Unit 1 - Reading Extension

Reading Comprehension Review

DIRECTIONS: Read the passage and answer the questions.

The Urge to Explore

THE AGE OF EXPLORATION
1 In the winter of 1769, the British explorer Captain James Cook received an astonishing gift from a
Polynesian priest named Tupaia. It was a map, the first that any European had ever encountered that showed
all the major islands of the South Pacific. Some accounts say Tupaia sketched the map on paper; others that
he described it in words. What’s certain is that this map instantly gave Cook a far more complete picture of
the South Pacific than any other European possessed. It showed every major island group in an area some
3,000 miles across, from the Marquesas west to Fiji.

2 Cook had granted Tupaia a place on his ship, Endeavour, in Tahiti. Soon after that, the Polynesian
impressed the crew by navigating to an island unknown to Cook. It was 300 miles south, but Tupaia never
consulted a compass, chart, clock, or sextant. In the weeks that followed, as he helped guide the Endeavour
from one archipelago1 to another, Tupaia amazed the sailors again and again. On request, at any time—day or
night, cloudy or clear—he could point precisely toward Tahiti.

3 Cook, uniquely among European explorers, understood what Tupaia’s feats2 meant. The islanders
scattered across the south were one people long ago who had explored, settled, and mapped this vast ocean
without any of the navigational tools (except for boats) that Cook found essential—and they had carried the
map solely in their heads ever since.

RESTLESS GENES
4 “No other mammal moves around like we do,” says Svante Pääbo, a director of the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He uses genetics to study human origins.
“There’s a kind of madness to it. Sailing out into the ocean, you have no idea what’s on the other side. And
now we go to Mars. We never stop. Why?”

5 If an urge to explore rises in us innately, perhaps its foundation lies within our genome 3. In fact, there
is a mutation4 that pops up frequently in such discussions: a variant of a gene called DRD4. DRD4 helps
control dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain that plays a major role in reward-motivated behavior.
Researchers have repeatedly tied the variant DRD4-7R—carried by roughly 20 percent of all humans—to
increased curiosity and restlessness. Dozens of human studies have found that 7R makes people more likely
to take risks; explore new places, ideas, foods, or relationships; and generally embrace movement, change,
and adventure.
 6 So is 7R the explorer’s gene or adventure gene, as some call it? Yale University evolutionary and
population geneticist Kenneth Kidd thinks that this overstates its role. Kidd speaks with special authority
here, as he was part of the team that discovered the 7R variant 20 years ago. “You just can’t reduce something
as complex as exploration to a single gene.” It would be better, Kidd suggests, to consider how groups of
genes might lay a foundation for such behavior. It is likely that different groups of genes contribute to
multiple traits that enable us to explore. There may be other genes—7R quite possibly among them—which
go even further: They push us to explore. It helps, in short, to think not just of the urge to explore but of the
ability—not just the motivation but the means. Before you can act on the urge, you need the tools or traits that
make exploration possible.

EXPLORING BEYOND
7 Following the call of our restless genes has not ended well for all explorers. Captain Cook died in a
fight with Hawaiians ten years after he received the precious map from Tupaia. His death, some say, brought
to a close what Western historians call the Age of Exploration. Yet it hardly ended our exploring. We have
remained obsessed with filling in the Earth’s maps; reaching its farthest poles, highest peaks, and deepest
trenches; sailing to its every corner and then flying off the planet entirely. With the NASA rover Curiosity
now stirring us all as it explores Mars, some countries and private companies are preparing to send humans to
the red planet as well. Some visionaries even talk of sending a spacecraft to the nearest star.

8 NASA’s Michael Barratt—a doctor, diver, and jet pilot; a sailor for 40 years; an astronaut for 12—is
among those aching to go to Mars. Barratt consciously sees himself as an explorer like Cook and Tupaia.
“We’re doing what they did,” he says. “It works this way at every point in human history. A society develops
an enabling technology, whether it’s the ability to preserve and carry food or build a ship or launch a rocket.”

9 Not all of us ache to ride a rocket or sail the infinite sea. Yet, as a species, we’re curious enough and
intrigued enough by the prospect to help pay for the trip and cheer at the voyagers’ return. Yes, we explore to
find a better place to live or acquire a larger territory or make a fortune. But we also explore simply to
discover what’s there.
1
archipelago: n. a group of islands
2
feat: n. an act of skill, strength, or bravery
3
genome: n. all of the genes in an organism
4
mutation: n. a change in the genetic structure of an organism that makes it different

____ 1. What is the passage mainly about?

a. Space exploration
b. South Pacific exploration
c. Biological causes of exploration
____ 2. Which event occurred first?
a. Polynesian islanders explored and settled the South Pacific.
b. Captain James Cook was given a map of the South Pacific.
c. The Age of Exploration was ended.
____ 3. According to paragraph 2, why were the sailors “impressed” and “amazed”?
a. Tupaia always guessed the location of islands correctly.
b. Tupaia taught the sailors how to find the islands without instruments.
c. Tupaia knew exactly where islands were, without the help of any instruments.
____ 4. In paragraph 4, what is Svante Pääbo trying to express using the word madness?
a. anger
b. craziness
c. illness
____ 5. What can we determine from the following sentence in paragraph 5?
“Researchers have repeatedly tied the variant DRD4-7R—carried by roughly 20 percent of all humans—to
increased curiosity and restlessness.”
a. People who carry DRD4-7R tend to be more curious and restless than others.
b. People without DRD4-7R lack curiosity and refuse to explore new places.
c. Scientists use DRD4-7R to increase people’s willingness to take risks.
____ 6. What is Kenneth Kidd’s opinion of the explorer gene?
a. The DRD4-7R gene determines who becomes an explorer.
b. The DRD4-7R gene provides people with the tools and traits to explore.
c. The DRD4-7R gene may be one of several genes that lead to being an explorer.
____ 7. Which sentence below best summarizes the main idea of paragraph 7?
a. Although some historians say the Age of Exploration ended when Captain Cook died,
humans have continued to explore ever since.
b. The Age of Exploration ended following Captain Cook’s death, but new technology is
helping humans begin to explore again.
c. Exploration can be dangerous, so using robots like the Curiosity Rover is the best way to
explore new places.
____ 8. In paragraph 8, how does Michael Barratt compare himself to Captain James Cook and Tupaia?
a. They used the same kinds of technology.
b. They had the same desire to explore.
c. They explored the same places.
____ 9. In paragraphs 8 and 9, what does to ache mean in aching to go and ache to ride?
a. to feel so strongly about something that it makes you sick
b. to really want to do something
c. to worry about something
____ 10. Which is NOT listed in the passage as a reason for exploration?
a. to discover what’s out there
b. to make money
c. to understand life on Earth better
Unit 1 - Reading Extension
Answer Section
1. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Review
2. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Review
3. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Review
4. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Review
5. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Review
6. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Review
7. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Review
8. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Review
9. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Review
10. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Review
Unit 1 - Reading Review

Reading Comprehension Extension

DIRECTIONS: Read the passage then choose the answer that best completes each sentence.

Field Trip on Mars

1
“There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson was exploring California in 1880. I’m one of a team of more than 500 travelers exploring Mars
from California with the most sophisticated robot ever sent to another planet. As I write, Curiosity is drilling a
hole into a rock in Gale Crater. That may not seem very sophisticated. But it is. It took ten years of
engineering on Earth and six months of preparation on Mars. Drilling a two-inch-deep hole and extracting a
tiny piece will take weeks more. We’re doing it all to look for chemical evidence that Mars is not so different
from Earth—that it, too, was once hospitable to life.

2 I’m a geologist, and I do fieldwork on Earth. To plan a field campaign takes months, not a decade,
and when I want to sample a rock, I take my rock hammer from my backpack and knock off a piece.
Sampling takes minutes, not weeks. Back in the lab, we analyze samples in a few days rather than the months
it takes Curiosity. On Earth, as on Mars, doing fieldwork takes a great deal of practice—but on Mars, it’s at a
different level.

3 For starters, we need a bunch of brilliant, visionary engineers just to figure out how to use the
hammer and drill. At Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they practiced for years on Curiosity’s twin sister
to make sure they could execute the hundreds of motions required to place a 65-pound drill as gently as a
feather on a target the size of a pea. We drilled scores of real rocks, and then we drilled fake rocks, too,
because the rocks might be different on Mars. We were certain the weather would be different. The daily
180°Fahrenheit (82°C) temperature swings on Mars would cause the drill bit to expand and contract. So we
had to figure out how to keep it from getting stuck. We worried a lot about details.

3 Curiosity is looking for evidence that life could once have existed on Mars. We’re not searching for
life itself; that would take instruments even more advanced than Curiosity’s. Its job is to acquire information
about where a future mission should look for life.

4 A habitable environment includes three important ingredients: water, a source of energy, and the
chemical building blocks of life, such as carbon. Earlier missions proved that Mars was once wet. Curiosity is
testing for the other two ingredients of habitability. Since the surface of Mars today is not hospitable, we’re
hunting for ancient rocks that preserve records of a wetter, more Earthlike environment. We’re expecting to
find such rocks near Mount Sharp, at the center of Gale Crater. But we stumbled on some not far from our
landing spot, and so we’re drilling there first.

5 We’ve already proved, with the first rock we drilled, that Mars was once habitable. Curiosity’s
analysis showed that the water would have been drinkable. It contained sulfur compounds that on Earth are an
energy source for some microbes. It contained carbon, too. We still can’t say that the pond our rock formed
in, maybe three billion years ago, was inhabited—only that it could have been.
 6 Images of distant, unknown places have long inspired explorers and the public. William Henry
Jackson’s photographs, taken during the Hayden expedition to Yellowstone, were an essential reason it was
selected as America’s first national park in 1872. Half a century later, photographer Ansel Adams began
inspiring the public with luminous pictures of parks that many would never visit. Curiosity’s photos are like
that—inspiring but also familiar. From the day we landed, this place looked different from the others we’d
visited on previous missions to Mars. Its strikingly Earthlike appearance has delighted the public and all of us
at the Jet Propulsion Lab. The images remind us of home.

7 It’s a strange and potent thought to have about another planet. Soon after you read this, we should be
on our five-mile way across the crater to the mountain. As a traveler on Mars, I’m feeling the truth of
Stevenson’s statement: This land is not so foreign. It’s a beautiful place to go for a drive.

____ 1. The author indicates that Curiosity isn’t looking for life itself because _____.
a. it can’t travel to Mount Sharp, where evidence of life is most likely to be found
b. the rapid temperature changes on Mars makes it impossible
c. the surface of Mars isn’t hospitable to life anymore
d. the equipment Curiosity uses isn’t advanced enough
____ 2. The phrase stumbled on in paragraph 5 is closest in meaning to _____.
a. discovered by chance
b. was slowed down by
c. worked on
d. passed by
____ 3. The first rock that Curiosity examined did NOT indicate that _____.
a. Mars once had liquid water on its surface
b. the rock contained possible sources of energy
c. microorganisms inhabited the pond where the rock formed
d. the rock contained the basic building blocks of living organisms
____ 4. The author mentions the photographers William Henry Jackson and Ansel Adams in part because _____.
a. The landscapes that they photographed resembled the ones that Curiosity photographed.
b. Their photos, like the ones taken by Curiosity, captured the public’s imagination.
c. Like Curiosity, they employed the most advanced photographic technology available.
d. Their images inspired the engineers and scientists who designed and built Curiosity.
____ 5. In the concluding paragraph of the article, the author _____.
a. describes the difficulties of Curiosity’s trip to Mount Sharp
b. summarizes his feelings about Curiosity’s photos
c. refers back to the introductory paragraph
d. urges the reader to learn more about Mars
 DIRECTIONS: Match each paragraph with the information that it contains.

Paragraph A
“There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson was exploring California in 1880. I’m one of a team of more than 500 travelers exploring Mars
from California with the most sophisticated robot ever sent to another planet. As I write, Curiosity is drilling a
hole into a rock in Gale Crater. That may not seem very sophisticated. But it is. It took ten years of
engineering on Earth and six months of preparation on Mars. Drilling a two-inch-deep hole and extracting a
tiny piece will take weeks more. We’re doing it all to look for chemical evidence that Mars is not so different
from Earth—that it too was once hospitable to life.

Paragraph B
I’m a geologist, and I do fieldwork on Earth. To plan a field campaign takes months, not a decade, and when I
want to sample a rock, I take my rock hammer from my backpack and knock off a piece. Sampling takes
minutes, not weeks. Back in the lab, we analyze samples in a few days rather than the months it takes
Curiosity. On Earth, as on Mars, doing fieldwork takes a great deal of practice—but on Mars it’s at a different
level.

Paragraph C
For starters, we need a bunch of brilliant, visionary engineers just to figure out how to use the hammer and
drill. At Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they practiced for years on Curiosity’s twin sister to make sure
they could execute the hundreds of motions required to place a 65-pound drill as gently as a feather on a
target the size of a pea. We drilled scores of real rocks, and then we drilled fake rocks too, because the rocks
might be different on Mars. We were certain the weather would be different. The daily 180°Fahrenheit
(82°C.) temperature swings on Mars would cause the drill bit to expand and contract. So we had to figure out
how to keep it from getting stuck. We worried a lot about details.

Paragraph D
Curiosity is looking for evidence that life could once have existed on Mars. We’re not searching for life itself;
that would take instruments even more advanced than Curiosity’s. Its job is to acquire information about
where a future mission should look for life.

a. paragraph A
b. paragraph B
c. paragraph C
d. paragraph D
____ 6. Why a geologist’s work on Mars is harder than it is on Earth
____ 7. Preparing for the Martian mission
____ 8. Performing a task that seems easier than it actually is
____ 9. Curiosity’s overall mission
Unit 1 - Reading Review
Answer Section
1. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Extension
2. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Extension
3. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Extension
4. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Extension
5. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Extension
6. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Extension
7. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Extension
8. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Extension
9. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Reading TOP: Reading Comprehension Extension
Unit 1 - Reading Skills

Reading Skills

DIRECTIONS: Read the passage. Then decide if each sentence below is a Main Idea (MI) or a
Supporting Detail (SD).

Field Trip on Mars

“There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.”

—Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson was exploring California in 1880. I’m one of a team of more than 500 travelers exploring Mars
from California with the most sophisticated robot ever sent to another planet. As I write, Curiosity is drilling a
hole into a rock in Gale Crater. That may not seem very sophisticated. But it is. It took ten years of
engineering on Earth and six months of preparation on Mars. Drilling a two-inch-deep hole and extracting a
tiny piece will take weeks more. We’re doing it all to look for chemical evidence that Mars is not so different
from Earth—that it, too, was once hospitable to life.

I’m a geologist, and I do fieldwork on Earth. To plan a field campaign takes months, not a decade, and when I
want to sample a rock, I take my rock hammer from my backpack and knock off a piece. Sampling takes
minutes, not weeks. Back in the lab, we analyze samples in a few days rather than the months it takes
Curiosity. On Earth, as on Mars, doing fieldwork takes a great deal of practice—but on Mars it’s at a different
level.

For starters, we need a bunch of brilliant, visionary engineers just to figure out how to use the hammer and
drill. At Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they practiced for years on Curiosity’s twin sister to make sure
they could execute the hundreds of motions required to place a 65-pound drill as gently as a feather on a
target the size of a pea. We drilled scores of real rocks, and then we drilled fake rocks, too, because the rocks
might be different on Mars. We were certain the weather would be different. The daily 180°Fahrenheit (82°C)
temperature swings on Mars would cause the drill bit to expand and contract. So we had to figure out how to
keep it from getting stuck. We worried a lot about details.

Curiosity is looking for evidence that life could once have existed on Mars. We’re not searching for life itself;
that would take instruments even more advanced than Curiosity’s. Its job is to acquire information about
where a future mission should look for life.

A habitable environment includes three important ingredients: water, a source of energy, and the chemical
building blocks of life, such as carbon. Earlier missions proved that Mars was once wet. Curiosity is testing
for the other two ingredients of habitability. Since the surface of Mars today is not hospitable, we’re hunting
for ancient rocks that preserve records of a wetter, more Earthlike environment. We’re expecting to find such
rocks near Mount Sharp, at the center of Gale Crater. But we stumbled on some not far from our landing spot,
and so we’re drilling there first.

We’ve already proved, with the first rock we drilled, that Mars was once habitable. Curiosity’s analysis
showed that the water would have been drinkable. It contained sulfur compounds that on Earth are an energy
source for some microbes. It contained carbon, too. We still can’t say that the pond our rock formed in,
maybe three billion years ago, was inhabited—only that it could have been.
 Images of distant, unknown places have long inspired explorers and the public. William Henry Jackson’s
photographs, taken during the Hayden expedition to Yellowstone, were an essential reason it was selected as
America’s first national park in 1872. Half a century later, photographer Ansel Adams began inspiring the
public with luminous pictures of parks that many would never visit.
Curiosity’s photos are like that—inspiring but also familiar. From the day we landed, this place looked
different from the others we’d visited on previous missions to Mars. Its strikingly Earthlike appearance has
delighted the public and all of us at the Jet Propulsion Lab. The images remind us of home.

It’s a strange and potent thought to have about another planet. Soon after you read this, we should be on our
five-mile way across the crater to the mountain. As a traveler on Mars, I’m feeling the truth of Stevenson’s
statement: This land is not so foreign. It’s a beautiful place to go for a drive.

1. Getting Curiosity ready to take mineral samples and analyze them was a long and difficult engineering
project.

__________

2. Curiosity will hunt for older rocks near the center of Gale Crater.

__________

3. Curiosity’s basic task is to determine if life may once have existed on Mars.

__________

4. William Henry Jackson’s amazing photos of Yellowstone led to it becoming the first national park in the
United States.

__________
Unit 1 - Reading Skills
Answer Section
1. ANS:
MI
PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B OBJ: Reading
TOP: Reading Skills: Identifying Supporting Information
2. ANS:
SD
PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B OBJ: Reading
TOP: Reading Skills: Identifying Supporting Information
3. ANS:
MI
PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B OBJ: Reading
TOP: Reading Skills: Identifying Supporting Information
4. ANS:
SD
PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B OBJ: Reading
TOP: Reading Skills: Identifying Supporting Information
Unit 1 - TED Talk

TED Talk Comprehension

DIRECTIONS: Read the excerpt from Brian Cox’s 2010 TED Talk then choose the answer that best
completes each sentence.

Brian Cox—Why We Need the Explorers

We live in difficult and challenging economic times, of course. And one of the first victims of difficult
economic times, I think, is public spending of any kind, but certainly in the firing line at the moment is public
spending for science, and particularly curiosity-led science and exploration. So I want to try and convince you
in about 15 minutes that that’s a ridiculous and ludicrous thing to do.

This is a picture that actually was sent back by the Cassini space probe around Saturn, after we’d finished
filming Wonders of the Solar System. So it isn’t in the series. It’s of the moon Enceladus. So that big
sweeping, white sphere in the corner is Saturn, which is actually in the background of the picture. And that
crescent there is the moon Enceladus, which is about as big as the British Isles. It’s about 500 kilometers in
diameter. So, tiny moon.

What’s beautiful is, you can probably see on the limb there some faint, sort of, wisps of almost smoke rising
up from the limb. What we found out were that those faint wisps are actually fountains of ice rising up from
the surface of this tiny moon. That’s fascinating and beautiful in itself, but we think that the mechanism for
powering those fountains requires there to be lakes of liquid water beneath the surface of this moon. And
what’s important about that is that, on our planet, on Earth, wherever we find liquid water, we find life.

This is a very famous picture taken, actually, on my first Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1968, when I was
about eight months old. It was taken by Apollo 8 as it went around the back of the moon. Earthrise from
Apollo 8. A famous picture; many people have said that it’s the picture that saved 1968, which was a
turbulent year—the student riots in Paris, the height of the Vietnam War. The reason many people think that
about this picture, and Al Gore has said it many times, actually, on the stage at TED, is that this picture,
arguably, was the beginning of the environmental movement. Because, for the first time, we saw our world,
not as a solid, immovable, kind of indestructible place, but as a very small, fragile-looking world just hanging
against the blackness of space.

What’s also not often said about the space exploration, about the Apollo program, is the economic
contribution it made. I mean, while you can make arguments that it was wonderful and a tremendous
achievement and delivered pictures like this, it cost a lot, didn’t it? Well, actually, many studies have been
done about the economic effectiveness, the economic impact of Apollo. The biggest one was in 1975 by
Chase Econometrics. And it showed that for every $1 spent on Apollo, 14 came back into the U.S. economy.
So the Apollo program paid for itself in inspiration, in engineering, achievement and, I think, in inspiring
young scientists and engineers 14 times over. So exploration can pay for itself.
 This is a beautiful quote that I found from Alexander Fleming: “When I woke up just after dawn on
September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first
antibiotic.” Now, the explorers of the world of the atom did not intend to invent the transistor. And they
certainly didn’t intend to describe the mechanics of supernova explosions, which eventually told us where the
building blocks of life were synthesized in the universe. So, I think science can be—serendipity is important.
It can be beautiful. It can reveal quite astonishing things. It can also, I think, finally reveal the most profound
ideas to us about our place in the universe and really the value of our home planet.

Let me leave the last words to someone who’s rapidly becoming a hero of mine, Humphry Davy, who did his
science at the turn of the 19th century. He was clearly under assault all the time. “We know enough at the turn
of the 19th century. Just exploit it; just build things.” He said this, he said, “Nothing is more fatal to the
progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate, that our triumphs are
complete, that there are no mysteries in nature, and that there are no new worlds to conquer.”

____ 1. The main purpose of Brian Cox’s talk is to _____.

a. explain his work in space exploration
b. convince people that spending on science is worthwhile
c. publicize the series Wonders of the Solar System
____ 2. Brian Cox explains the size of Enceladus by _____.
a. contrasting it with the diameter of the planet Saturn
b. explaining how much water may exist under its surface
c. comparing it with a place on Earth
____ 3. According to the talk, the fountains of ice coming from Enceladus are evidence that _____.
a. there is probably life on Enceladus
b. there are probably underground lakes on Enceladus
c. Enceladus is probably too cold to sustain life
____ 4. Brian Cox mentions the photo taken from Apollo 8 because it _____.
a. helped start an important movement on Earth
b. made people ask, “Are we alone in the universe?”
c. got people interested in space exploration
____ 5. The 1975 Chase Econometrics study showed that the Apollo program _____.
a. cost less than had been estimated
b. benefited the United States economically
c. was successful scientifically but not financially
____ 6. Brian Cox compares Alexander Fleming with the scientists who formulated the quantum theory because
_____.
a. both their discoveries unintentionally led to major developments
b. they both helped to revolutionize medical science
c. they were both initially criticized by other scientists
____ 7. Humphry Davy believed that _____.
a. it is more important to create practical things than to work with abstract theories
b. scientists would not make any important discoveries in the nineteenth century
c. there will always be unknown phenomena for scientists to investigate
Unit 1 - TED Talk
Answer Section
1. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B
OBJ: Reading TOP: TED Talk Comprehension
2. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B
OBJ: Reading TOP: TED Talk Comprehension
3. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B
OBJ: Reading TOP: TED Talk Comprehension
4. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B
OBJ: Reading TOP: TED Talk Comprehension
5. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B
OBJ: Reading TOP: TED Talk Comprehension
6. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B
OBJ: Reading TOP: TED Talk Comprehension
7. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson B
OBJ: Reading TOP: TED Talk Comprehension
Unit 1 - Vocabulary

Vocabulary

DIRECTIONS: Complete each sentence with the correct vocabulary word from the box.

authority innate obsessed variant visionaries

1. The McDonald brothers were _______________. Their business started out small, but they had big dreams
and eventually made their dreams a reality.

2. Don’t ask me. I’m not a(n) _______________ on the subject.

3. Each daughter in the family has some _______________ of the name Mary. There’s Ann Marie, Maria, and
Mariah.

4. Some of the world’s greatest artists and inventors are said to be completely _______________ with their craft
—not able to think about or do anything else.

5. Some experts say that personality characteristics are learned rather than _______________ expressions of
who we are naturally.

DIRECTIONS: Match each vocabulary word to its definition.

a. encounter
b. prospect
c. acquire
d. consult
e. solely
____ 6. only, no other
____ 7. to get something
____ 8. to seek advice or information
____ 9. the possibility of something happening
____ 10. to meet, come across something or someone
Unit 1 - Vocabulary
Answer Section
1. ANS: visionaries
PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A OBJ: Vocabulary
2. ANS: authority
PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A OBJ: Vocabulary
3. ANS: variant
PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A OBJ: Vocabulary
4. ANS: obsessed
PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A OBJ: Vocabulary
5. ANS: innate
PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A OBJ: Vocabulary
6. ANS: E PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Vocabulary
7. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Vocabulary
8. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Vocabulary
9. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Vocabulary
10. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: Unit 1 Lesson A
OBJ: Vocabulary