TOEFL Reading Comprehension

PRACTICE TEST 05
Passage 1
In 1903 the members of the governing board of the University of Washington. in
Seattle. engaged a firm of landscape architects, specialists in the design of outdoor
environments--OImsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts-to advise them on an
Line appropriate layout for the university grounds. The plan impressed the university officials,
(5) and in time many of its recommendations were implemented. City officials in Seattle, the
largest city in the northwestern United States, were also impressed, for they employed the
same organization to study Seattle's public park needs. John Olmsted did the investigation
and subsequent report on Seattle's parks. He and his brothers believed that parks should
be adapted to the local topography, utilize the area's trees and shrubs, and be available to
(10) the entire community. They especially emphasized the need for natural, serene settings
where hurried urban dwellers could periodically escape from the city. The essence of the
Olmsted park plan was to develop a continuous driveway, twenty miles long, that would
tie together a whole series of parks, playgrounds, and parkways. There would be local
parks and squares, too, but all of this was meant to supplement the major driveway,
(15) which was to remain the unifying factor for the entire system.

In November of 1903 the city council of Seattle adopted the Olmsted Report, and
it automatically became the master plan for the city's park system. Prior to this report,
Seattle's park development was very limited and funding meager. All this changed
after the report. Between 1907 and 1913, city voters approved special funding measures
(20) amounting to $4,000,000. With such unparalleled sums at their disposal, with the Olmsted
guidelines to follow, and with the added incentive of wanting to have the city at its best
for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, the Parks Board bought aggressively.
By 1913 Seattle had 25 parks amounting to 1,400 acres, as well as 400 acres in
playgrounds, pathways, boulevards, and triangles. More lands would be added in the
(25) future, but for all practical purposes it was the great land surge of 1907-1913 that
established Seattle's park system.

Passage 2
No two comets ever look identical, but they have basic features in common, one of the
most obvious of which is a coma. A coma looks like a misty, patch of light with one or more
tails often streaming from it in the direction away from the Sun.

Line At the heart of a comet's coma lies a nucleus of solid material, typically no more than
(5) 10 kilometers across. The visible coma is a huge cloud of gas and dust that has escaped
from the nucleus, which it then surrounds like an extended atmosphere. The coma can extend
as far as a million kilometers outward from the nucleus. Around the coma there is often an
even larger invisible envelope of hydrogen gas.

The most graphic proof that the grand spectacle of a comet develops from a relatively
(10) small and inconspicuous chunk of ice and dust was the close-up image obtained in 1986 by
the European Giotto probe of the nucleus of Halley's Comet. It turned out to be a bit like a
very dark asteroid, measuring 16 by 8 kilometers. Ices have evaporated from its outer layers
to leave a crust of nearly black dust all over the surface. Bright jets of gas from evaporating
ice burst out on the side facing the Sun, where the surface gets heated up, carrying dust
(15) with them. This is how the coma and the tails are created.

Comets grow tails only when they get warm enough for ice and dust to boil off. As a

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PRACTICE TEST 05

comet's orbit brings it closer to the Sun, first the coma grows, then two distinct tails usually
form. One, the less common kind, contains electrically charged (i.e., ionized) atoms of gas,
which are blown off directly in the direction away from the Sun by the magnetic field of
(20) the solar wind. The other tail is made of neutral dust particles, which get gently pushed back
by the pressure of the sunlight itself. Unlike the ion tail, which is straight, the dust tail
becomes curved as the particles follow their own orbits around the Sun.

Passage 3
Many prehistoric people subsisted as hunters and gatherers. Undoubtedly, game
animals, including some very large species, provided major components of human diets.
An important controversy centering on the question of human effects on prehistoric wildlife
Line concerns the sudden disappearance of so many species of large animals at or near the end
(5) of the Pleistocene epoch. Most paleontologists suspect that abrupt changes in climate led
to the mass extinctions. Others, however, have concluded that prehistoric people drove
many of those species to extinction through overhunting. In their "Pleistocene overkill
hypothesis," they cite what seems to be a remarkable coincidence between the arrival of
prehistoric peoples in North and South America and the time during which mammoths,
(10) giant ground sloths, the giant bison, and numerous other large mammals became extinct.
Perhaps the human species was driving others to extinction long before the dawn of history.
Hunter-gatherers may have contributed to Pleistocene extinctions in more indirect
ways. Besides overhunting, at least three other kinds of effects have been suggested:
direct competition, imbalances between competing species of game animals, and early
(15) agricultural practices. Direct competition may have brought about the demise of large
carnivores such as the saber-toothed cats. These animals simply may have been unable
to compete with the increasingly sophisticated hunting skills of Pleistocene people.
Human hunters could have caused imbalances among game animals, leading to the
extinctions of species less able to compete. When other predators such as the gray wolf
(20) prey upon large mammals, they generally take high proportions of each year s crop of
young. Some human hunters, in contrast, tend to take the various age-groups of large animals
in proportion to their actual occurrence. If such hunters first competed with the larger
predators and then replaced them. they may have allowed more young to survive each year,
gradually increasing the populations of favored species As these populations expanded,
(25) they in turn may have competed with other game species for the same environmental niche,
forcing the less hunted species into extinction. This theory, suggests that human hunters
played an indirect role in Pleistocene extinctions by hunting one species more than another.

Passage 4
Tulips are Old World, rather than New World, plants, with the origins of the species
lying in Central Asia. They became an integral part of the gardens of the Ottoman Empire
from the sixteenth century onward, and, soon after, part of European life as well. Holland,
Line in particular, became famous for its cultivation of the flower.

(5) A tenuous line marked the advance of the tulip to the New World, where it was
unknown in the wild. The first Dutch colonies in North America had been established
in New Netherlands by the Dutch West India Company in 1624, and one individual who
settled in New Amsterdam (today's Manhattan section of New York City) in 1642
described the flowers that bravely colonized the settlers' gardens. They were the same
(10) flowers seen in Dutch still-life paintings of the time: crown imperials, roses, carnations,
and of course tulips. They flourished in Pennsylvania too, where in 1698 William Penn

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 TOEFL Reading Comprehension

received a report of John Tateham's "Great and Stately Palace," its garden full of tulips.
By 1760, Boston newspapers were advertising 50 different kinds of mixed tulip "roots."
But the length of the journey between Europe and North America created many
(15) difficulties. Thomas Hancock, an English settler, wrote thanking his plant supplier for
a gift of some tulip bulbs from England, but his letter the following year grumbled that
they were all dead.

Tulips arrived in Holland, Michigan, with a later wave of early nineteenth-century

Dutch immigrants who quickly colonized the plains of Michigan. Together with many
(20) other Dutch settlements, such as the one at Pella. Iowa, they established a regular demand
for European plants. The demand was bravely met by a new kind of tulip entrepreneur, the
traveling salesperson. One Dutchman, Hendrick van de Schoot, spent six months in 1849
traveling through the United States taking orders for tulip bulbs. While tulip bulbs were
traveling from Europe to the United States to satisfy the nostalgic longings of homesick
(25) English and Dutch settlers, North American plants were traveling in the opposite
direction. In England, the enthusiasm for American plants was one reason why tulips
dropped out of fashion in the gardens of the rich and famous.

Passage 5
Pheromones are substances that serve as chemical signals between members of the
same species. They are secreted to the outside of the body and cause other individuals
of the species to have specific reactions. Pheromones, which are sometimes called
Line "social hormones," affect a group of individuals somewhat like hormones do an individual
(5) animal. Pheromones are the predominant medium of communication among insects
(but rarely the sole method). Some species have simple pheromone systems and produce
only a few pheromones, but others produce many with various functions. Pheromone
systems are the most complex in some of the so-called social insects, insects that live
in organized groups.

(10) Chemical communication differs from that by sight or sound in several ways.
Transmission is relatively slow (the chemical signals are usually airborne), but the
signal can be persistent, depending upon the volatility of the chemical, and is sometimes
effective over a very long range. Localization of the signal is generally poorer than
localization of a sound or visual stimulus and is usually effected by the animal's moving
(15) upwind in response to the stimulus. The ability to modulate a chemical signal is limited,
compared with communication by visual or acoustic means, but some pheromones may
convey different meanings and consequently result in different behavioral or physiological
responses, depending on their concentration or when presented in combination. The
modulation of chemical signals occurs via the elaboration of the number of exocrine
(20) glands that produce pheromones. Some species, such as ants, seem to be very articulate
creatures, but their medium of communication is difficult for humans to study and
appreciate because of our own olfactory, insensitivity and the technological difficulties
in detecting and analyzing these pheromones.

Pheromones play numerous roles in the activities of insects. They may act as alarm
(25) substances, play a role in individual and group recognition, serve as attractants between
sexes, mediate the formation of aggregations, identify foraging trails, and be involved in
caste determination. For example, pheromones involved in caste determination include
the "queen substance" produced by queen honey bees. Aphids, which are particularly
vulnerable to predators because of their gregarious habits and sedentary nature, secrete
an alarm pheromone when attacked that causes nearby aphids to respond by moving away.

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