From “Georgia O’Keeffe” by Joan Didion

6 Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it. On the surface her upbringing was conventional.

7 She was a child on the Wisconsin prairie who played with china dolls and painted watercolors with cloudy skies because sunlight was too hard to paint and, with her brother and sisters, listened every night to her mother read stories of the Wild West, of Texas, of Kit Carson and Billy the Kid. She told adults that she wanted to be an artist and was embarrassed when they asked what kind of artist she wanted to be: she had no idea “what kind.” She had no idea what artists did. She had never seen a picture that interested her, other than a pen-and-ink Maid of Athens in one of her mother’s books, some Mother Goose illustrations printed on cloth, a tablet cover that showed a little girl with pink roses, and the painting of Arabs on horseback that hung in her grandmother’s parlor. At thirteen, in a Dominican convent, she was mortified when the sister corrected her drawing. At Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia she painted lilacs and sneaked time alone to walk out to where she could see the line of the Blue Ridge Mountains on the horizon. At the Art Institute in Chicago she was shocked by the presence of live models and wanted to abandon anatomy lessons. At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girls’ school, any work of hers was less important than modeling for him. Another painted over her work to show her how the Impressionists did trees. She had not before heard how the Impressionists did trees and she did not much care.

The sentence “Georgia O’Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it” develops the author’s purpose by:

A. providing an additional example of what life was like for her growing up
B. showing that she doubted herself at times when she was challenged by men
C. revealing that she always pushed forward because she was afraid of failure
D. reinforcing the idea that she was a passionate and defiant person

Biographical information in paragraph 7 reinforces the idea that the author’s purpose is—

A. to persuade.
B. to entertain.
C. to inform.
D. none of the above.

Which evidence from paragraph 7 best supports the author’s perspective that Georgia O’Keeffe was not affected by the opinions of others?

A. “She was a child on the Wisconsin prairie who played with china dolls and painted watercolors with cloudy skies . . .”
B. “She had never seen a picture that interested her, other than a pen-and-ink Maid of Athens in one of her mother’s books . . .”
C. “At Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia she painted lilacs and sneaked time alone to walk out to where she could see the line of the Blue Ridge Mountains . . .”
D. “She had not before heard how the Impressionists did trees and she did not much care.”