Georgia O'Keeffe: reading answers and analysis
The career of the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe: teaching, then charcoal abstractions that reached Alfred Stieglitz, New York skyscrapers and giant close-up flowers, then decades in New Mexico painting bones, landscapes and her Abiquiu patio. Air travel late in life led to huge paintings of rivers and clouds seen from above.
Questions 1-13 · 13 marks · 2 question blocks
Where the answers sit
The notes (1-7) run through her life in order, from teaching to the late aerial series. The TRUE / FALSE / NOT GIVEN statements (8-13) start again in the first paragraph and also run in order.
Questions 1-7
The notes are a timeline, so each gap is the next stage of her career. The answers are concrete nouns: her job, her drawing material, and then each subject in turn (city buildings, plants, desert finds, the wider scenery, and what she saw from planes besides clouds).
| Question | Answer | Also accepted |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | teacher | — |
| 2 | charcoal | — |
| 3 | skyscrapers | — |
| 4 | flowers | — |
| 5 | bones | — |
| 6 | landscape | — |
| 7 | rivers | — |
Questions 8-13
The two FALSEs contradict specific details. The first line says she stayed independent of changing trends. A friend, not O'Keeffe, showed the drawings to Stieglitz. The two NOT GIVENs ask about her favourite works and her most productive period, and the passage offers no ranking of either.
| Question | Answer | Also accepted |
|---|---|---|
| 8 | FALSE | — |
| 9 | TRUE | — |
| 10 | FALSE | — |
| 11 | TRUE | — |
| 12 | NOT GIVEN | — |
| 13 | NOT GIVEN | — |
The questions most people get wrong
FALSE. O'Keeffe sent the drawings to a friend in New York, and the friend showed them to Stieglitz. She didn't send them to his gallery.
NOT GIVEN. She travelled and painted big canvases in those decades, but the passage never compares how much she produced then with other periods.
The scenery she painted for over forty years is the region's landscape. Don't write 'rocks' or 'cliffs', which are the features that make it up.
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The full Cambridge 20 Test 4 reading paper: all three passages, 60 minutes, marked the second you finish with a review of every answer. Already done it? Take it again and see if the same traps still get you.
Cambridge IELTS 20, Test 4, Reading Passage 1. The passage name belongs to Cambridge University Press. No passage text or question wording is reproduced on this page. The answers are published for self-marking, and the analysis is our own.