<p>There is only one complication: he doesn’t feel like Nikhil. Not yet. Part of the problem is that the people who know him as Nikhil have no idea that he used to be Gogol. They know him only in the present, not at all in the past. But after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant, inconsequential. At times he feels as if he’s cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally different. At times he still feels his old name, painfully and without warning, the way his front tooth had unbearably throbbed in recent weeks after a filling. He fears being discovered, having the whole charade somehow unravel, and in nightmares his files are exposed, his original name printed on the front page of the student newspaper. Once, he signs his old name by mistake on a credit card slip at the college bookstore. Occasionally he has to hear” Nikhil” three times before he answers.</p>
<ol>
<li>The description in lines 48-51 (“At times … filling”) suggests that Nikhil’s response is<br>
(A) intense and involuntary<br>
(B) committed and intellectual
(C) virtuous and self-effacing
(D) skeptical and resistant
(E) intermittent and nonsensical</li>
</ol>
<p>The magical aura surrounding art and its creators has, of course, given birth to myths since the earliest times. The fairy tale of the discovery by an older artist or discerning patron of the Boy Wonder, usually in the guise of a lowly shepherd boy. has been a stock-in-trade of artistic mythology ever since the sixteenth-century biographer Vasari wrote that the young Giotto was discovered by the great Cimabue while the lad was guarding his flocks, drawing sheep on a stone. Cimabue, overcome with admiration for the realism of the drawing, immediately invited the humble youth to be his pupil. Through some mysterious coincidence, later artists were all discovered in similar pastoral circumstances. Even when the young Great Artist was not fortunate enough to come equipped with a flock of sheep, his talent always seems to have manifested itself very early and independent of any external encouragement. So pronounced was the great Michelangelo’s talent, reports Vasari, that when his master absented himself momentarily and the young art student took the opportunity to draw “scaffolding, trestles, pots of paint, brushes and the apprentices at their tasks,” he did it so skillfully that upon his return the master exclaimed: “This boy knows more than I do.” </p>
<p>For question 13, we know that Vasari was teaching Michelangelo before that quote also. He simply went out for some time and when he came back, he was impressed by the work. He did not discover Michelangelo that time. He had discovered him long before the incident.</p>