Bài tập Reading - Test 4

TOEFL® Reading Test 4

This page will help you practise for the TOEFL reading test. This section has a reading passage about the photographer Robert Capa and 13 questions. Think carefully before you select an answer. Your answer is scored on the first click!

Read the text and answer all the questions. Robert Capa

1. Robert Capa is a name that has for many years been synonymous with war photography.

2. Born in Hungary in 1913 as Friedmann Endre Ernő, Capa was forced to leave his native country after

his involvement in anti government protests. Capa had originally wanted to become a writer, but after his

arrival in Berlin had first found work as a photographer. He later left Germany and moved to France due

to the rise in Nazism. He tried to find work as a freelance journalist and it was here that he changed his

name to Robert Capa, mainly because he thought it would sound more American.

3. In 1936, after the breakout of the Spanish Civil war, Capa went to Spain and it was here over the next

three years that he built his reputation as a war photographer. It was here too in 1936 that he took one of

his most famous pictures, The Death of a Loyalist Soldier. One of Capa’s most famous quotes was 'If

your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.' And he took his attitude of getting close to the

action to an extreme. His photograph, The Death of a Loyalist Soldier is a prime example of this as Capa

captures the very moment the soldier falls. However, many have questioned the authenticity of this

photograph, claiming that it was staged.

4. When World war II broke out, Capa was in New York, but he was soon back in Europe covering the

war for Life magazine. Some of his most famous work was created on 6th June 1944 when he swam

ashore with the first assault on Omaha Beach in the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Capa, armed only with

two cameras, took more than one hundred photographs in the first hour of the landing, but a mistake in

the darkroom during the drying of the film destroyed all but eight frames. It was the images from these

frames however that inspired the visual style of Steven Spielberg's Oscar winning movie ‘Saving Private

Ryan’. When Life magazine published the photographs, they claimed that they were slightly out of focus,

and Capa later used this as the title of his autobiographical account of the war.

5. Capa’s private life was no less dramatic. He was friend to many of Hollywood’s directors, actors and

actresses. In 1943 he fell in love with the wife of actor John Austin. His affair with her lasted until the end

of the war and became the subject of his war memoirs. He was at one time lover to actress Ingrid

Bergman. Their relationship finally ended in 1946 when he refused to settle in Hollywood and went off to

Turkey.

6. In 1947 Capa was among a group of photojournalists who founded Magnum Photos. This was a co-

operative organisation set up to support photographers and help them to retain ownership of the copyright

to their work.

7. Capa went on to document many other wars. He never attempted to glamorise war though, but to

record the horror. He once said, "The desire of any war photographer is to be put out of business."

8. Capa died as he had lived. After promising not to photograph any more wars, he accepted an

assignment to go to Indochina to cover the first Indochina war. On May 25th 1954 Capa was

accompanying a French regiment when he left his jeep to take some photographs of the advance and

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