A Bar at the Folies: IELTS Reading Answers

The IELTS reading section is taken for a duration of 60 minutes. It consists of 3 or 4 reading passages of varying difficulty, with a total of 40 questions to answer. The passages will be complicated and long but not impossible to crack. Practice many passages to get the flow and pace.

In this article, you will read about a passage from A Bar at the Folies. Read carefully as you don’t want to miss anything.

A Bar at the Folies Reading Answers

The masterpiece of French artist edouard Manet is one of the most widely acclaimed works of the nineteenth-century modernist movement. Originally owned by composer Emmanuel Chabrier, it is now in the hands of The Courtauld Gallery in London, where it has been a crowd favourite.

The drawing depicts a late-night scene in a 19th century Parisian nightclub. A barmaid poses alone behind her counter, dressed in a black bodice with a frilly white ‘neckline and a shower of flowers on her décolleté. She leans against the bar and looks out forlornly at a point just under the viewer, not yet making “laking eye contact.” Bottles of beer and a tray of oranges are also on the counter, but most of the action in the room actually occurs in the image of a mirror behind the chambermaid.

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Section A of the Paragraph: IELTS Reading Answers

Through this mirror, we have seen an auditorium filled with distorted figures and faces: top hat-wearing men, monocular-wearing women, long-gloved women, and even the foot of a trapeze artist performing acrobatic stunts over his adoring audience. A man with a heavy moustache converses with the chambermaid in the background of the reflection.

About the fact that the Folies (-Bergere) was an actual bar in late 19th century Paris, and Manet’s protagonist was a real chambermaid who served there, Manet did not try to recreate any aspect of the bar in his depiction. The drawing was mostly done in the painter’s private workshop, where the barmaid posed with a selection of bottles, and was then combined with short sketches taken by the artist at the Folies.

Section A of the Paragraph: IELTS Reading Test

The relation in the painting between the action in the mirrored image and that which we see from the unreflected foreground is much more perplexing than Manet’s casual eye for detail. Manet uses the reflection in a similar way to Diego Velazquez’ much previous work Las Meninas to play with our perceptions on which specifics are true to life and what are not. The barmaid, for instance, is standing vertically in the foreground, her expression betraying a solitary alienation, but she seems to be leaning inward and to the side in the reflected reflection, seemingly engaged in conversation with her moustachioed client. As a consequence, the customer’s perspective is shifted. Because of where the barmaid is positioned in the mirror, he should be hidden, but Manet has readjusted him to the left.

Section A of the Paragraph: IELTS Exam

The ultimate impression on the spectator is of a dreamlike split between truth and fantasy.

Why does Manet deceive himself in this way? Probably for that purpose: to represent two separate mental or emotional states. Manet appears to be expressing his perception of the new workplace, which he sees as a place of isolation, where people are torn from their “real” self and compelled to adopt a false working identity. The barmaid’s working self can be seen in the reflected reflection, busy servicing a client. The front-on view, on the other hand, reveals how bleak, adrift, and lonely the barmaid feels at work.

Section A of the Paragraph: IELTS Reading

Since its launch at the Salon de Paris in 1882, art critics have published a slew of journals and articles debating the placement of the barmaid and patron in A Bar at the End of the World. Some had also staged replicas of the painting to see if Manet’s ostensibly skewed point of view was really real. Although scholars are naturally attracted to the painting’s contrapuntal enigma, the layperson is more apt to notice the painting’s much easier, more human tale underneath. This is, without a doubt, how Manet would have liked it.

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ELTS Reading Answers a Bar at the Folies: Questions Types 

In any reading passage of IELTS reading, you will find questions of these following types:

Detail Questions

Detail questions, as opposed to comprehension questions, define smaller bits of knowledge. The answers address basic, minor details in the paragraph or passage, such as a count, a date, or a title.

Following Directions Questions

Following instruction is a form of comprehension. You are being asked to comprehend how to answer a question rather than to answer the question itself. For eg, the instructions might state that you should underline the topic once, the pronoun twice, and the prepositions with parenthesis. If you can not read the instructions, you will either (1) not know what to do about the document or (2) will not know how to type the answers correctly.

Main Idea Questions

The key concept answers the majority of the questions in a paragraph or passage; it can answer who, what, why, when, where, or how. It contains a topic as well as anything unique to that subject. For instance, the Civil War may be a subject. A key theory about the Civil War may be: The disputes over slavery and state rights became the two most prominent factors of the Civil War.

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Inference

Inferences, as opposed to facts or evidence stated expressly in the paragraph or passage, are decisions, opinions, or opinions made by the reader based on details in the paragraph or passage. The details are oblique, and the inferred concepts are not mentioned explicitly. The reader must reason or consider her answer.

Sequence

The sequence of events depicts the chronological timeline of words – what occurred first, second, and occasionally more. It should be noted that the sequence does not correspond to the order of events outlined in the paragraph or passage. For eg, the passage might begin by discussing what happened most recently and then return to the beginning.

Conclusion

We hope that we were successful in adding a key point to your IELTS preparation. Go through the question types to get to know what type of questions can come in the passages.

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