aside from health scares and labelling problems. Sugar’s bad press puts the food industry in a difficult position because sugars have chemical functions in foods that make them difficult to replace. Sugar solutions freeze at a lower temperature than pure water, for instance. In products like ice cream, this is critical to maintaining a soft texture at freezer temperatures. Sugars also play an important role in giving products like bread and cakes their darker colour, through what chemists call non-enzymatic browning reactions. Unfortunately, artificial sweeteners are not good at reproducing either of these functions.
44 …
All in all, although non-sugar sweeteners are a huge industry, these drawbacks help to explain why they have come nowhere near eclipsing sugar. However, things are looking up for natural sweeteners. The evidence of health risks associated with them has turned out to be less convincing than first thought. Stevia’s years in the wilderness were apparently the result of an anonymous complaint about the risks to the U.S. authorities, which is not commonly thought to have come from a rival producer of an alternative sweetener.
45 …
As for the problem of taste, manufacturers have sought to overcome the aftertaste issue by combining a number of different sweeteners. We perceive the aftertaste of different sweeteners over differing timescales, so one sweetener can be used to mask the aftertaste of another.
46 …
In the absence of a perfect sugar replacement, such ploys could be as good as it gets for the foreseeable future. No wonder governments are instead beginning to intervene by employing measures such as higher taxes on products containing excessive sugar to save us from our sweet tooth.
A Scientists have also been playing their part in this rehabilitation. When it comes to texture, for instance, protein texturisers can be added instead – soy, for example. And for other substances which have a similar effect as sugar on the freezing properties of water, scientists have discovered that erythritol is one option.
B Public suspicions are further fueled by the fact that many governments classify all non-sugar sweeteners as additives – even those which occur naturally in plants. As consumers have become increasingly wary of anything containing additives, manufacturers have been moving towards products which are free of them, thus putting these sweeteners at a disadvantage.
C An additional, increasingly common practice is to mix sugar and non-sugar sweeteners together. This helps explain why the use of non-sugar sweeteners in new product launches has risen significantly in recent years.
D But while sweeteners have this particular advantage, it remains a problem that they adhere more strongly to our sweetness receptors and have a different and longer-lasting taste profile to sugar, and so are perceived as tasting different by consumers.
E Had we ever come up with a viable alternative to sugar, of course, we wouldn’t be facing such seemingly insurmountable problems now. In our sweetness-addicted era, finding a healthier substitute for sugar is one of science’s greatest challenges. The question is, why has a solution eluded us for so long?
F Then there is the problem of the bitter aftertaste of artificial sweeteners experienced by some consumers, which arises from the mechanism by which sweetness is detected in the taste buds. One problem is that the structural features of a sweet molecule which allow it to bind to the sweetness receptors on the tongue are similar to those which bind to our bitterness receptors.
G As well as these substances, there are naturally occurring sweeteners that we have actually known about for much longer. For example, the Guarani peoples of modern-day Brazil and Paraguay have been using the leaves of the stevia plant to sweeten foods for about 1,500 years. Also well known is the West African katemfe fruit, the seeds of which contain a sweet chemical called thaumatin.
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