{"id":16529,"date":"2021-11-09T13:00:25","date_gmt":"2021-11-09T13:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/prep\/?p=16529"},"modified":"2021-11-09T19:28:40","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T19:28:40","slug":"high-level-gmat-reading-comprehension-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpapp.kaptest.com\/study\/gmat\/high-level-gmat-reading-comprehension-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice: Difficult Passages"},"content":{"rendered":"

Take a few minutes to review GMAT Reading Comprehension question types and strategies<\/a> in detail. Then, try out your skills on this high level GMAT Reading Comprehension passage and questions. Give yourself about 10-20 minutes to complete the passage and questions, not forgetting to sufficiently analyze the passage<\/a>. Once you have finished, check your analysis and answers with ours to see how you did.<\/p>\n\n

The Difficult GMAT Passage<\/h2>
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\n\u201cStrange Bedfellows!\u201d lamented the title of a recent letter to Museum News, in which a certain Harriet Sherman excoriated the National Gallery of Art in Washington for its handling of tickets to the much-ballyhooed \u201cVan Gogh\u2019s van Goghs\u201d exhibit. A huge proportion of the 200,000 free tickets were snatched up by the opportunists in the dead of winter, who then scalped those tickets at $85 apiece to less hardy connoiseurs.<\/p>\n

Yet, Sherman\u2019s bedfellows are far from strange. Art, despite its religious and magical origins, very soon became a commercial venture. From bourgeois patrons funding art they barely understood in order to share their protegee\u2019s prestige, to museum curators stage-managing the cult of artists in order to enhance the market value of museum holdings, entrepreneurs have found validation and profit in big-name art. Speculators, thieves, and promoters long ago created and fed a market where cultural icons could be traded like commodities.<\/p>\n

This trend toward commodification of high-brow art took an ominous, if predictable, turn in the 1980s during the Japanese \u201cbubble economy.\u201d At a time when Japanese share prices more than doubled, individual tycoons and industrial giants alike invested record amounts in some of the West\u2019s greatest masterpieces. Ryoei Saito, for example, purchased van Gogh\u2019s Portrait of Dr. Gachet<\/em> for a record-breaking $82.5 million. The work, then on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, suddenly vanished from the public domain. Later learning that he owed the Japanese government $24 million in taxes, Saito remarked that he would have the paining cremated with him to spare his heirs the inheritance tax. This statement, which he later dismissed as a joke, alarmed and enraged many. A representative of the Van Gogh museum, conceding that he had no legal redress, made an ethical appeal to Mr. Saito, asserting, \u201ca work of art remains the possession of the world at large.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ethical appeals notwithstanding, great art will increasingly devolve into big business. Firstly, great art can only be certified by its market value. Moreover, the \u201cworld at large\u201d hasn\u2019t the means of acquisition. Only one museum currently has the funding to contend for the best pieces\u2013the J. Paul Getty Museum, founded by the billionaire oilman. The art may disappear into private hands, but its transfer will disseminate once static fortunes into the hands of various investors, collectors, and occasionally the artist.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n

Passage Analysis<\/h3>\n