High-Q | English פסיכומטרי

Reading Comprehension

9. According to the passage, most of

10. The term “them” in line 16 refers to -

modern knowledge about the exotic animal and plant collections of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia is obtained from - (1) the ruins of ancient botanical gardens and zoos (2) oral traditions (3) comparisons to modern zoos (4) ancient writings

(1) rulers (2) expeditions (3) lands (4) animals and seeds

TEXT 3

The idea of life’s raw materials riding to earth on comets and meteors is quite different from the notion of actual living organisms drifting in from space and colonizing the planet - an ancient idea known as panspermia. After 17 th century Italian physicist Francesco Redi disproved the long standing view that life could arise from non-living matter, it was assumed that life could only come from life. Following this logic, Swedish chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Svante Arrhenius 5 proposed in 1908 that radiation from stars could create star “winds” that could blow microscopic germs from one world to another. Few other scientists have been willing to admit the possibility of such events - until recently. Controversial reports of fossil microbes in a meteorite from the planet Mars revived the panspermia theory in 1996, and a report from the same year suggested that inner planets may have 10 exchanged tons of debris in the past few billion years. Still, few scientists believe that life ever arose on Mars, let alone that Martian organisms could have survived the 80-million-kilometer trip to Earth. Even if a microbe could somehow endure the enormous impact required to fling it up into space, deadly radiation and the subzero vacuum of space during thousands of years of travel would very likely destroy it. 15 Given these problems, direct colonization from Mars seems unnecessarily complicated when life could just as well have started here on Earth. Or perhaps life arose independently on Mars if it possessed the proper conditions for life sometime in the past. After all, the comets and meteors that provided Earth with water and organic molecules would have provided the same materials for all the planets of the solar system. 20

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