OPTION A — READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER QUESTIONS 1 TO 5.

FOOD POVERTY

Food poverty afflicts people the world over, even in more affluent nations. "There are more and more younger people who cry with relief because they can get something to eat and refill their fridge," said Jochen Brühl, chairman of Tafel Deutschland, Germany's food bank group. "Even though the federal government has initiated quick and unbureaucratic help," he added, "some people are in a tragic situation."

In the UK, food poverty has moved to the front of the social and political agenda in large part (line 5) thanks to Manchester United Marcus Rashford, "ambassador" for FareShare, the UK's longest-running food redistribution charity that feeds more than 930,000 people each week, two-thirds of whom are children and vulnerable families.

"Marcus Rashford's campaign really put food poverty in people's minds, and we've seen a lot of people giving to food banks," says Charities Aid Foundation's Mark Greer of Rashford's efforts. "He's a (line 10) really powerful messenger, and people have thought about these issues in ways that they perhaps hadn't before. To hear a very wealthy young man talk in such stark terms about his own upbringing and how his family didn't have enough food to put on the table has made a huge difference."

Rashford has not only raised awareness of child hunger but has also helped to drive a fundraising initiative that paid for children and families who might otherwise have gone hungry. He has also launched (line 15) the Child Food Poverty Taskforce, a group of around 12 organisations to support the UK government's National Food Strategy.

In the US, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos promised to donate $100m to Feeding America, a nonprofit that has 200 food banks across the United States, and which launched the Response Fund, a national food and fundraising effort to support national food banks. "Even in ordinary times, food insecurity in American (line 20) households is an important problem", Bezos said on Instagram.

But the huge increase in demand for food banks came in parallel with restrictions on grocery shopping and limitations on the handling of food. As a result, food banks have had to accept food donations in cash. (Fragment adapted from The Financial Times.)

OPTION B — READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER QUESTIONS 1 TO 5.

PHOTOGRAPHING LIFE AS IT'S SEEN, NOT STAGED

Documentary photography, which fell out of favor with the rise of manipulated images, is making a comeback, on view at the International Center of Photography.

According to legend, when the Roman Catholic Church forced Galileo to renounce his astronomical proof that the earth revolves around the sun, he muttered, "But still, it turns." For a group show at the ICP, the photographer Paul Graham thought that would make an apt title. "He meant, 'My observations of the (line 5) world still matter.'"

In recent years, documentary photography has fallen out of fashion. The critical arbiters in museums and galleries favor pictures that are constructed in a studio, lifted off a computer screen, generated through digital manipulation — anything other than shot outside the photographer's door. But, as Graham says, "The world matters — this is the core of photography, engaging with life."

Although the photographs in the show were taken before the pandemic, they are being seen together (line 10) about a year after lockdowns began. "The name of the show took a different layer of meaning after Covid," Graham said. "The world goes on. When you look back at these pictures made pre-Covid, you realize, I had it so good, the freedom to roam around and touch strangers, the ability to go into people's houses. It makes you realize, as photography can, the effortless beauty or unspoken flow that life has."

The pictures were made by seven photographers. The American documentary tradition they are (line 15) revitalizing is not the politically charged movement of the 1930s, which exposed the hardships and injustices in the country at that time, but the version that took hold among the leading street photographers of the '60s, and which the MOMA photography director John Szarkowski termed "New Documents." As Szarkowski wrote in the introduction to that 1.967 show, "Their aim has been not to reform life but to know (line 20) it, not to persuade but to understand."

More important, though, is what they share: a commitment to portray life as they discover it in the world at large, without staging or manipulation; and by so doing, to find and express themselves. (Fragment adapted from The New York Times.)