# Hokusai and the Great Wave: answers and explanations

Testmigo Practice Test 3, Reading Passage 1

Source: Written by Testmigo.

## Answer key

| Q | Answer | Proof |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | woodcarver | At fourteen he became apprentice to a woodcarver |
| 2 | hollow | the mountain sits low in the hollow of the wave |
| 3 | cherry | a carver cut it into blocks of cherry wood |
| 4 | keyblock | a single block called the keyblock |
| 5 | indigo | they mixed Prussian blue with indigo for the bold outlines |
| 6 | FALSE | anyone in Edo, the city now called Tokyo, could buy a copy |
| 7 | NOT GIVEN | He started painting at around the age of six |
| 8 | TRUE | The designs sold so well that ten more were added |
| 9 | FALSE | its blocks were made in the workshop of a master carver hired by the publisher |
| 10 | TRUE | Prussian blue, by contrast, did not fade |
| 11 | FALSE | no records of the numbers printed have survived |
| 12 | NOT GIVEN | The British Museum itself holds three of them |
| 13 | TRUE | agreeing that the waves were like claws that had caught the boat |

## Why these answers are right

**1. woodcarver.** Paragraph B says that at fourteen Hokusai became apprentice to a woodcarver, and only at eighteen joined Shunshō's studio. Before joining matches the earlier date, and trained under paraphrases became apprentice to, so woodcarver is the answer.

**2. hollow.** Paragraph C says that in the Great Wave the mountain sits low in the hollow of the wave, while the foam seems to fall on its peak. Near the bottom of the picture paraphrases sits low, and framed by describes the mountain sitting inside the curve, so the noun before of the wave must be hollow.

**3. cherry.** In the list of specialists in paragraph D, the carver cut the design into blocks of cherry wood. The sentence already contains wood after the gap, so only the single word cherry is needed to name the type of wood.

The why and the trap for questions 4 onwards are free with an account on the [answers page](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/hokusai-and-the-great-wave/answers).

[Practice Hokusai and the Great Wave](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/hokusai-and-the-great-wave)