Practice these TOEFL iBT listening tests to help you score high in the TOEFL Listening Section. Check the correct answers and audio transcripts below. This video is in the series of NEW TOEFL iBT Preparation: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2jvSGmpWX1UMjbc8Onae7i-R6Z8VcPbU.
Questions 23 through 28. Listen to part of a lecture in a Canadian studies class. The professor is talking about art.
The painter Arthur Lismer wrote. “Most creative people, whether in painting, writing or music, began to have a guilty feeling that Canada was as yet unwritten, unpainted, unsung.” According to Lismer, there was a job to be done, and so a generation of artists set out to create a school of painting that would record the Canadian scene and reinforce a distinctive Canadian identity. Calling themselves the Group of Seven, they proclaimed that quote, “Art must grow and flower in the land before the country will be a real home for its people."
The Group's origins date back to the 1911 showing in Toronto of the painting “At the Edge of the Maple Wood” by A.Y. Jackson of Montreal. This painting’s vibrant color and texture made a deep impression on local artists. They persuaded Jackson to come to Toronto and share a studio with them. Jackson began to accompany another painter, Tom Thomson, on sketching trips to Algonquin Park, north of the city.
Several of the artists worked at the same Toronto commercial design firm, and it was here that they met and discovered their common artistic interests. After work, they socialized together at the Arts and Letters Club. They talked about finding a new direction for Canadian art. a distinctly Canadian style of painting. It was a romantic quest—mainly fueled by the restless spirit of Tom Thomson, who led the others to the Canadian wilderness to sketch and paint.
A patron gave the artists the famous Studio Building in Toronto. It was here that Thomson did some of his finest paintings from sketches made in the wild. Among them was “The Jack Pine,” one of the nation’s best-loved pictures. But then, suddenly and tragically, Thomson died in 1917 drowning in a canoe accident—shocking his fellow painters and Canadian art lovers.
The other artists continued their sketching trips to the vast wilderness of northern Ontario. It was there that they found inspiration for some of their greatest paintings. Each artist had his own vision and his own technique, but they all captured the essence of wilderness Canada—a bleak, somber, incredibly beautiful landscape of rock outcroppings, storm-driven lakes, and jack pine trees—a land totally uninhabited by people.
After a 1919 trip to the wilderness, the artists decided to organize an exhibition and to formally call themselves the Group of Seven. The seven founding artists were Jackson, Lismer, Harris, MacDonald, Varley, Johnston, and Carmichael.
Their 1920 exhibition was an important moment in Canadian art. It proclaimed that Canadian art must be inspired by Canada itself. However, the initial response was less than favorable. Several major art critics ignored the show, while others called the paintings crude and barbaric. Yet, when British critics praised the Group’s distinctly Canadian vision, the Canadian public took another look. Later exhibitions drew increasing acceptance for the Group’s work, establishing them as the “national school.” Before long, they were the most
influential painters in the country, and several of their paintings have become icons of Canada.
A.Y. Jackson was influential for his analysis of light and shadow. Arthur Lismer’s work has an intensity all its own— particularly his painting of the "Canadian Jungle”, the violently colored forest in the fall. Lawren Harris went further than the rest in simplifying the forms of nature into sculptural shapes, organizing an entire scene into a single, unified image, and eventually into abstraction.
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Correct Answers:
23. B
24. A
25. D
26. B & D
27. C
28. A
