"of the time" refers to the attempt of the artists to create an art piece that would reflect the contemproary culture.
Explanation:
Minimalist art forms refer to the use of either single or repeated patterns (mostly geometrical) in the creation of modern art piece.
The use of the term “of the time” refers to the activity of minimalist artist like Donald Judd to make an art of contemporary times. This was done by using the material which was at use contemporarily along with contemproary practises.
Donald Judd used to belong to the industrial or machine culture where most of the things were machine-made and not made by the artist himself rather industrial workers, hence he used bronze in the form of thin machine-made sheets which conformed to the machine culture.
These minimalistic art pieces later influenced the development of modern skyscrapers and many design firms.
Synonyms help us connect unknown words with known words. For example, one may not know the meaning of the word "nefarious" when used in this context: "The offense was more nefarious than previously thought." If we replace "nefarious" with "evil" or "wretched" the meaning is more comprehensible to those who don't know the meaning of "nefarious": The offense was more evil (wretched) than previously thought."
I hope this helps, I used nefarious as a somewhat uncommon term to better illustrate my point, and to explain why we use synonyms to learn new words. Simply put, synonyms bridge us to the unknown using the known as solid ground build from.
The answer to number five is distance