VSTEP Reading Mock Test 02

Sometimes people worry about the germs that they come into contact with daily. In fact, most people would be surprised to learn just how many microbes actually inhabit a human's body at any given time, in addition to the larger visitors that come around occasionally. Such natural species that regularly come into contact with our bodies include mites, lice, yeast, and fungus, just to name a few. We are, in fact, an ecosystem much like a rainforest is to the natural flora and fauna that call it home.

Lice, or nits, are particularly horrible to even think about. To learn that one's child has been found in school with head lice can cause trauma and shame. People think that having lice is a symptom of being unclean, although one can be infected by contact with somebody else who has them. Although lice are not that common in general circles, children can easily acquire them just because of their close contact with other children at school or play. Some large cities host high-priced nitpickers who make a living removing head lice from children.

Mites on the human body are much more common, and cleanliness does not eliminate the chance of having them. They are also microscopic, so they are invisible to the naked eye. There are a number of different species of mites, two of which have the human face as their natural habitat, particularly the skin of the forehead. Others are very content among human hair, living among the follicles of the eyelashes, eyebrows, and scalp hair.

Not all such inhabitants are harmful. In fact, even the annoying mite lives on dead skin cells, actually doing us a favor by removing them. The dreaded dust mite, for example, blamed for causing allergies, removes dead skin from bed coverings. And harmless bacteria often keep potentially harmful bacteria from being able to survive. So people should not try to eliminate mites from their bodies, although some have tried. Some sufferers of obsessive/compulsive disorder have scrubbed themselves raw trying to eliminate all scavengers from their bodies, only to damage their skin, and all to no avail.

Certain types of yeast also regularly live on the human body, Sometimes causing annoyances. One common type lives on the oil produced in the skin of the face or scalp, causing a condition known as pityriasis versicolor, which is a scaling and discoloration of the skin.

Ailments such as athlete's foot are caused by a fungus that grows in warm, moist conditions. To avoid them or avoid a recurrence, patients are encouraged to keep their feet dry and cool, which of course may not be easy, depending on one's work or personal habits. Ringworm is also a fungus acquired by contact with keratin-rich soil in many parts of the world.

Besides the tiny inhabitants, we are also regularly harassed by insects that feed off of our bodies, like mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas, which sometimes deposit harmful illnesses at the same time they probe the skin for the blood on which they live. Mosquitoes have been known to cause malaria and yellow fever, as well as encephalitis. Fleas have transmitted bubonic plague, and ticks have caused lyme disease.

Just like a river, an ocean, a rainforest, or any other ecological wonder in which numerous species survive, feeding upon other inhabitants, our bodies are natural providers of nutrition and life for various small and microscopic species.

PASSAGE 3

The Asian migration hypothesis is today supported by most of the scientific evidence. The first "hard" data linking American Indians with Asians appeared in the 1980s with the finding that Indians and Northeast Asians share a common and distinctive pattern in the arrangement of the teeth. But perhaps the most compelling support for the hypothesis comes from genetic research. Studies comparing the DNA variation of populations around the world consistently demonstrate the close genetic relationship of the two populations, and recently geneticists studying a virus sequestered in the kidneys of all humans found that the strain of virus carried by Navajos and Japanese is nearly identical, while that carried by Europeans and Africans is quite different. The migration could have begun over a land bridge connecting the continents. During the last Ice Age 70,000 to 10,000 years ago, huge glaciers locked up massive volumes of water and sea levels were as much as 300 feet lower than today. Asia and North America were joined by a huge subcontinent of ice-free, treeless grassland, 750 miles wide. Geologists have named this area Beringia, from the Bering Straits. Summers there were warm, winters were cold, dry and almost snow-free. This was a perfect environment for large mammals-mammoth and mastodon, bison, horse, reindeer, camel, and saiga (a goat-like antelope). Small bands of Stone Age hunter-gatherers were attracted by these animal populations, which provided them not only with food but with hides for clothing and shelter, dung for fuel, and bones for tools and weapons. Accompanied by a husky- like species of dog, hunting bands gradually moved as far east as the Yukon River basin of northern Canada, where field excavations have uncovered the fossilized jawbones of several dogs and bone tools estimated to be about 27,000 years old. Other evidence suggests that the migration from Asia began about 30,000 years ago - around the same time that Japan and Scandinavia were being settled. This evidence is based on blood type. The vast majority of modern Native Americans have type O blood and a few have type A, but almost none have type B. Because modern Asian populations include all three blood types, however, the migrations must have begun before the evolution of type B, which geneticists believe occurred about 30,000 years ago. By 25,000 years ago human communities were established in western Beringia, which is present-day Alaska. [A] But access to the south was blocked by a huge glacial sheet covering much of what is today Canada. How did the hunters get over those 2,000 miles

of deep ice? The argument is that the climate began to warm with the passing of the Ice Age, and about 13,000 B.C.E., glacial melting created an ice-free corridor along the eastern front range of the Rocky Mountains. [B] Soon hunters of big game had reached the Great Plains. In the past several years, however, new archaeological finds along the Pacific coast of North and South America have thrown this theory into question. [C] The most spectacular find, at Monte Verde in southern Chile, produced striking evidence of tool making, house building, rock painting, and human footprints conservatively dated at 12,500 years ago, long before the highway had been cleared of ice. [D] Many archaeologists now believe that migrants moved South in boats along a coastal route rather than overland. These people were probably gatherers and fishers rather than hunters of big game. There were two later migrations into North America. About 5,000 B.C.E., the Athapascan or Na-Dene people began to settle the forests in the northwestern area of the continent. Eventually, Athapascan speakers, the ancestors of the Navajos and Apaches, migrated across the Great Plains to the Southwest. The final migration began about 3,000 B.C.E after Beringia had been submerged, when maritime hunting people crossed the Bering Straits in small boats. The Inuits (also known as the Eskimos) colonized the polar coasts of the Arctic, the Yupiks the coast of southwestern Alaska, and the Aleuts the Aleutian Islands. While scientists debate the timing and mapping of these migrations, many Indian people hold to oral traditions that include a long journey from a distant place of origin to a new homeland.

PASSAGE 4

One of the primary ways of approaching the Greek theatre is through archeology, the systematic study of material remains such as architecture, inscriptions, sculpture, vase painting, and other forms of decorative art. [A] Serious on-site excavations began in Greece around 1870, but W. Dorpfeld did not begin the first extensive study of the Theatre of Dionysus until 1886. [B] Since that time, more than 167 other Greek theatres have been identified and many of them have been excavated. [C] Nevertheless, they still do not permit us to describe the precise appearance of the skene (illustrations printed in books are conjectural reconstructions), since many pieces are irrevocably

lost because the buildings in later periods became sources of stone for other projects and what remains is usually broken and scattered. [D] That most of the buildings were remodeled many times has created great problems for those seeking to date both the parts and the successive versions. Despite these drawbacks, archeology provides the most concrete evidence we have about the theatre structures of ancient Greece. But, if they have told us much, archeologists have not completed their work, and many sites have scarcely been touched. Perhaps the most controversial use of archeological evidence in theatre history is vase paintings, thousands of which have survived from ancient Greece. (Most of those used by theatre scholars are reproduced in Margarete Bieber's The History of the Greek and Roman Theatre.) Depicting scenes from mythology and daily life, the vases are the most graphic pictorial evidence we have. But they are also easy to misinterpret. Some scholars have considered any vase that depicts a subject treated in a surviving drama or any scene showing masks, flute players, or ceremonials to be valid evidence of theatrical practice. This is a highly questionable assumption, since the Greeks made widespread use of masks, dances, and music outside the theatre and since the myths on which dramatists drew were known to everyone, including vase painters, who might well depict the same subjects as dramatists without being indebted to them. Those vases showing scenes unquestionably theatrical are few in number.

Written evidence about ancient Greek theatre is often treated as less reliable than archeological evidence because most written accounts are separated so far in time from the events they describe and because they provide no information about their own sources. Of the written evidence, the surviving plays are usually treated as the most reliable. But the oldest surviving manuscripts of Greek plays date from around the tenth century, C.E., some 1,500 years after they were first performed. Since printing did not exist during this time span, copies of plays had to be made by hand, and therefore the possibility of textual errors creeping in was magnified. Nevertheless, the scripts offer us our readiest access to the cultural and theatrical conditions out of which they came. But these scripts, like other kinds of evidence, are subject to varying interpretations. Certainly performances embodied a male perspective, for example, since the plays were written, selected, staged, and acted by men. Yet the existing plays feature numerous choruses of women and many feature strong female characters. Because these characters often seem victims of their own powerlessness and appear to be governed, especially in the comedies, by sexual desire, some critics have seen these plays as rationalizations by the male-dominated culture for keeping women segregated and cloistered. Other critics, however, have seen in these same plays an attempt by male authors to force their male audiences to examine and call into question this segregation and cloistering of Athenian women.

By far the majority of written references to Greek theatre date from several hundred years after the events they report. The writers seldom mention their sources of evidence, and thus we do not know what credence to give them. In the absence of material nearer in time to the events, however, historians have used the accounts and have been grateful to have them. Overall, historical treatment of the Greek theatre is something like assembling a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces are missing: historians arrange what they have and imagine (with the aid of the remaining evidence and logic) what has been lost. As a result, though the broad outlines of Greek theatre history are reasonably clear, many of the details remain open to doubt.