TOEFLiBTTestQuestions.PDF

® TOEFL iBT Test Questions Reading Section Directions: The Reading section measures your ability to understand academic passages written in English. You will read one passage and answer questions about it. In the actual TOEFL iBT® test, you would have 20 minutes to read the passage and answer the questions. Test takers with disabilities can request a time extension. Meteorite Impact and Dinosaur Extinction There is increasing evidence that the impacts of meteorites have had important effects on Earth, particularly in the field of biological evolution. Such impacts continue to pose a natural hazard to life on Earth. Twice in the twentieth century, large meteorite objects are known to have collided with Earth. 5 If an impact is large enough, it can disturb the environment of the entire Earth and cause an ecological catastrophe. The best-documented such impact took place 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period of geological history. This break in Earth’s history is marked by a mass extinction, when as many as half the species on the planet 10 became extinct. While there are a dozen or more mass extinctions in the geological record, the Cretaceous mass extinction has always intrigued paleontologists because it marks the end of the age of the dinosaurs. For tens of millions of years, those great creatures had flourished. Then, suddenly, they disappeared. 15 The body that impacted Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period was a meteorite with a mass of more than