Reading- Test 5(Toefl)

In the years following 1820, after several decades of relative stability, the economy entered a Line period of sustained and extremely rapid growth that continued to the end of the [r]

Passage 1

Born in 1830 in rural Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson spent her entire life in the household of her parents Between 1858 and 1862, it was later discovered, she wrote like a person possessed, often producing a poem a day It was also during this period that her life was transformed into the myth of Amherst Withdrawing more and more, keeping

to her room, sometimes even refusing to see visitors who called, she began to dress only

in white-a habit that added to her reputation as an eccentric

In their determinatin to read Dickinson's life in terms of a traditional romantic plot, biographers have missed the unique pattern of her life-her struggle to create a female life not yet imagined by the culture in which she lived Dickinson was not the innocent, lovelorn, and emotionally fragile girl sentimentalized by the Dickinson myth and

popularized by William Luce's 1976 play, The Belle of Amherst Her decision to shut the door on Amherst society in the 1850's transformed her house into a kind of magical realm

in which she was free to engage her poetic genius Her seclusion was not the result of a failed love affair, but rather a part of a more general pattern of renunciation through which she, in her quest for self-sovereignty, carried on an argument with the Puritan fathers, attacking with wit and irony their cheerless Calvinist doctrine, their stern

patriarchal God, and their rigid notions of "true womanhood."

1 What is the author's main purpose in the passage?

(A) To interpret Emily Dickinson's eccentric behavior

(B) To promote the popular myth of Emily Dickinson

(C) To discuss Emily Dickinson's failed love affair

(D) To describe the religious climate in Emily Dickinson's time

2 According to the passage, the period from 1858 to 1862 was for Emily Dickinson a period of great

(A) Refusing to eat

(B) Wearing only white

(C) Avoiding visitors

(D) Staying in her room

4 According to the passage, biographers of Emily Dickinson have traditionally

(A) criticized most of her poems

(B) ignored her innocence and emotional fragility

(C) seen her life in romantic terms

(D) blamed her parents for restricting her activities

5 Why does the author mention William Luce's play The Belle of Amherst?

(A) To give an example of the sentimentalized Emily Dickinson myth

(B) To show how popular Emily Dickinson's poems have become

(C) To show that Emily Dickinson was also an actress

(D) To illustrate the theatrical quality of Emily Dickinson's poems

6 The author implies that many people attribute Emily Dickinson's seclusion to

(A) physical illness

(B) a failed love affair

(C) religious fervor

(D) her dislike of people

7 The author suggests all of the following as reasons for Emily Dickinson's unusual behavior EXCEPT the

(A) struggle to create a new female identity

(B) desire to develop her genius undisturbed

(C) search for her own independence

(D) attempt to draw attention to her poetry

8 It can be inferred from the passage that Emily Dickinson lived in a society that was characterized by

(A) strong Puritan beliefs

(B) equality of men and women

(C) the encouragement of nonconformity

(D) the appreciation of poetic creativity

Passage 2:

One of the most popular literary figures in American literature is a woman who spent almost half of her long life in China, a country on a continent thousands of miles from the Unite States In her lifetime she earned this country's most highly acclaimed literary award: the Pulitzer Prize, and also the most prestigious form of literary recognition in the world, the Nobel Prize for Literature Pearl S Buck was almost a household word

throughout much of her lifetime because of her prolific literary output, which consisted of some eighty-five published works, including several dozen novels, six collections of short stories, fourteen books for children, and more than a dozen works of nonfiction When she was eighty years old, some twenty-five volumes were awaiting publication Many of those books were set in China, the land in which she spent so much of her life Her books and her life served as a bridge between the cultures of the East and the West

As the product of those two cultures she became as the described herself, "mentally bifocal." Her unique background made her into an unusually interesting and versatile human being As we examine the life of Pearl Buck, we cannot help but be aware that we are in fact meeting three separate people: a wife and mother, an internationally famous writer and a humanitarian and philanthropist One cannot really get to know Pearl Buck without learning about each of the three Though honored in her lifetime with the

William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in addition to the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes Pearl Buck as a total human being, not only a famous author, is a captivating subject of study

1 What is the author's main purpose in the passage?

(A) To offer a criticism of the works of Pearl Buck

(B) To illustrate Pearl Buck's views on Chinese literature

(C) To indicate the background and diverse interests of Pearl Buck

(D) To discuss Pearl Buck's influence on the cultures of the East and theWest

2 According to the passage, Pearl Buck is known as a writer of all of the following EXCEPT

(A) The Nobel Prize

(B) The Newberry Medal

(C) The William Dean Howell medal

(D) The Pulitzer prize

4 According to the passage, Pearl Buck was an unusual figure in American literature in that she

(A) wrote extensively about a very different culture

(B) published half of her books abroad

(C) won more awards than any other woman of her time

(D) achieved her first success very late in life

5 According to the passage, Pearl Buck described herself as "mentally bifocal" to

suggest that she was

(A) capable of resolving the differences between two distinct linguistic systems

(B) keenly aware of how the past could influence the future

(C) capable of producing literary works of interest to both adults and children

(D) equally familiar with two different cultural environments

6 The author's attitude toward Peart Buck could best be described as

Joyce Carol Oates published her first collection of short stories, By The North Gate,

in 1963, two years after she had received her master's degree from the University of Wisconsin and become an instructor of English at the University of Detroit Her

Line productivity since then has been prodigious, accumulating in less than two decades

to

(5) nearly thirty titles, including novels, collections of short stories and verse, plays, and literary criticism In the meantime, she has continued to teach, moving in 1967 from

the University of Detroit to the University of Windsor, in Ontario, and, in 1978, to

Princeton University Reviewers have admired her enormous energy, but find a

productivity of such magnitude difficult to assess

(10) In a period characterized by the abandonment of so much of the realistic tradition by authors such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol

Oates has seemed at times determinedly old-fashioned in her insistence on the

essentially mimetic quality of her fiction Hers is a world of violence, insanity,

fractured love, and hopeless loneliness Although some of it appears to come from her (15) own direct observations, her dreams, and her fears, much more is clearly from the experiences of others Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), dealt with stock car racing, though she had never seen a race In Them (1969) she focused on Detroit from the Depression through the riots of 1967, drawing much of her material from the deep impression made on her by the problems of one of her students Whatever the

(20) source and however shocking the events or the motivations, however, her fictive world

remains strikingly akin to that real one reflected in the daily newspapers, the television news and talk shows, and the popular magazines of our day

1 What is the main purpose of the passage?

(A) To review Oates' By the North Gate

(B) To compare some modern writers

(C) To describe Oates' childhood

(D) To outline Oates' career

2 Which of the following does the passage indicate

about Joyce Carol Qates' first publication?

(A) It was part of her master's thesis

(B) It was a volume of short fiction

(C) It was not successful

(D) It was about an English instructor in Detroit

3 Which of the following does the passage suggest

about Joyce Carol Oates in terms of her writing

career?

(A) She has experienced long nonproductive

periods in her writing

(B) Her style is imitative of other contemporary

authors

(C) She has produced a surprising amount of

fictions in a relative short time

(D) Most of her work is based on personal

experience

4 The word "characterized" in line 10 can best

replaced by which of the following?

(A) It is a typical novel of the 1960's

(B) It is her best piece of nonfiction

(C) It is a fictional work based on the experiences

of another person

(D) It is an autobiography

7 Which of the following would Joyce Carol Oates

be most likely to write?

(A) A story with an unhappy ending

(B) A romance novel set in the nineteenth century

(C) A science fiction novel

(D) A dialogue for a talk show

Passage 4

What makes it rain? Rain falls from clouds for the same reason anything falls to Earth The Earth's gravity pulls it But every cloud is made of water droplets or ice crystals Why

doesn't rain or snow fall constantly from all clouds? The droplets or ice crystals in clouds are

exceedingly small The effect of gravity on them is minute Air currents move and lift droplets

(5) so that the net downward displacement is zero, even though the droplets are in

constant motion

Droplets and ice crystals behave somewhat like dust in the air made visible in a shaft of sunlight To the casual observer, dust seems to act in a totally random fashion, moving about

chaotically without fixed direction But in fact dust particles are much larger than water droplets

and they finally fall The average size of a cloud droplet is only 0.0004 inch in diameter,

It is so

(10) small that it would take sixteen hours to fall half a mile in perfectly still air, and it does not fall out of moving air at all Only when the droplet grows to a diameter of 0.008 inch or larger can it fall from the cloud The average raindrop contains a million times as much water as a tiny

cloud droplet The growth of a cloud droplet to a size large enough to fall out is the cause

of

rain and other forms of precipitation This important growth process is called

"coalescence."

23 What is the main topic of the passage?

(A) The mechanics of rain

(B) The weather patterns of North America

(C) How Earth's gravity affects agriculture

(D) Types of clouds

24 The word "minute" in line 4 is closest in meaning

to which of the following?

(A) they are kept aloft by air currents

(B) they combine with other chemicals in the

atmosphere

(C) most of them evaporate

(D) their electrical charges draw them away from

the earth

27 The word "random" in line 7 is closest in

28 What can be inferred about drops of water

larger than 0.008 inch in diameter?

(A) They never occur

(B) They are not affected by the force of gravity

(C) In still air they would fall to earth

(D) In moving air they fall at a speed of thirty-two

miles per hour

29 How much bigger is a rain drop than a cloud

(B) The growth of droplets

(C) The effect of gravity on precipitation

(D) The movement of dust particles in the sunlight

Passage 5

Many of the most damaging and life-threatening types of weather-torrential rains,

severe thunderstorms, and tornadoes begin quickly, strike suddenly, and dissipate

rapidly, devastating small regions while leaving neighboring areas untouched One

Line such event, a tornado, struck the northeastern section of Edmonton, Alberta, in July

models do a much better job predicting general weather conditions over large regions than they do forecasting specific local events

Until recently, the observation-intensive approach needed for accurate, very short-range (15) forecasts, or "Nowcasts," was not feasible The cost of equipping and operating many thousands of conventional weather stations was prohibitively high, and the

difficulties involved in rapidly collecting and processing the raw weather data from such a network were insurmountable Fortunately, scientific and technological

advances have overcome most of these problems Radar systems, automated weather (20) instruments, and satellites are all capable of making detailed, nearly continuous observation over large regions at a relatively low cost Communications satellites can transmit data around the world cheaply and instantaneously, and modern computers can quickly compile and analyzing this large volume of weather information Meteorologists and computer scientists now work together to design computer programs and video (25) equipment capable of transforming raw weather data into words, symbols, and vivid graphic displays that forecasters can interpret easily and quickly As meteorologists have begun using these new technologies in weather forecasting offices, Nowcasting is becoming a reality

Which of the following would best illustrate Nowcasting?

(A) A five-day forecast

(B) A warning about a severe thunderstorm on the radio

(C) The average rainfall for each month

(D) A list of temperatures in major cities

Passage 6

Are organically growth foods the best food choices? The advantages claimed for

such foods over conventionally growth and marketed food products are now being

debated Advocates of organic foods a term whose meaning varies greatly

frequently proclaim that such products are safer and more nutritious than others

(5) The growing interest of consumers in the safety and nutritional quality of the

typical North American diet is a welcome development However, much of this

interest has been sparked by sweeping claims that the food supply is unsafe or

inadequate in meeting nutritional needs Although most of these claims are not

supported by scientific evidence, the preponderance of written material advancing

(10) such claims makes it difficult for the general public to separate fact from fiction

As a result, claims that eating a diet consisting entirely of organically grown foods

prevents or cures disease or provides other benefits to health have become widely

publicized and form the basis for folklore

Almost daily the public is besieged by claims for "no-aging" diets, new vitamins,

(15) and other wonder foods There are numerous unsubstantiated reports that natural vitamins are superior to synthetic ones, that fertilized eggs are nutritionally superior

to unfertilized eggs, that untreated grains are better than fumigated grains, and the like One thing that most organically grown food products seem to have in common is

that they cost more than conventionally grown foods But in many cases consumers are (20) misled if they believe organic foods can maintain health and provide better

nutritional

quality than conventionally grown foods So there is real cause for concern if consumers, particularly those with limited incomes, distrust the regular food supply and buy only expensive organic foods instead

According to the first paragraph which of the following is true about the term "organic foods"?

(A) It is accepted by most nutritionists

(B) It has been used only in recent years

(C) It has no fixed meaning

(D) It is seldom used by consumers

Passage 7

Ancient people made clay pottery because they needed it for their survival They

used the pots they made for cooking, storing food, and carrying things from places to place Pottery was so important to early cultures that scientists now study it to learn more about ancient civilizations The more advanced the pottery in terms of decoration (5) materials, glazes, and manufacture, the more advanced the culture itself

The artisan who makes pottery in North America today utilizes his or her skill and

imagination to create items that are beautiful as well as functional, transforming

something ordinary into something special and unique

The potter uses one of the Earth's most basic materials: clay Clay can be found

(10) almost anywhere Good pottery clay must be free from all small stones and other hard

materials that would make the potting process difficult Most North American artisan- potters now purchase commercially processed clay, but some find the clay they need right in the earth, close to where they work

The most important tools potters use are their own hands; however, they also use

(15) wire loop tools, wooden modeling tools, plain wire, and sponges Plain wire is used

to

cut away the finished pot from its base on the potter's wheel

After a finished pot is dried of all its moisture in the open air, it is placed in a kiln

and fired The first firing hardens the pottery, and it is then ready to be glazed and

fired again

(20) For areas where they do not want any glaze, such as the bottom of the pot, artisans paint on melted wax that will later burn off in the kiln They then pour on the liquid glaze and let it run over the clay surface, making any kind of decorative pattern that they want

Which of the following is NOT mentioned in the passage as a way that ancient people used pottery?

(A) To hold food

that matter can exist only as a gas, except at the core In the core of the Sun the pressures are

so great against the gases that, despite the high temperature, there may be a small solid core

(5) However, no one really knows, since the center of the Sun can never be directly observed

Solar astronomers do know that the Sun is divided into five layers or zones Starting at the outside and going down into the Sun, the zones are the corona, chromosphere, photo- sphere, convection zone, and finally the core The first three zones are regarded as the Sun's

atmosphere But since the Sun has no solid surface, it is hard to tell where the atmosphere (10) ends and the main body of the Sun begins

The Sun's outermost layer begins about 10,000 miles above the visible surface and goes outward for millions of miles This is the only part of the Sun that can be seen during an eclipse such as the one in February 1979 At any other time, the corona can be seen only when special instruments are used on cameras and telescopes to shut out the glare of the (15) Sun's rays

The corona is a brilliant, pearly white, filmy light, about as bright as the full Moon Its beautiful rays are a sensational sight during an eclipse The corona's rays flash out in a brilliant fan that has wispy spikelike rays near the Sun's north and south poles The

corona

is thickest at the Sun's equator

(20) The corona rays are made up of gases streaming outward at tremendous speeds and reaching a temperature of more than 2 million degrees Fahrenheit The rays of gas thin out

as they reach the space around the planets By the time the Sun's corona rays reach the Earth, they are weak and invisible

Where in the passage does the author compare the light of the Sun's outermost layer to that of another astronomical body?

(A) Lines 2-3

(B) Lines 9-10

(C) Lines 16

(D) Lines 22-23

All of the following are parts of the Sun's atmosphere EXCEPT the

1945 The baby boom continued through the decade of the 1950's, producing a

population increase of nearly fifteen percent in the five years from 1951 to 1956 This rate of increase had been exceeded only once before in Canada's history, in the decade before 1911 when the prairies were being settled Undoubtedly, the good economic (10) conditions of the 1950's supported a growth in the population, but the expansion also derived from a trend toward earlier marriages and an increase in the average size of families In 1957 the Canadian birth rate stood at 28 per thousand, one of the highest in the world

After the peak year of 1957, the birth rate in Canada began to decline It continued

(15) falling until in 1966 it stood at the lowest level in 25 years Partly this decline

reflected

the low level of births during the depression and the war, but it was also caused by

changes in Canadian society Young people were staying at school longer, more

women were working; young married couples were buying automobiles or houses

before starting families; rising living standards were cutting down the size of families (20) It appeared that Canada was once more falling in step with the trend toward smaller families that had occurred all through the Western world since the time of the Industrial Revolution

Although the growth in Canada's population had slowed down by 1966 (the

increase the first half of the 1960's was only nine percent), another large population (25) wave was coming over the horizon It would be composed of the children of the children who were born during the period of the high birth rate prior to 1957

The author mentions all of the following as causes of declines in population growth after

1957 EXCEPT

(A) people being better educated

(B) people getting married earlier

(C) better standards of living

(D) couples buying houses

Passage 10

The physical difficulties encountered, how-ever, were quite real Without a plentiful and convenient supply of some suitable writing medium, any very extended development of the arithmetic process was bound to be hampered It must be remembered that our

common machine-made pulp paper is little more than a hundred years old The older rag paper was made by hand and so consequently expensive and scarce

The author describes old rag paper as all of the following EXCEPT

eviscerate and regenerate itself if it is attacked or even touched; it will do the same if the surrounding water temperature is too high or if the water becomes too polluted

Of all the characteristics of the sea cucumber, which of the following seems to fascinate the author most?

(A) What it does when threatened

(B) Where it lives

(C) How it hides from predators

(D) What it eats

Passage 12

Certainly no creature in the sea is odder than the common sea cucumber All living

creature, especially human beings, have their peculiarities, but everything about the little sea cucumber seems unusual What else can be said about a bizarre animal that, Line among other eccentricities, eats mud, feeds almost continuously day and night but can

(5) live without eating for long periods, and can be poisonous but is considered

supremely

edible by gourmets?

For some fifty million years, despite all its eccentricities, the sea cucumber has

subsisted on its diet of mud It is adaptable enough to live attached to rocks by its tube feet, under rocks in shallow water, or on the surface of mud flats Common in cool

(10) water on both Atlantic and Pacific shores, it has the ability to suck up mud or sand and

digest whatever nutrients are present

Sea cucumbers come in a variety of colors, ranging from black to reddish-brown to