Starry nights and sunflowers, self-portraits and café settings — all painted in bold,
intense colors. Today, people around the world immediately recognize these as the work
of Vincent Van Gogh, the Dutch painter. [A]
Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in a small village in southern
Holland. As achild, he was serious and sensitive. He loved to draw, and his work showed
talent, but no one encouraged him to become an artist. Instead, his father thought he
should take a “sensible” job — something like a salesclerk or carpenter. Asa young adult,
he wandered from job to job with little success and very little money, becoming more
depressed with each failure. In March 1880, however, just before his 27" birthday,
something changed inside Van Gogh. He realized that he was meant to be a painter,
and he began to study art in Brussels, receiving a subsidy from his brother Theo, which
helped him to live. [B]
In 1886, Van Gogh moved to Paris, hoping to learn more about color techniques
being used by Impressionist artists there. Instead of grays and browns, his work began
to emphasize blue and red and then yellow and orange. Soon he began to see life differently: Go slow. Stop thinking. Look around. You'll see something beautiful if you
open yourself. These were the principles that guided his art. With his innovative color
combinations, Van Gogh wanted to show his viewers how to better appreciate a flower,
the night sky, or a person’s face.
Few who lived in Van Gogh's time appreciated his work, however. Many laughed
when they saw his paintings, which hurt the sensitive artist terribly. In February 1888, he
moved away from Paris to Arles, a town in southern France. Often he could not eat or
sleep, and stayed up into the early morning hours painting. Days passed, and he spoke
to no one. Following an argument with fellow artist Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh took a
razor and cut off his own earlobe.
He never explained why, but by now, many were convinced that Van Gogh was
crazy, and indeed, his mental health started to decline. He began to have attacks during
which he would hear strange sounds and think people were trying to hurt him. In the
spring of 1889, he was sent to a mental hospital in St. Remy, a town near Ades.
What exactly was van Gogh suffering from? No one knows for sure, but some now
think it may have been a form of manic depression. Whatever his condition, Van Gogh’s
illness both inhibited and inspired his creativity. When his attacks came, he could not
paint. But during his periods of calm, he was able to complete more than a hundred
masterpieces, including the classic Starry Night. “Working on my pictures is almost a
necessity for my recovery.” he wrote.
Following his release from the hospital in May 1890, Van Gogh took a room in a
town just north of Paris. For the 70 days that he lived there, he produced, on average, a
painting a day. Until his death, however, he was unable to sell a single one; today, those
paintings would be worth more than a billion U.S. dollars. [C]
It was at this time that Van Gogh either borrowed or stole a gun. On the afternoon
of July 27, 1890, he went out to the country and shot himself in the stomach. Two days
later, Vincent Van Gogh died at age 37. What caused him to take his own life — his lack
of financial success, mental illness, his loneliness? [D]
PASSAGE 2 — Questions 11-20
Mesa Verde is the center of the prehistoric Anasazi culture. It is located in the high
plateau lands near Four Corners in the U.S. Southwest, where Colorado, Utah, New
Mexico, and Arizona come together. The climate in this region is dry, but at the bottom
of deeply cut canyons, seeps, springs, and tiny streams can be found. These provided the
water for the Anasazi crops of corn, beans, squash, tobacco, and cotton. Farming was the main business of these people, but the Anasazi domesticated the wild turkey, hunted
deer, rabbits, and mountain sheep, and gathered wild plants.
For a thousand years the Anasazi lived at Mesa Verde. These Native Americans
were not related to the Navajos, who came to the area long after the Anasazi. However,
because no one knows what the Anasazi actually called themselves, they are commonly
called by their Navajo name, which means “the ancient ones” in the Navajo language.
The first Anasazi people, who are called the Basket Makers by archaeologists, came
to the area around 550. This formerly nomadic group began to live a more settled
life. They built underground dwellings called pit houses. These were clustered into small
villages, mostly on top of mesas but occasionally on ledges on the walls of the cliffs that
formed the Mesa.
In the next 300 years, the Anasazi made rapid technological progress, including
the refinement of basket making, pottery making, jewelry making, leather working, and
weaving. Stone Age people, the Anasazi did not use metal, but they skillfully shaped
stone, bone, and wood into a variety of tools for grinding, cutting, scraping, and
polishing. About 750, they began building houses above ground. At first these houses
were made of poles and mud, but later they were made of sandstone. This period of
development is known as the Early Pueblo Period.
The Great Pueblo Period (1 100-1300) was Mesa Verde’s classic age. The population
grew to about 5,000. The Anasazis’ level of technology continued to rise. Around 1200,
there was another major population shift. The Anasazi moved from the mesa tops to the
ledges on the steep sides of cliffs where some of their ancestors had lived centuries earlier.
On these ledges, the Anasazi built two- and three-story dwellings made of sandstone
blocks held together with mortar made of mud. There were no doors on the first floors,
and people had to use ladders to get into the buildings. Rooms averaged about six feet by
nine feet (two meters by three meters). They were plastered on the inside and decorated
with painted symbols. Smaller, isolated rooms were used for crop storage. The largest
village (Cliff Palace) had 217 rooms. All the villages had underground chambers called
kivas. Men held tribal councils there and also used them for secret religious ceremonies
and clan meetings. Winding paths, ladders, and steps cut in the stone led from the
villages to the valley below. One might surmise that these settlements were built on the
cliffs for protection, but the Anasazi had no known enemies, and there is no sign of
warfare.
A bigger mystery is why the Anasazi occupied their villages for such a short time.
By 1300 Mesa Verde was deserted. It is generally thought that the Anasazi abandoned their settlements because of a prolonged drought, overpopulation, crop failure, or some
combination of these. They probably moved southward and were incorporated into the
pueblo villages that the Spanish explorers encountered two hundred years later. Their
descendants may still live in the Southwest.
PASSAGE 3 — Questions 21-30
In April 1 870, an art exhibit opened in Paris featuring famous and priceless works of
art. However, at the time, no one knew that these paintings would one day be considered
masterpieces. The paintings and the painters were virtually unknown at the time and
would remain that way for several years.
In the nineteenth century, French art was dominated by the Academy of Fine Arts.
Every year the academy held an art show called Le Salon. In 1863, the Academy rejected
one of the paintings of Edouard Manet. Manet and a group of other independent artists
organized their own show, which they called Salon des Refuses (Salon of the Rejected)
opened on April 15,1874. A newspaper critic named Louis Leroy visited the gallery
and was not pleased with what he saw. Impression: Sunset — one painting of boats
in a harbor at dawn by Claude Monet particularly enraged him. Leroy wrote that this
piece, and in fact most of the pieces in the show, looked like “impressions” — a term for
a preliminary, unfinished sketch made before a painting is done. Leroy’s newspaper
review was jokingly called “The Exhibition of the Impressionists.” Within a few years of
Leroy’s review, the term Impressionists had clearly stuck, not as a term of derision but as
a badge of honor, and a new movement was born.
The Impressionist movement included the French painters Edouard Manet, Claude
Monet, Pierre-Auguste Rencir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, and the American painter
Mary Cassatt. The techniques and standards employed within the Impressionist movement
varied widely, and though the artists shared a core of values, the real glue which bound
the movement together was its spirit of rebellion and independence. This spirit is clear
when you compare Impressionist paintings with traditional French paintings of the time.
Traditional painters tended to paint rather serious scenes from history and mythology.
Many Impressionist paintings feature pleasant scenes of urban life, celebrating the leisure
time that the Industrial Revolution had won for the middle class, as shown in Renoir’s
luminous painting Luncheon of the Boating Party. Renoir once said that paintings should
be ”... likable, joyous, and pretty.” He said, “There are enough unpleasant things in this
world. We don’t have to paint them as well.”
The Impressionists delighted in painting landscapes (except for Edgar Degas, who
preferred painting indoor scenes, and Mary Cassatt, who mainly painted portraits
of mothers and children). [A] Traditional painters, too, painted landscapes, but their
landscapes tended to be somber and dark. [B] The Impressionists’ landscapes sparkle
with light. [C] Impressionists insisted that their works be “true to nature.” [D] When they
painted landscapes, they carried their paints and canvases outdoors in order to capture
the ever-changing light. Traditional painters generally made preliminary sketches outside
but worked on the paintings themselves in their studios.
“Classic” Impressionist paintings are often easy to spot because of the techniques
used by the painters. For example, colors should be dropped pure on the canvas instead
of getting mixed on the palette and most Impressionists mixed their paints as little as possible. The traditional technique at the time was to make sketches or outlines of the
subject before painting them. Unlike traditional painters, Impressionists applied one layer
of paint on top of the last one without waiting for the paint to dry. These techniques
created paintings that seemed strange and unfinished to the general public when they
were first painted, but are much loved in our time.
PASSAGE 4 — Questions 31-40
In many countries, access to capital markets and low-interest loans is limited to large
corporations and government monopolies. Small businesses and suppliers do not have
access to liquid cash, and run the risk of failing to fulfil orders because they do not have
the capital to purchase supplies for the products they make. As a result of this credit crisis,
a practice called factoring has become popular in many areas of the world.
In factoring, a bank or financial organization — called a factor — gives a supplier
cash in exchange for the right to collect payment when the supplier delivers an order to
a buyer. In effect, the factor is buying the supplier’s Accounts Receivables at a discount
off the face value of the accounts. The supplier benefits by receiving cash more quickly
than it could from the buyer, but does not receive full payment for the accounts. The factor
takes on a huge amount of risk by buying a supplier’s Accounts Receivables, as each
individual buyer must be researched to determine what the risk is of that buyer defaulting
on payment. In some cases, these buyers are so small or obscure that risk cannot be
determined, and a factor is buying a complete unknown. In this case, if a buyer defaults,
the factor may go back to the supplier and ask for compensation for the default. Thus,
factoring is risky for both the supplier and the factor.
In recent years, a new practice called reverse factoring has become increasingly
popular because it shifts the anchor from supplier to buyer to virtually eliminate risk from
the transaction. In reverse factoring, instead of buying a supplier’s Accounts Receivables,
a factor provides loans to a single large buyer’s suppliers.
For example, a large corporation with an excellent credit rating and an extremely
low chance of defaulting will have a list of suppliers. Many of these suppliers are small
businesses without adequate access to liquid cash. When a factor contracts with the
large buyer to supply payments to suppliers, the transaction works as follows: 1) the
supplier signs an agreement to be entered into the factor’s system, 2) the supplier delivers
an order to the buyer, 3) the buyer approves the delivery and signs off with the factor,
4) the factor pays the supplier a percentage (usually 80 to 90 percent) of the price of
the order immediately, 5) the buyer pays the factor for the order at whatever terms the
agreement states, 6) the factor pays the supplier the remaining balance for the order. The
factor takes a percentage of the transaction and charges interest to the buyer.
By originating the transaction with a large, risk-free buyer instead of a supplier,
reverse factoring improves all three parties’ positions and liquidity. The factor earns a
steady interest rate with very little risk, and by working with large buyers, has access to
large volumes of business at one time. The buyers gain the ability to pay on better terms
for lower interest than they would with traditional capital market structures. Suppliers get
paid far more rapidly and at a far lower interest rate than they would be able to with a
traditional factoring or capital market arrangement.