Q13

[natasha119]

I'm having trouble understanding why E is the correct answer. Line 31 says infants were trying desperately hard to sit still. Line 32 says "endures his or her ordeal" in describing the collective action of the photograph, but wouldn't infants have a hard time sitting still for portraits today?
I thought the correct answer was D because the passage says housemaids, nieces, husbands, village children (28-31) were the subjects of the photographs; average people.

[jrkovals]

The fact that Cameron used ordinary people in her settings doesn't professional models weren't available

I don't like E either.

[christine.defenbaugh]

Thanks for posting, natasha119 and jrkovals!

Jrkovals has nailed why (D) is incorrect - Cameron used regular people for her photographs, but that doesn't suggest that professional artist's models didn't exist. It just means Cameron didn't use them if they did!

You've nabbed most of the right line references to support (E), natasha119, so let's take another look. Getting specific with what these line references really tell us is the key to understanding the inference.

Line 31 is actually about all the subjects trying to sit still, not just infants. Infants may have a hard time sitting still in any era, but it's not really difficult for adults to pose for a snapshot today, because it only takes a second. If these photographs were "an ordeal", and even adults had to "try[] desperately hard to sit still", there must be something about sitting for these photographs that makes it far more difficult than it would be today!

Interestingly, infants is only raised specifically up in line 12 - "infant Christs whose faces are blurred because they moved". You read this comment about infants in paragraph 1, then interpreted line 31 to be only about infants, which undermined your analysis.

Remember that for an inference question on RC, the answer does not need to be 100% directly provable. However, we need the inference to have substantial support, and be likely. While it's theoretically possible for everything in the passage to be correct, and yet the photographs be fast, it's the most obvious/likely explanation for why even adults had trouble sitting still for the whole ordeal.

Also, importantly, none of the other answers has any support whatsoever:

(A) The discussion is entirely about the photographs themselves; we have zero information about how much interest there was in photography.
(B) We have no information about who practiced photography, other than that Cameron herself did.
(C) We have zero information about publicity stills of actors.
(D) Cameron didn't use professional artist's models, but we have no information about whether they existed.

Process of elimination is your friend on a question like this. Kill all the answers with zero support whatsoever, then check to see whether the remaining answer has indirect support! Grab the line references that you need, but make sure you've accurately captured what they say!

Please let me know if this helps clear a few things up!