Question 75 Answer and Explanation _ACT June 2018 Form A11 English Section

Passage V

Capturing the Arctic

San Francisco native, Louise Arner Boyd, first saw the blue glaciers and glittering fjords of the Arctic ice cap during a 1924 photography expedition to Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island. In the United States, little was known about the Arctic: its nearly frozen seas, packed with icebergs, made boat travel to the area treacherous. But Boyd, an amateur naturalist and practiced photographer, made exploring this wide, frigid terrain her life’s focus. She would lead seven Arctic expeditions, six by sea and one by air, mainly to the east coast of Greenland.

Boyd’s first two Arctic trips, taken in a small ship with a small crew, were designed for photographing the magnificent glaciers. Soon her interest in the region expanded beyond capturing its beauty. She secured a larger, sturdier ship, the Veslekari, and invited several scientists to travel with her. Over the course of three 1930s voyages, she led her team to the farthest reaches of the Arctic, in 1938, the group anchored close south of the North Pole. Botanists gathered plant specimens from the tundra——paleogeologists studied the ancient ice fields, and hydrogeographers searched for mountains on the ocean floor.

Boyd took thousands of photographs. She worked with the best equipment available, including a tripod-mounted large-format camera that freed crisp, high-resolution images of the landscape. She knew about photogrammetry, the science of making 3-D measurements from photographic images, Boyd used precise methods to choose locations and camera positions for its shots. Her well-executed photos, featured in her book The Fiord Region of East Greenland, provided the basis for the first accurate large-scale maps of the east coast of the country.

The polar expert’s final Arctic journey in 1955 was over the North Pole, in a chartered flight. Her aerial photos document the trip. Today, scientists are exploring how Boyd’s photographs and writing, along with her team’s studies, might be used to monitor environmental change in the Arctic.

Question 75 asks about the preceding passage as a whole.

75. Suppose the writers primary purpose had been to explain the way Boyd's photographs were used to make maps of the east coast of Greenland. Would this essay accomplish that purpose?

A. Yes, because the writer hints that because Boyd had studied photogrammetry, she deliberately created photographs that could be used to make maps.

B. Yes, because the writer makes clear that Boyd had photographed a region that, before her expeditions, had not been thoroughly documented.

C. No, because although the writer mentions that Boyd's photographs were used to make maps, the writer does not elaborate on how this was done.

D. No, because the writer instead focuses on describing how Boyd positioned her camera to create high-resolution images of glaciers.

Answer and Explanation

Your Answer is

Correct Answer is C

Explanation

The hypothetical subject of the question stem is to explain how Boyd's photo is used as a map of the east coast of Greenland, but this article does not give a specific explanation of the use of Boyd's photo as a map, so the subject of the question stem hypothesis is wrong, and the explanation of item C is correct.