Time: 55 minutes (including the reading of the directions). Now set your clock for 55 minutes.
Directions: In this section you will read several passages. Each one is followed by several questions about it. For questions 1-50, you are to choose the one best answer, (A), (B),(C), or (D), to each question. Then, on your answer sheet, find the number of the question and fill in the space that corresponds to the letter of the answer you have chosen.
Answer all questions following a passage on the basis of what is stated or implied in that passage.
Read the following passage:
The railroad was not the first institution to impose regularity on society, or to draw attention to the importance of precise timekeeping. For as long as merchants have set out their wares at daybreak and communal festivities have been celebrated, people have been in rough agreement with their neighbours as to the time of day. The value of this tradition is today more apparent than ever. Were it not for public acceptance of a single yardstick of time, social life would be unbearably chaotic: the massive daily transfers of goods, services, and information would proceed in fits and starts; the very fabric of modern society would begin to unravel.
Example I Sample Answer
What is the main idea of the passage?
The main idea of the passage is that societies need to agree about how time is to be measured in order to function smoothly. Therefore, you should choose (C).
Example II Sample Answer
In line 5, the phrase ‘’this tradition’’ refers to
The phrase ‘’this tradition’’ refers to the preceding clause, ‘’people have been in rough agreement with their neighbours as to the time of day. ‘’Therefore, you should choose (D).
Now begin work on the questions.
A distinctively American architecture began with Frank Lloyd Wright, who had taken to heart(1) the admonition that form should follow function, and who thought of buildings not as separate architectural entities but as parts of an organic whole that included the land, community, and the society. In a very real way the house of colonial New England and some of southern plantations had been functional, but Wright was the first architect to make functionalism the authoritative principle for public as well as for domestic buildings. As early as 1906 he built the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, the first of those churches that di so much to revolutionize ecclesiastical architecture in the United States. Thereafter he turned his genius to such miscellaneous structures as houses, schools, office buildings, and factories, among them the famous Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York, and the Johnson Wax Company building in Racine, Wisconsin.
There are two basic types of glaciers, those that flow outward in all directions with little regard for any underlying terrain and those that are confined by terrain to a particular path.
The first category of glaciers includes those massive(1) blankets that cover whole continents, appropriately called ice sheets. There must be over 50,000 square kilometres of land covered with ice for the glacier to qualify as an ice sheet. When portions of an ice sheet spread out over the ocean, they form ice shelves.
About 20,000 years ago the Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered nearly all the mountains in southern Alaska, western Canada, and the western United States. It was about 3 kilometres deep as its thickest point in northern Alberta. Now there are only two sheets left on Earth, those covering Greenland and Antarctica.
Any domelike body of ice that also flows out in all directions but coverless than 50,000 square kilometres is called an ice cap. Although ice caps are rare(2) nowadays, there are a number in north-eastern Canada, on Baffin island, and on the Queen Elizabeth Islands.
The second category of glaciers includes those of a variety of shapes and sizes generally called mountain or alpine glaciers. Mountain glaciers are typically identified by the landform that controls their flow. One form of mountain glacier that resembles an ice cap in that it(13) flows outward in several directions is called an ice field. The difference between an ice field and ice cap is subtle(14). Essentially, the flow of an ice field is somewhat controlled by surrounding terrain and thus does not have the domelike shape of a cap. There are several ice fields in the Wrangell, St. Elias, and Chugach mountains of Alaska and northern British Columbia.
Less spectacular than large ice fields are the most common types of mountain glaciers: the cirque and valley glaciers. Cirque glaciers are found in depressions in the surface of the land and have a characteristic circular shape. The ice of valley glaciers, bound by terrain, flows down valleys, curves around their corners, and falls over cliffs.
Tools and hand bones excavated from the Swartkrans cave complex in South Africa suggest that a close relative of early humans known as Australopithecus robustus may have made and used primitive tools long before the species became extinct 1 million years ago. It may even have made and used primitive tools long before humanity’s direct ancestor, Homo habilis, or ‘’handy man,’’ began doing so. Homo habilis and its successor, Homo erectus, coexisted with Australopithecus robustus on the plains of South Africa for more than a million years.
The Swartkrans cave in South Africa has been under excavation since the 1940’s. The earliest fossil-containing layers of sedimentary rock in the cave date from about 1.9 million years ago and contain extensive(1) remains of animals, primitive tools, and two or more species of apelike hominids. They key recent discovery involved bones from the hand of Australopithecus robustus, the first time such bones have been found.
The most important feature of the Australopithecus robustus hand was the pollical distal thumb tip, the last bone in the thumb. The bone had an attachment point for a ‘’uniquely human’’ muscle, the flexor pollicis longus , that had previously been found only in more recent ancestors. That muscle gave Australopithecus robustus opposable thumb, a feature that would allow them to grip objects, including tools. The researchers also found primitive bone and stone implements, especially digging tools, in the same layers of sediments.
Australopithecus robustus were more heavily built –more ‘’robust’’ in anthropological terms – than their successors. They had broad faces, heavy jaws, and massive crushing and grinding teeth that were used for eating hard fruits, seeds, and fibrous underground plant parts. They walked upright, which would have allowed them to carry and use tools. More experts had previously believed that Homo habilis were able to supplant(2) Australopithecus robustus because the former’s ability to use tools gave them(3) an innate superiority. The discovery that Australopithecus robustus also used tools means that researchers will have to seek other explanations for their extinction. Perhaps their reliance on(4) naturally occurring plants led to their downfall as the climate became drier and cooler, or perhaps Homo habilis, with their bigger brains, were simply able to make more sophisticated tools.
The first two decades of this century were dominated by the microbe hunters. These hunters had tracked down one after another of the microbes responsible for the most dreaded scourges of many centuries: tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria. But there remained some terrible diseases for which(1) no microbe could be incriminated(2): scurvy, pellagra, rickets, beriberi. Then it was discovered that these diseases were caused by the lack of vitamins, a trace substance in the diet. The diseases could be prevented or cured by consuming foods that contained the vitamins. And so in the decades of the 1920’s and 1930’s, nutrition became a science and the vitamin hunters replaced the microbe hunters.
In the 1940’s and 1950’s, biochemist strived(3) to learn why each of the vitamins was essential for health. They discovered that key enzymes in metabolism depend on one or another of the vitamins as coenzymes to perform the chemistry that provides cells with energy for growth and function. Now, these enzyme hunters occupied center stage.
You are aware that the enzyme hunters have been replaced by a new breed of hunters who are tracking genes – the blueprints for each of the enzymes – and are discovering the defective genes that cause inherited diseases – diabetes, cystic fibrosis. These gene hunters, or genetic engineers, use recombinant DNA technology to identify and clone genes and introduce them(4) into bacterial cells and plants to create factories for the massive production of hormones and vaccines for medicine and for better crops for agriculture. Biotechnology has become a multibillion-dollar industry.
In view of the inexorable progress in science, we can expect that the gene hunters will be replaced in the spotlight. When and by whom? Which kind of hunter will dominate the scene in the last decade of our waning century and in the early decades of the next? I wonder whether the hunters who will occupy the spotlight(5) will be neurobiologists who apply the techniques of the enzymes and gene hunters to the functions of the brain. What to call them? The head hunters. I will return to them later.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States had tremendous natural resources that could be exploited in order to develop heavy industry. Most of the raw materials that are valuable in the manufacture of machinery, transportation facilities, and consumer goods lay ready to be worked into wealth. Iron, coal, and oil – the basic ingredients(1) of industrial growth – were plentiful and needed only the application of technical expertise, organizational skill, and labour.
One crucial development in this movement toward industrialization was the growth of the railroads. The railway network expanded rapidly until the railroad map of the United States looked like a spider’s web(2), with the steel filaments connecting all important sources of raw materials, their places of manufacture, and their centers of distribution. The railroads contributed to the industrial growth not only by connecting these major centers, but also by themselves(3) consuming enormous amounts of fuel, iron, and coal.
Many factors influenced emerging modes of production. For example, machine tools, the tools used to make goods, were steadily improved in the latter part of the nineteenth century – always with an eye to speedier production and lower unit costs. The products of the factories were rapidly absorbed by the growing cities that sheltered the workers and the distributors. The increased urban population was nourished(4) by the increased farm production that, in turn, was made more productive by the use of the new farm machinery. American agricultural production kept up with the urban demand and still had surpluses for sale to the industrial centers of Europe.
The labour that ran(5) the factories and built the railways was recruited in part from American farm areas where people were being displaced by farm machinery, in part from Asia, and in part from Europe. Europe now began to send tides of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe – most of whom were originally poor farmers but who settled in American industrial cities. The money to finance this tremendous expansion of the American economy still came from Europe financiers for the most part, but the Americans were approaching the day when their expansion could be financed in their own ‘’money market.’’