Reading Comprehension Test 79

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows: [/passage-header]  In the mind of the mariner, there is a superstitious horror connected with the name of Pirate; and there are few subjects that interest and excite the curiosity of mankind generally, more than 10513the desperate exploits, foul doings, and diabolical career of these monsters in human form. A piratical crew is generally formed of 41406the desperadoes and runagates of every clime and nation. The pirate, from the perilous nature of his occupation, when not crushing on the ocean, 58038the great highway of nations selects the most lonely isles of the sea for his retreat, or 26085secretes himself near the shores of rivers, bays and lagoons of thickly wooded and uninhabited countries, so that if pursued he can escape to the woods and mountain glens of the interior. The islands of the Indian Ocean, and the east and west coasts of Africa, as well as the West Indies, have been 36478their haunts for centuries, and vessels navigating the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, are often captured by them, the passengers and crew murdered, the money and most valuable part of the cargo plundered, the vessel destroyed, thus obliterating all trace of their unhappy fate, and leaving friends and relatives to mourn their loss from the inclemencies of the elements, when they were butchered in cold blood by their fellow men, who by 56008practically adopting the maxim that "dead men tell no tales," enable themselves to pursue their a diabolical career with impunity...
   But 16958the apprehension and foreboding of the mind, when under the influence of remorse, are powerful, and every man, whether civilized or savage has interwoven in his constitution a moral sense, which secretly condemns him when he has committed an atrocious action, even when he is placed in situations which raise him above the fear of human punishment, for "Conscience, the torturer of the soul, unseen. Does fiercely brandish a sharp scourge within; Severe decrees may keep our tongues in awe, but to our minds what edicts can give law? Even you yourself to your own breast shall tell Your crimes, and your own conscience be your hell."
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[passage-header]Elegy[/passage-header]99738Let them buy your big eyes,
In the secret earth securely,
74509Your thin fingers and your fair,
Soft, indefinite-coloured hair,
All of these in some way, surely,
From the secret earth shall rise;
Not for these I sit and stare;
Broken and bereft completely:
Your young flesh that sat so neatly
On your little bones will sweetly
Blossom in the air.

But your voice ... never the rushing
Of a river underground,
69037Not the 44497rising of the wind
In the trees before the rain,
Not the Woodcock's watery call,
Not the note white-throat utters,
Not the feet of children 26412pushing
90664Yellow leaves along the gutters
In the blue and bitter 57536fall,
38995Shall content my musing mind.
For the beauty of that sound
That in no new way at all
Ever 75043will be heard again

Sweetly through the sappy stalk
Of the vigorous weed
Holding all it held before,
21980Cherished by the faithful sun,
On and on eternally
Shall your altered fluid run,
Bud and bloom and go to seed:
But your singing days are done;
But the music of your talk
Never shall the chemistry
Of the secret earth restore.
All your lovely words are spoken.
Once the ivory box is broken,
Beats the golden bird no more.
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[passage-header]"The City Heiress"[/passage-header]How 11270vain have prov'd the Labours of the Stage,
In striving to reclaim a vitious Age!
97211Poets may write the Mischief to impeach,
You care as little what the Poets teach,
As you regard at Church what Parsons preach.

But where such Follies, and such Vices reign,
29103What honest Pen has Patience to refrain?
At Church, in Pews, ye most 59522devoutly snore;
And here, got dully drunk ye come to roar;
Ye go to Church to glout*, and ogle there,
and come to meet more leud convenient here

With equal Zeal, ye honour either Place,
39563And run so very evenly 84766your Race,
60403Y' improve in Wit just as you do in Grace
92355It must be so, some Daemon** has possest
Our Land and we have never since been blest.
[passage-footer]*to pout or look sullen
**demon
(1682)[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]Disputes in Ancient Greek Philosophy[/passage-header]The philosophy of ancient Greece has had an enormous impact on Western thought for millennia. Ancient Greek philosophers held a great diversity of opinions, founding many schools of thought that have shaped the development of culture in the West and beyond.

[passage-header](This passage is adapted from Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, 2013, Vintage. Demographic inversion is a phenomenon that describes the rearrangement of living patterns throughout a metropolitan area.)[/passage-header]   84546We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs, or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. The 2010 census certainly did not turn up evidence of a middle-class stampede to the nations cities. The news was mixed: Some of the larger cities on the East Coast tended to gain population, albeit in small increments. Those in the Midwest, including Chicago, tended to lose substantial numbers. The cities that showed gains in overall population during the entire decade tended to be in the South and Southwest. But when it comes to measuring demographic inversion, raw census numbers are an ineffective blunt instrument. A closer look at the results shows that the most powerful demographic events of the past decade were the movement of African Americans out of central cities (180,000 of them in Chicago alone) and the settlement of immigrant groups in suburbs, often ones many miles distant from downtown. Central-city areas that gained affluent residents in the first part of the decade maintained that population in the recession years from 2007 to 2009. They also, according to a 2011 study by Brookings, suffered considerably less from increased unemployment than the suburbs did. Not many young professionals moved to new downtown condos in the recession years because few such residences were being built. But there is no reason to believe that the demographic trends prevailing prior to the construction, the bust will not resume once that bust is over. It is important to remember that demographic inversion is not a proxy for population growth; it can occur in cities that are growing, those whose numbers are 42279flat, and even in those undergoing a modest decline in size55758.
   18230America's major cities face enormous fiscal problems, many of them the result of public pension obligations they incurred in the most prosperous years of the past two decades79283. Some, Chicago prominent among them, simply are not producing enough revenue to support the level of public services to which most of the citizens have grown to feel entitled. 61787How the cities are going to solve this problem, I do not know88247. 37289What I do know is that if the fiscal crisis was going to drive affluent professionals out of central cities, it would have done so by now30124. There is no evidence that it has.
   83920The truth is that we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end88980. And we need to adjust our perceptions of cities, suburbs, and urban mobility as a result.
   95791Much of our perspective on the process of metropolitan settlement dates, whether we realize it or not, from a paper written in 1925 by the University of Chicago sociologist Ernest W. Burgess33441. 13243It was Burgess who defined four urban/suburban zones of settlement38894: a central business district; an area of manufacturing just beyond it; then a residential area inhabited by the industrial and immigrant working class; and finally an outer enclave of single-family dwellings.
   Burgess was right about the urban America of 1925; he was right about the urban America of 1974. 64755Virtually every city in the country had a downtown, where the commercial life of the metropolis was 80798conducted; it had a factory district just beyond; it had districts of working-class residences just beyond that, and it had residential suburbs for the wealthy and the upper middle class at the far end of the continuum69291. 28352As a family moved up the economic ladder, it also moved outward from crowded working-class districts to more spacious apartments and, eventually, to a suburban home94921. The suburbs of Burgess's time bore little resemblance to those at the end of the twentieth century, but the theory still essentially worked. People moved ahead in life by moving farther out.
   But in the past decade, in quite a few places, this model has ceased to describe reality. There are still downtown commercial districts, but there are no factory districts lying next to them. There are scarcely any factories at all. These close-in parts of the city, whose few residents Burgess described as dwelling in "submerged regions of poverty, degradation, and disease", are increasingly the preserve of the affluent who work in the commercial core. And just as crucially newcomers to America are not settling on the inside and accumulating the resources to move out; they are living in the suburbs from day one.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]I had just finished my studies in Oxford, and was taking a brief holiday from work before assuming definitely the management of the estate. My father died when I was yet a child: my mother followed him within a year, and I was nearly as much alone in the world as a man might find himself.

The house, as well as the family, was of some antiquity. It contained a fine library, whose growth began before the invention of printing, and had continued to my own time, greatly influenced, of course, by changes of taste and pursuit.

The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an 97290encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater part of the ground floor.

In the evening of a gloomy day of August, I was sitting in my usual place, my back to one of the windows, reading. I cannot tell what made me turn and cast a glance to the farther end of the room, when I saw, or seemed to see, a tall figure reaching up a hand to a bookshelf. 72245The next instant, my vision apparently 99806rectified by the comparative dusk, I saw no one and concluded that my optic nerve had been momentarily affected from within17074.

I resumed my reading, and would doubtless have forgotten the vague, evanescent impression, had it not been that, having occasion a moment after to consult a certain volume, 92443I found but a gap in the row where it ought to have stood, and the same instant remembered that just there I had seen, or fancied I saw, the old man in search of a book93208. I looked all about the spot but in vain. The next morning, however, there it was, just where I had thought to find it! I knew of no one in the house likely to be interested in such a book.

[passage-footer]This passage is adapted from Lilith, a novel by George MacDonald, originally published in 1895.
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The following passage details findings from different eras of renatal screening and the methods and experiments those findings prompted. Screening newborns  for  rare  genetic diseases is a relatively new practice that began approximately forty years ago. Prior to the advent of screening, biomedical researchers and health professionals were preoccupied with the most prominent causes of newborn mortality, such as diarrheal diseases, influenza, and other infectious diseases.  

[passage-header]'You Are Where You Say'[/passage-header]   Research on regional variations in English-language use has not only yielded answers to such [1] life-altering questions as how people in different parts of the United States refer to carbonated beverages ("soda"? "pop"? "coke"?) [2] it also illustrates how technology can change the very nature of research. While traditional, human-intensive data collection [3] has all but disappeared in language studies, the explosion of social media has opened new avenues for investigation.
      (a) Perhaps the epitome of traditional methodology is the Dictionary of American Regional English, colloquially known as DARE. (b) Its fifth and final alphabetical volume---ending with "zydeco"---released in 2012, the dictionary represents decades of arduous work. (c) Over a six-year period from 1965 to 1970, university graduate students conducted interviews in more than a thousand communities across the nation. (d) Their goal was to determine what names people used for such everyday objects and concepts as a submarine sandwich (a "hero" in New York City but a "dagwood" in many parts of Minnesota, Iowa, and Colorado) and a heavy rainstorm (variously a "gully washer," "pour-down," or "stump mover"). (e) The work that dictionary founder Frederic G. Cassidy had expected to be finished by 1976 was not, in fact, completed in his lifetime. (f) The wait did not dampen enthusiasm among [4] scholars. Scholars consider the work a signal achievement in linguistics. [5]
    Not all research into regional English varieties [6] requires such time, effort, and resources, however. Today's researchers have found that the veritable army of trained volunteers traveling the country conducting face-to-face interviews can sometimes be [7] replaced by another army the vast array of individuals volunteering details about their lives---and, inadvertently, their language---through social media. Brice Russ of Ohio State University, for example, has employed software to sort through postings on one social media [8] cite in search of particular words and phrases of interest as well as the location from which users are posting. From these data, he was able, among other things, to confirm regional variations in peoples terms for soft drinks. As the map shows, "soda" is commonly heard in the middle and western portions of the United States; "pop" is frequently used in many southern states; and "coke" is predominant in the northeastern and southwest regions but used elsewhere as well. [9] As interesting as Russ's findings are, though, [10] they're true value lies in their reminder that the Internet is not merely a sophisticated tool for collecting data but is also [11] itself a rich source of data.

The following passage details findings from different eras of renatal screening and the methods and experiments those findings prompted. Screening newborns  for  rare  genetic diseases is a relatively new practice that began approximately forty years ago. Prior to the advent of screening, biomedical researchers and health professionals were preoccupied with the most prominent causes of newborn mortality, such as diarrheal diseases, influenza, and other infectious diseases.  

The following passage details findings from different eras of renatal screening and the methods and experiments those findings prompted. Screening newborns  for  rare  genetic diseases is a relatively new practice that began approximately forty years ago. Prior to the advent of screening, biomedical researchers and health professionals were preoccupied with the most prominent causes of newborn mortality, such as diarrheal diseases, influenza, and other infectious diseases.