1. Deep – ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land – based evidence of past climates.

The word "they" refers to

(A) years

(B) climates

(C) sediments

(D) cores

2. Basic to any understanding of Canada in 20 years after the Second World War is the country's impressive population growth. For every three Canadians in 1945, there were over five in 1996. In September 1966 Canada's population passed the 20 million mark. Most of this surging growth came from natural increase. The depression of the 1930's and the war had held back marriages and the catching – up process began after 1945. The baby boom continued through the decade of the 1950's, producing a population increase of nearly fifteen percent in the five years from 1951 to 1956. This rate of increase had been exceeded only once before in Canada's history, in the decade before 1911, when the prairies were being settled. Undoubtedly, the good economic conditions of the 1950's supported a growth in the population, but the expansion also derived from a trend toward earlier marriages and an increase in the average size of families. In 1957 the Canadian birth rate stood at 28 per thousand, one of the highest in the world.

The word "five" in line 2 refers to A

(A) Canadians

(B) Years

(C) Decades

(D) Marriages

3.Although the growth in Canada's population has slowed down by 1966 (the increase in the first half of the 1960's was only nine percent). Another large population wave was coming over the horizon. It would be composed of the children who were born during the period of the high birth rate prior to 1957.

The word "It" in line 3 refers to B

(A) horizon

(B) population wave

(C) nine percent

(D) first half

4. Are organically grown foods the best food choices? The advantages claimed for such foods over conventionally grown and marketed food products are now being debated. Advocates of organic foods – a term whose meaning varies greatly – frequently proclaim that such products are safer and more nutritious than others.

In line 4, the word "others" refers to D

(A) advantages

(B) advocates

(C) organic foods

(D) products

5. There are many theories about the beginning of drama in ancient Greece. The one most widely accepted today is based on the assumption that drama evolved from ritual. The argument for this view goes as follows. In the beginning, human beings viewed the natural forces of the world, even the seasonal changes, as unpredictable, and they sought through various means, to control these unknown and feared powers. Those measures which appeared to bring the desired results were then retained and repeated until they hardened into fixed rituals. Eventually stories arose which explained or veiled the mysteries of the rites. As time passed some rituals were abandoned, but the stories, later called myths, persisted and provided material for art and drama.

The word "they" in line 4 refers to D

(A) seasonal changes

(B) natural forces

(C) theories

(D) human beings

6. Those who believe that drama evolved out of ritual also argue that those rites contained the seed of theater because music, dance, masks, and costumes were almost always used. Furthermore, a suitable site had to be provided for performances, and when the entire community did not participate, a clear division was usually made between the "acting area" and the "auditorium." In addition, there were performers, and since considerable importance was attached to avoiding mistakes in the enactment of rites, religious leaders usually assumed that task. Wearing masks and costumes, they often impersonated other people, animals, or supernatural beings, and mimed the desired effect - success in hunt or battle, the coming rain, the revival of the Sun - as an actor might. Eventually such dramatic representations were separated from religious activities.

The word "they" refers to D

(A) mistakes

(B) costumes

(C) animals

(D) performers

7. Physical devastation caused by invading armies, chiefly in the South and border states, had to be repaired. This herculean task was ultimately completed, but with discouraging slowness.

The word "task" refers to D

(A) raising the tax level

(B) sensible financial choices

(C) worse decisions about former slaves

(D) reconstruction of damaged areas

8. What of the Southern leaders, all of whom were liable to charges of treason? One of these leaders, Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy, was the subject of an insulting popular Northern song, "Hang Jeff Davis from a Sour Apple Tree." And even children sang it. Davis was temporarily chained in his prison cell during the early days of his two-year imprisonment. But he and the other Southern leaders were finally released, partly because it was unlikely that a jury from Virginia, a Southern Confederate state, would convict them. All the leaders were finally pardoned by President Johnson in 1868 in an effort to help reconstruction efforts proceed with as little bitterness as possible.

The word "them" refers to   

(A) charges

(B) leaders

(C) days

(D) irons

9. If water is not pumped to the top of a tall tree, and if it is not pushed to the top of a tall tree, then we may ask, How does it get there? According to the currently accepted cohesion-tension theory, water is pulled there. The pull on a rising column of water in a plant results from the evaporation of water at the top of the plant. As water is lost from the surface of the leaves, a negative pressure, or tension, is created. The evaporated water is replaced by water moving from inside the plant in unbroken columns that extend from the top of a plant to its roots. The same forces that create surface tension in any sample of water are responsible for the maintenance of these unbroken columns of water. When water is confined in tubes of very small bore, the forces of cohesion (the attraction between water molecules) are so great that the strength of a column of water compares with the strength of a steel wire of the same diameter. This cohesive strength permits columns of water to be pulled to great heights without being broken.

The word "there" refers to A

(A) treetops

(B) roots

(C) water columns

(D) tubes

10. Of course, many were never occupied; there was always a huge surplus of subdivided, but vacant, land around Chicago and other cities. These excesses underscore a feature of residential expansion related to the growth of mass transportation: urban sprawl was essentially unplanned. It was carried out by thousands of small investors who paid little heed to coordinated land use or to future land users. Those who purchased and prepared land for residential purposes, particularly land near or outside city borders where transit lines and middle-class inhabitants were anticipated, did so to create demand as much as to respond to it. Chicago is a prime example of this process. Real estate subdivision there proceeded much faster than population growth.

The word "many" refers to B

(A) people

(B) lots

(C) years

(D) developers

11. The preservation of embryos and juveniles is rare occurrence in the fossil record. The tiny, delicate skeletons are usually scattered by scavengers or destroyed by weathering before they can be fossilized. Ichthyosaurs had a higher chance of being preserved than did terrestrial creatures because, as marine animals, they tended to live in environments less subject to erosion. Still, their fossilization required a suite of factors: a slow rate of decay of soft tissues, little scavenging by other animals, a lack of swift currents and waves to jumble and carry away small bones, and fairly rapid burial. Given these factors, some areas have become a treasury of well-preserved ichthyosaur fossils.

The word "they" in line 2 refers to A

(A) skeletons

(B) scavengers

(C) creatures

(D) environments

12. Why are there so many pregnant females and young at Holzmaden when they are so rare elsewhere? The quality of preservation is almost unmatched, and quarry operations factors do not account for the interesting question of how there came to be such a concentration of pregnant ichthyosaurs in a particular place very close to their time of giving birth.

The word "they" refers to A

(A) pregnant females and young

(B) quarry operations

(C) the value of the fossils

(D) these factors

13. The ancestry of the piano can be traced to the early keyboard instruments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – the spinet, the dulcimer, and the virginal. In the seventeenth century the organ, the clavichord, and the harpsichord became the chief instruments of the keyboard group, a supremacy they maintained until the piano supplanted them at the end of the eighteenth century. The clavichord's tone was metallic and never powerful; nevertheless, because of the variety of tone possible to it, many composers found the clavichord a sympathetic instrument for concert use, but the character of the tone could not be varied save by mechanical or structural devices.

The word "it" refers to the D

(A) variety

(B) music

(C) harpsichord

(D) clavichord

14. Another early Native American tribe in what is now the southwestern part of the United States was the Anasazi. By A. D. 800 the Anasazi Indians were constructing multistory pueblos-massive, stone apartment compounds. Each one was virtually a stone town, which is why the Spanish would later call them pueblos, the Spanish word for towns. These pueblos represent one of the Anasazis' supreme achievements. At least a dozen large stone houses took shape below the bluffs of Chiaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico. They were built with masonry walls more than a meter thick and adjoining apartments to accommodate dozens, even hundreds, of families. The largest, later named Pueblo Bonito (Pretty Town) by the Spanish, rose in five terraced stories, contained more than 800 rooms, and could have housed a population of 1,000 or more.

The word "They" in line 5 refers to A

(A) houses

(B) bluffs

(C) walls

(D) families

15. The Earth comprises three principal layers: the dense, iron-rich core, the mantle made of silicate rocks that are semimolten at depth, and the thin, solid-surface crust. There are two kinds of crust, a lower and denser oceanic crust and an upper, lighter continental crust found over only about 40 percent of the Earth's surface. The rocks of the crust are of very different ages. Some continental rocks are over 3,000 million years old, while those of the ocean flow are less than 200 million years old. The crusts and the top, solid part of the mantle, totaling about 70 to 100 kilometers in thickness, at present appear to consist of about 15 rigid plates, 7 of which are very large. These plates move over the semimolten lower mantle to produce all of the major topographical features of the Earth. Active zones where intense deformation occurs are confined to the narrow, interconnecting boundaries of contact of the plates.

The word "which" in line 7 refers to C

(A) crusts

(B) kilometers

(C) plates

(D) continents

16. The fact that half of the known species are thought to inhabit the world's rain forests does not seem surprising, considering the huge numbers of insects that comprise the bulk of the species. One scientist found many different species of ants in just one tree from a rain forest. While every species is different from every other species, their genetic makeup constrains them to be insects and to share similar characteristics with 750,000 species of insects. If basic, broad categories such as phyla and classes are given more emphasis than differentiating between species, then the greatest diversity of life is unquestionably the sea. Nearly every major type of plant and animal has some representation there.

The word "there" refers to A

(A) the sea

(B) the rain forests

(C) a tree

(D) the Earth's surface

17. What geologists call the Basin and Range Province in the United States roughly coincides in its northern portions with the geographic province known as the Great Basin. The Great Basin is hemmed in on the west by the Sierra Nevada and on the east by the Rocky Mountains; it has no outlet to the sea. The prevailing winds in the Great Basin are from the west. Warm, moist air from the Pacific Ocean is forced upward as it crosses the Sierra Nevada. At the higher altitudes it cools and the moisture it carriers is precipitated as rain or snow on the western slopes of the mountains. That which reaches the Basin is air wrung dry of moisture. What little water falls there as rain or snow, mostly in the winter months, evaporates on the broad, flat desert floors. It is, therefore, an environment in which organisms battle for survival. Along the rare watercourses, cottonwoods and willows eke out a sparse existence. In the upland ranges, pinon pines and junipers struggle to hold their own.

The word "it" in line 4 refers to B

(A) Pacific Ocean

(B) air

(C) west

(D) the Great Basin

18. In science, a theory is a reasonable explanation of observed events that are related. A theory often involves an imaginary model that helps scientists picture the way an observed event could be produced. A good example of this is found in the kinetic molecular theory, in which gases are pictured as being made up of many small particles that are in constant motion.

 The word "this" in line 3 refers to B

(A) a good example

(B) an imaginary model

(C) the kinetic molecular theory

(D) an observed event

19. By the mid-nineteenth century, the term "icebox" had entered the American language, but ice was still only beginning to affect the diet of ordinary citizens in the United States. The ice trade grew with the growth of cities. Ice was used in hotels, taverns, and hospitals, and by some forward-looking city dealers in fresh meat, fresh fish, and butter. After the Civil War (1861-1865), as ice was used to refrigerate freight cars, it also came into household use. Even before 1880, half the ice sold in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and one-third of that sold in Boston and Chicago, went to families for their own use. This had become possible because a new household convenience, the icebox, a precursor of the modern refrigerator, had been invented.

The word "it" in line 4 refers to C

(A) fresh meat

(B) the Civil War

(C) ice

(D) a refrigerator

20. Aside from perpetuating itself, the sole purpose of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters is to "foster, assist and sustain an interest" in literature, music, and art. This it does by enthusiastically handing out money. Annual cash awards are given to deserving artists in various categories of creativity: architecture, musical composition, theater, novels, serious poetry, light verse, painting, sculpture. One award subsidizes a promising American writer's visit to Rome. There is even an award for a very good work of fiction that failed commercially—once won by the young John Updike for The Poorhouse Fair and, more recently, by Alice Walker for In Love and Trouble The awards and prizes total about $750,000 a year, but most of them range in size from $5,000 to $12,500, a welcome sum to many young practitioners whose work may not bring in that much money in a year. One of the advantages of the awards is that many go to the struggling artists, rather than to those who are already successful.

The word "many" in line 9 refers to C

(A) practitioners

(B) advantages

(C) awards

(D) strugglers

21. The most financially rewarding of all the Academy-Institute awards are the Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings. Harold Strauss, a devoted editor at Alfred A. Knopf, the New York publishing house, and Mildred Strauss, his wife, were wealthy and childless. They left the Academy-Institute a unique bequest: for five consecutive years, two distinguished (and financially needy) writers would receive enough money so they could devote themselves entirely to "prose literature" (no plays, no poetry, and no paying job that might distract). In 1983, the first Strauss Livings of $35,000 a year went to short-story writer Raymond Carver and novelist-essayist Cynthia Ozick. By 1988, the fund had grown enough so that two winners, novelists Diane Johnson and Robert Stone, each got $50,000 a year for five years.

The word "they" refers to C

(A) Mildred and Harold Strauss

(B) years

(C) writers

(D) plays

22. If the physical barriers of the plant are breached, then preformed chemicals may inhibit or kill the intruder, and plant tissues contain a diverse array of toxic or potentially toxic substances, such as resins, tannins, glycosides, and alkaloids, many of which are highly effective deterrents to insects that feed on plants. The success of the Colorado beetle in infesting potatoes, for example, seems to be correlated with its high tolerance to alkaloids that normally repel potential pests. Other possible chemical defenses, while not directly toxic to the parasite, may inhibit some essential step in the establishment of a parasitic relationship. For example, glycoproteins in plant cell walls may inactivate enzymes that degrade cell walls. These enzymes are often produced by bacteria and fungi.

The word "which" refers to B

(A) tissues

(B) substances

(C) barriers

(D) insects

23. To lure their pollinators from afar, orchids use appropriately intriguing shapes, colors and scents. At least 50 different aromatic compounds have been analyzed in the orchid family, each blended to attract one or at most a few species of insects or birds. Some orchids even change their scents to interest different insects at different times.

The word "their" refers to A

(A) orchids

(B) birds

(C) insects

(D) species

24. Therefore, in the 1950's and 1960's, the baby boom hit an antiquated and inadequate school system. Consequently, the "custodial rhetoric" of the 1930's and early 1940's no longer made sense; that is, keeping youths aged sixteen and older out of the labor market by keeping them in school could no longer be a high priority for an institution unable to find space and staff to teach younger children aged five to sixteen. With the baby boom, the focus of educators and of laymen interested in education inevitably turned toward the lower grades and back to basic academic skills and discipline. The system no longer had much interest in offering nontraditional new and extra services to older youths.

The "custodial rhetoric" mentioned refers to B

(A) raising a family

(B) keeping older individuals in school

(C) running an orderly household

(D) maintaining discipline in the classroom