Need/Help on a CR Strategy

Brolex
Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:37:02 +0000

Okay, I’m not too familiar with a reading strategy but I heard an important thing was to look at line references and then underline or bracket them. I’m going to post a section with questions and I want you to demonstrate how you would “highlight” the selected part of the passage and for which questions would you do it.

I’m going to post all the questions, not just the ones with line or text references so I can be sure which ones I should mark in the passage for.

Press Ctrl and F at the same time to search for words faster because I understand it’s not easy to see. Thank you once again for taking time to explain this. Also feel free to post any other strategy that you found helpful. I got a 640 on my practice CR if that matters.

Passage 1

Talk to those people who first saw films when they were silent, and they will tell you the experience was magic. The silent film had extraordinary powers to draw members of an audience into the story, and an equally(5) potent capacity to make their imaginations work. It required the audience to become engaged-to supply voices and sound effects. The audience was the final, creative contributor to the process of making a film.

The finest films of the silent era depended on two (10) elements that we can seldom provide today-a large and receptive audience and a well-orchestrated score. For the audience, the fusion of picture and live music added up to more than the sun of the respective parts.

The one word that sums up the attitude of the silent (15) filmmakers is enthusiasm, conveyed most strongly before formulas took shape and when there was more room for experimentation. This enthusiastic uncertainty often resulted in such accidental discoveries as new camera or editing techniques. Some films experimented (20) with players; the 1915 film Regeneration, for example, by using real gangsters and streetwalkers, provided startling local color. Other films, particularly those of Thomas Ince, provided tragic endings as often as films by other companies supplied happy ones.

(25) Unfortunately, the vast majority of silent films survive today in inferior prints that no longer reflect the care that the original technicians put into them. The modern versions of silent films may appear jerky and flickery, but the vast picture palaces did not attract four to six (30) thousand people a night by giving them eyestrain. A silent film depended on its visuals; as soon as you degrade those, you lose elements that go far beyond the image on the surface. The acting in silents was often very subtle, very restrained, despite legends to the contrary.

Passage 2

(35) Mime opens up a new world to the beholder, but it does so insidiously, not by purposely injecting points of interest in the manner of a tour guide. Audiences are not unlike visitors to a foreign land who discover that the modes, manners, and thoughts of its inhabitants are not (40) meaningless oddities, but are sensible in context.

I remember once when an audience seemed perplexed at what I was doing. At first, I tried to gain a more immediate response by using slight exaggerations. I soon realized that these actions had nothing to do with than audience’s understanding of the character. What I had believed to be a failure of the audience to respond in the manner I expected was, in fact, only their concentration on what I was doing; they were enjoyed a gradual awakening-a slow transference of their understanding (50) from their own time and place to one that appeared so unexpectedly before their eyes. This was evidenced by their growing response to succeeding numbers.

Mime is an elusive art, as its expression is entirely dependent on the ability of the performer to imagine a (55) character and to re-create that character for each performance. As a mime, I am a physical medium, the instrument upon which the figures of my imagination play their dance of life. The individuals in my audience also have responsibilities-they must be alert (60) collaborators. They cannot sit back, mindlessly complacent, and wait to have their emotions titillated by mesmeric musical sounds or visual rhythms or acrobatic feats, or by words that tell them what to think. Mime is an art that, paradoxically, appeals both to those who (65) respond instinctively to entertainment and to those whose appreciation is more analytical and complex. Between these extremes lie those audiences conditioned to resist any collaboration with what is played before them, and these the mime must seduce despite (70) themselves. There is only one-way to attack those reluctant minds-take them aware! They will be delighted at an unexpected pleasure.


Both passages are primarily concerned with the subject of…
The author of passage 1 uses the phrase “enthusiastic uncertainty” in line 17 to suggest that the filmmakers were…
In lines 19-24, regeneration and the films of thomas ince are presented as examples of…
In context, the reference to “eyestrain” (line 30) conveys a sense of…
In line 34, “legends” most nearly means…
The author of Passage 2 most likely considers the contrast of mime artist and tour guide appropriate because both…
The incident describes in lines 41-52 shows the author of Passage 2 to be similar to the silent film makers of passage 1 in the way she…
In lines 41-52, the author most likely describes a specific experience in order to…
In lines 60-63, the author’s description of techniques in in the types of performances is…
What additional information would reduce the apparent similarity between these two art forms…
Both passages mention which of the following as being important to the artistic success of the dramatic forms they describe?