VSTEP Reading Mock Test 13

Every year for many years the people of Milpa Alta, Mexico, have prepared a feast in the week before Christmas. Sixty thousand tamales and 15,000 litres of hot chocolate are made in less than a week, not too much and not too little for the thousands of people who show up for the feast. The feast is called La Rejunta and is made for pilgrims preparing for the long walk to the holy cave of El Señor de Chalma on January 3rd. The people responsible for organising La Rejunta are called the majordomos. It’s an honour to be chosen and so many people want to do it that the waiting list is full until 2046.

The stages in the organisation of La Rejunta are the same every year. Tradition is important to the Milpa Alta people. Corn has been grown here for hundreds of years and the name of the region means ‘high cornfield’. Local farmers grow most of the corn, meat, and vegetables needed as ingredients for the meal. And a year before the event, the men go to the forest and collect wood that they pile up high near the home of the majordomo so that it will be properly dried before it’s used for open-air cooking. This year’s majordomos are Virginia Meza Torres and her husband Fermín Lara Jiménez. ‘There is an infinity of things to do,’ Virginia Meza Torres says firmly, as if to indicate there is no time to talk. Virginia is heading to the local offices to get the necessary permits and Fermín sets off into the countryside in search of more ingredients. They leave their daughter Montserrat Lara Meza in charge. She is a 24-year-old graduate student who’s come home to help her parents for the week. Volunteers are starting to arrive and Montserrat wanders down the hill to a shed to see how the toasting of the corn is going. Everything is made from the basics – no instant mixes or other culinary shortcuts are allowed.

Such traditional approaches are part of everyday life here. Eating together is perhaps the most important example. ‘In my experience, there is a glue, a bonding, that comes from the time together at the table,’ says Josefina García Jiménez. She often cooks for her nieces and nephews and says, ‘It feels like I am passing down a tradition, and when it comes to their turn to be adults, they will remember what I have done. Here we have time to cook, time to think just what ingredients are needed, time to show our kids through cooking that we love them.’

When the day of La Rejunta arrives, the volunteers have been up all night, though no one admits to feeling tired. Fermin has made sure there are enough tamales for everyone, and the head cook has been stirring the atole (chocolate drink) all night. After a 14-year wait, and a full year of preparation, it’s almost time for Fermin and Virginia to hand over responsibility to the next majordomos. But first, there are thousands of cups of atole to serve.

Prehistoric peoples most certainly took note of the recurring patterns of movements in the sky of such celestial bodies as the Sun, the Moon, the planets, and the stars, and they most certainly noted that events in their world, such as seasonal fluctuations in weather, which in turn had an effect on the lives of the plants and animals in their world, were often correlated with the movements of the celestial bodies. Because it was important for prehistoric people to have knowledge, for example, of when it was important for prehistoric people to have been migrating, early farmers and hunters took a great interest in the movements of celestial bodies. An understanding of the relationship between the movements of celestial bodies and recurring patterns of events on Earth was paramount in many cultures; thus, many cultures in widely separated areas of the world developed methods for monitoring astronomical events.

The field of archeoastronomy, which combines knowledge and expertise from the fields of archeology and astronomy, is dedicated to the study of the astronomical knowledge of prehistoric cultures. Archeoatronomers who have been studying prehistoric cultures in North America have been discovered various devices that made it possible for prehistoric people to study and record astronomical events. An alignment of stones in Wyoming that is known as the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, the remnants of a circular-shaped structure created with wooden posts at Cahoki in Illinois, and specially designed windows in structures of the Southwest that allowed the rays of the Sun to hit designated marks on inside walls are all believed to be constructions that serve the function of monitoring and measuring astronomical events.

One particular construction, which is located in the Chaco Canyon area of the state of New Mexico, has been the subject of considerable attention and discussion among archeologists and astronomers. This construction, which is at least 700 years old, consists of large slabs of rock located on top of the flat surface of a high butte that seem to form an observatory of sorts. What makes it appear to experts to be an observatory is that the slabs of rock are positioned so that shafts of sunlight fall betweenthem and hit spiral markings carved into the side of a cliff. As the Sun changes positions with the progressions of the seasons, the shafts of light fall in different places on the markings in the cliff wall. Using this system, it must have been possible for early inhabitants of the area to predict upcoming seasonal changes and the events based on them.

One question that has been the focus of considerable discussion is whether the stones were actually placed in their current location by early inhabitants of the region or whether the stones forces of nature created the arrangement. While some scientists argue that the stones could not have fallen in the current arrangement by mere happenstanceand must have been purposefully positioned, others find it harder to believe that the huge stones could have been moved and easier to believe that that the marks on the cliff wall were placed to reflect the positions where the slabs had fallen naturally. Whether or not the slabs were positioned by the local population, the structure correlating the positions of the slabs and the markings on the cliff wall represents a remarkably sophisticated method of following astronomical events

According to the theory of plate tectonics, the upper portion of the Earth’s lithosphere, which contains the heavier oceanic and the lighter continental crusts, consists of a series of rigid plates that are in constant motion. This theory provides a cohesive model to explain the integrated actions of continental drift, seafloor spreading, and mountain formation.

The Earth’s plates are estimated to have an average depth of appropriately 60 miles (or 100 kilometers), but they are believed to vary considerably in size. Some are estimated to be continental or even hemispheric in size, while others are believed to be much smaller. Though the actual boundaries and sizes and shapes of the plates are not known for sure, it has been postulated that there are six major plates and somewhere around the same number of smaller ones. Most of the plates consist of both sial (continental) and sima (oceanic) crust. They are in constant movement, though they move at an extremely slow pace, and these movements cause frequent interactions between plates.

At this time, scientists have identified three different types of boundaries between plates. At a divergent boundary, plates are moving away from each other. This type of boundary occurs at an oceanic ridge, where new material is being added to the seafloor from deeper within the Earth. Shallow earthquakes and underwater volcanoes are associated with this type of plate activity. At a convergent boundary, plates are moving toward each other and collide, causing vast folding and crumpling along the edges of the plates, one of the plates slowly folds under the other. Though this subduction is slow, it can nonetheless be quite catastrophic as the crustal material of the submerging plate gradually melts into the fiery hot depths below. The area where subduction occurs is usually an area where the crust is relatively unstable and is characterized by numerous deep earthquakes and a significant amount of volcanic activity. The boundaries between convergent plates are generally found around the edges of ocean basins and are sometimes associated with deep ocean trenches. A third type of boundary is a transcurrent boundary, which involves two plates sliding past each other laterally, without the folding and crumpling that occurs at a convergent boundary. This third type of boundary is thought to be far less common than the other two types of boundaries.

The concept of plate tectonics provides an understanding of the massive rearrangement of the Earth’s crust that has apparently taken place. It is now generally accepted that the single supercontinent known as Pangaea indeed existed, that Pangaea subsequently broke apart into two giant pieces, Gondwanaland in the south and Laurasia in the north, and that the continents attached to the various crustal plates separated and drifted in various directions. As the plates drifted, they may have diverged, which was associated with the spread of the seafloor, or they may have converged, which resulted in collision, subduction, and mountain building.

[A] The majority of the Earth’s major mountain ranges are found in zones where plates converge. [B] The Himalayas, which are the world’s highest mountains, along with the central Asian mountains of varying heights associated with them, were formed by the crumpling and folding of two massive plates that collided at a convergent boundary. [C] The landmass that is today known as India was originally part of Gondwanaland, the giant supercontinent in the Southern Hemisphere, but it broke off from Gondwanaland approximately 200 million years ago and drifted north to collide with part of Laurasia, the giant supercontinent in the Northern Hemisphere, to create the world’s tallest mountains. [D]