What is the passage mainly about?

Long, quiet attention creates a knowledge different from study (The final sentences say it directly: he had not studied the painting, yet years of presence gave him a different kind of knowing.)

About how many people did Teodor see stop at the small canvas?

About forty (In nineteen years he had seen perhaps forty people stop. Eleven is the number of paintings and nineteen the number of years.)

The last sentence suggests that Teodor's kind of knowing is

possibly as valuable as expert study, though different in kind (The careful phrase possibly not a smaller one refuses to rank his knowledge below study, while still calling it different.)

In this passage, varnish is

a clear coating on the surface of the painting (It is something on the painting that can crack over time, which points to the protective surface layer.)

Room Nine: Level 3 Reading Comprehension Questions

Room 9 held eleven paintings, and for nineteen years Teodor stood among them. Visitors moved through in about four minutes. They photographed the large battle scene by the door, glanced at the portraits, and left.

Teodor watched the small canvas in the corner: a kitchen table, a bowl, a window with weak northern light. Nobody stopped for it. In nineteen years he had seen perhaps forty people stop, and he remembered most of them.

He could not have said what the painting meant. He knew instead where the varnish had cracked, how the bowl went cold and silver in February, how the same brown warmed in July when the room's own light changed. He had not studied it. He had simply been present while it was there, which is a different kind of knowing, and possibly not a smaller one.

Comprehension questions