TOEFL EXAM
PRACTICE TEST 2
READING SECTION
PASSAGE 1
DEER POPULATIONS OF THE PUGET SOUND
Two species of deer have been prevalent in the Puget Sound area of Washington
state in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The black-tailed deer, a lowland,
west-side cousin of the mule deer of eastern Washington, is now the most common.
The other species, the Columbian white-tailed deer, in earlier times was common
in the open prairie country; it is now restricted to the low, marshy islands and flood
plains along the lower Columbia River.
Nearly any kind of plant of the forest understory can be part of a deer’s diet. Where
the forest inhibits the growth of grass and other meadow plants, the black-tailed
deer browses on huckleberry, salal, dogwood, and almost any other shrub or herb.
But this is fair-weather feeding. What keeps the black-tailed deer alive in the
harsher seasons of plant decay and dormancy? One compensation for not
hibernating is the built-in urge to migrate. 1 Deer may move from high-elevation
browse areas in summer down to the lowland areas in late fall. 2 Even with snow
on the ground, the high bushy under-story is exposed; also snow and wind bring
down leafy branches of cedar, hemlock, red alder, and other arboreal fodder. 3
The numbers of deer have fluctuated markedly since the entry of Europeans into
Puget Sound country. 4 The early explorers and settlers told of abundant deer in the
early 1800s and yet almost in the same breath bemoaned the lack of this succulent
game animal. Famous explorers of the North American frontier, Lewis and Clark
arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River on November 14, 1805, in nearly starved
circumstances. They had experienced great difficulty finding game west of the
Rockies and not until the second of December did they kill their first elk. To keep 40
people alive that winter, they consumed approximately 150 elk and 20 deer. And
when game moved out of the lowlands in early spring, the expedition decided to
return east rather than face possible starvation. Later on in the early years of the
nineteenth century, when Fort Vancouver became the headquarters for the
Hudson’s Bay Company, deer populations continued to fluctuate. David Douglas,
Scottish botanical explorer of the 1830s, found a disturbing change in the animal
life around the fort during the period between his first visit in 1825 and his final
contact with the fort in 1832. A recent Douglas biographer states: “The deer which
once picturesquely dotted the meadows around the fort were gone [in 1832],
hunted to extermination in order to protect the crops.”
Reduction in numbers of game should have boded ill for their survival in later times.
A worsening of the plight of deer was to be expected as settlers encroached on the
land, logging, burning, and clearing, eventually replacing a wilderness landscape
with roads, cities, towns, and factories. No doubt the numbers of deer declined still
further. Recall the fate of the Columbian white-tailed deer, now in a protected
status. But for the black-tailed deer, human pressure has had just the opposite
effect. Wildlife zoologist Helmut Buechner (1953), in reviewing the nature of biotic
changes in Washington through recorded time, says that “since the early 1940s, the
state has had more deer than at any other time in its history, the winter population
fluctuating around approximately 320,000 deer (mule and black-tailed deer), which
will yield about 65,000 of either sex and any age annually for an indefinite period.”
The causes of this population rebound are consequences of other human actions.
First, the major predators of deer—wolves, cougar, and lynx—have been greatly
reduced in numbers. Second, conservation has been insured by limiting times for
and types of hunting. But the most profound reason for the restoration of high
population numbers has been the fate of the forests. Great tracts of lowland
country deforested by logging, fire, or both have become ideal feeding grounds for
deer. In addition to finding an increase of suitable browse, like huckleberry and vine
maple, Arthur Einarsen, longtime game biologist in the Pacific Northwest, found
quality of browse in the open areas to be substantially more nutritive. The protein
content of shade-grown vegetation, for example, was much lower than that for
plants grown in clearings.
PASSAGE 2
CAVE ART IN EUROPE
The earliest discovered traces of art are beads and carvings, and then paintings,
from sites dating back to the Upper Paleolithic period. We might expect that early
artistic efforts would be crude, but the cave paintings of Spain and southern France
show a marked degree of skill. So do the naturalistic paintings on slabs of stone
excavated in southern Africa. Some of those slabs appear to have been painted as
much as 28,000 years ago, which suggests that painting in Africa is as old as painting
in Europe. But painting may be even older than that. The early Australians may have
painted on the walls of rock shelters and cliff faces at least 30,000 years ago, and
maybe as much as 60,000 years ago.
The researchers Peter Ucko and Andrée Rosenfeld identified three principal
locations of paintings in the caves of western Europe: (1) in obviously inhabited
rock shelters and caves; (2) in galleries immediately off the inhabited areas of caves;
and (3) in the inner reaches of caves, whose difficulty of access has been interpreted
by some as a sign that magical-religious activities were performed there.
The subjects of the paintings are mostly animals. The paintings rest on bare walls,
with no backdrops or environmental trappings. Perhaps, like many contemporary
peoples, Upper Paleolithic men and women believed that the drawing of a human
image could cause death or injury, and if that were indeed their belief, it might
explain why human figures are rarely depicted in cave art. Another explanation for
the focus on animals might be that these people sought to improve their luck at
hunting. 1 This theory is suggested by evidence of chips in the painted figures,
perhaps made by spears thrown at the drawings. 2 But if improving their hunting
luck was the chief motivation for the paintings, it is difficult to explain why only a
few show signs of having been speared. 3 Perhaps the paintings were inspired by
the need to increase the supply of animals. Cave art seems to have reached a peak
toward the end of the Upper Paleolithic period, when the herds of game were
decreasing. 4
The particular symbolic significance of the cave paintings in southwestern France is
more explicitly revealed, perhaps, by the results of a study conducted by
researchers Patricia Rice and Ann Paterson. The data they present suggest that the
animals portrayed in the cave paintings were mostly the ones that the painters
preferred for meat and for materials such as hides. For example, wild cattle
(bovines) and horses are portrayed more often than we would expect by chance,
probably because they were larger and heavier (meatier) than other animals in the
environment. In addition, the paintings mostly portray animals that the painters
may have feared the most because of their size, speed, natural weapons such as
tusks and horns, and the unpredictability of their behavior. That is, mammoths,
bovines, and horses are portrayed more often than deer and reindeer. Thus, the
paintings are consistent with the idea that the art is related to the importance of
hunting in the economy of Upper Paleolithic people. Consistent with this idea,
according to the investigators, is the fact that the art of the cultural period that
followed the Upper Paleolithic also seems to reflect how people got their food. But
in that period, when getting food no longer depended on hunting large game
animals (because they were becoming extinct), the art ceased to focus on portrayals
of animals.
Upper Paleolithic art was not confined to cave paintings. Many shafts of spears and
similar objects were decorated with figures of animals. The anthropologist
Alexander Marshack has an interesting interpretation of some of the engravings
made during the Upper Paleolithic. He believes that as far back as 30,000 B.C.,
hunters may have used a system of notation, engraved on bone and stone, to mark
phases of the Moon. If this is true, it would mean that Upper Paleolithic people
were capable of complex thought and were consciously aware of their
environment. In addition to other artworks, figurines representing the human
female in exaggerated form have also been found at Upper Paleolithic sites. It has
been suggested that these figurines were an ideal type or an expression of a desire
for fertility.
PASSAGE 3
PETROLEUM RESOURCES
Petroleum, consisting of crude oil and natural gas, seems to originate from organic
matter in marine sediment. Microscopic organisms settle to the seafloor and
accumulate in marine mud. The organic matter may partially decompose, using up
the dissolved oxygen in the sediment. As soon as the oxygen is gone, decay stops
and the remaining organic matter is preserved.
Continued sedimentation—the process of deposits’ settling on the sea bottom—
buries the organic matter and subjects it to higher temperatures and pressures,
which convert the organic matter to oil and gas. 1 As muddy sediments are pressed
together, the gas and small droplets of oil may be squeezed out of the mud and may
move into sandy layers nearby. 2 Over long periods of time (millions of years),
accumulations of gas and oil can collect in the sandy layers. 3 Both oil and gas are
less dense than water, so they generally tend to rise upward through water-
saturated rock and sediment. 4
Oil pools are valuable underground accumulations of oil, and oil fields are regions
underlain by one or more oil pools. When an oil pool or field has been discovered,
wells are drilled into the ground. Permanent towers, called derricks, used to be built
to handle the long sections of drilling pipe. Now portable drilling machines are set
up and are then dismantled and removed. When the well reaches a pool, oil usually
rises up the well because of its density difference with water beneath it or because
of the pressure of expanding gas trapped above it. Although this rise of oil is almost
always carefully controlled today, spouts of oil, or gushers, were common in the
past. Gas pressure gradually dies out, and oil is pumped from the well. Water or
steam may be pumped down adjacent wells to help push the oil out. At a refinery,
the crude oil from underground is separated into natural gas, gasoline, kerosene,
and various oils. Petrochemicals such as dyes, fertilizer, and plastic are also
manufactured from the petroleum.
As oil becomes increasingly difficult to find, the search for it is extended into more-
hostile environments. The development of the oil field on the North Slope of Alaska
and the construction of the Alaska pipeline are examples of the great expense and
difficulty involved in new oil discoveries. Offshore drilling platforms extend the
search for oil to the ocean’s continental shelves—those gently sloping submarine
regions at the edges of the continents. More than one-quarter of the world’s oil and
almost one-fifth of the world’s natural gas come from offshore, even though
offshore drilling is six to seven times more expensive than drilling on land. A
significant part of this oil and gas comes from under the North Sea between Great
Britain and Norway.
Of course, there is far more oil underground than can be recovered. It may be in a
pool too small or too far from a potential market to justify the expense of drilling.
Some oil lies under regions where drilling is forbidden, such as national parks or
other public lands. Even given the best extraction techniques, only about 30 to 40
percent of the oil in a given pool can be brought to the surface. The rest is far too
difficult to extract and has to remain underground.
Moreover, getting petroleum out of the ground and from under the sea and to the
consumer can create environmental problems anywhere along the line. Pipelines
carrying oil can be broken by faults or landslides, causing serious oil spills. Spillage
from huge oil-carrying cargo ships, called tankers, involved in collisions or accidental
groundings can create oil slicks at sea. Offshore platforms may also lose oil, creating
oil slicks that drift ashore and foul the beaches, harming the environment.
Sometimes, the ground at an oil field may subside as oil is removed. The Wilmington
field near Long Beach, California, has subsided nine meters in 50 years; protective
barriers have had to be built to prevent seawater from flooding the area. Finally,
the refining and burning of petroleum and its products can cause air pollution.
Advancing technology and strict laws, however, are helping control some of these
adverse environmental effects.
