WITH WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING CONCLUSIONS WOULD THE AUTHOR PROBABLY...

10. With which of the following conclusions would the author probably agree?

(A) The evolution of terrestrial life was as complicated as the origin of life itself.

(B) The discovery of microfossils supports the traditional view of how terrestrial life evolved.

(C) New species have appeared at the same rate over the course of the last 400 million years.

(D) The technology used by paleontologists is too primitive to make accurate determinations about

ages of fossils.

Part 8. Read the passage and do the tasks that follow .( 5 points)

Scientists Are Mapping the World's Largest Volcano

(A) After 36 days of battling sharks that kept biting their equipment, scientists have returned from the remote

Pacific Ocean with a new way of looking at the world’s largest - and possibly most mysterious - volcano,

Tamu Massif.

(B) The team has begun making 3-D maps that offer the clearest look yet at the underwater mountain, which

covers an area the size of New Mexico. In the coming months, the maps will be refined and the data

analyzed, with the ultimate goal of figuring out how the mountain was formed.

(C) It's possible that the western edge of Tamu Massif is actually a separate mountain that formed at a

different time, says William Sager, a geologist at the University of Houston who led the expedition. That would

explain some differences between the western part of the mountain and the main body.

(D) The team also found that the massif (as such a massive mountain is known) is highly pockmarked with

craters and cliffs. Magnetic analysis provides some insight into the mountain’s genesis, suggesting that part

of it formed through steady releases of lava along the intersection of three mid-ocean ridges, while part of it is

harder to explain. A working theory is that a large plume of hot mantle rock may have contributed additional

heat and material, a fairly novel idea.

(E) Tamu Massif lies about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) east of Japan. It is a rounded dome, or shield

volcano, measuring 280 by 400 miles (450 by 650 kilometers). Its top lies more than a mile (about 2,000

meters) below the ocean surface and is 50 times larger than the biggest active volcano on Earth, Hawaii’s

Mauna Loa. Sager published a paper in 2013 that said the main rise of Tamu Massif is most likely a single

volcano, instead of a complex of multiple volcanoes that smashed together. But he couldn’t explain how

something so big formed.

(F) The team used sonar and magnetometers (which measure magnetic fields) to map more than a million

square kilometers of the ocean floor in great detail. Sager and students teamed up with Masao Nakanishi of

Japan’s Chiba University, with Sager receiving funding support from the National Geographic Society and the

Schmidt Ocean Institute.

(G) Since sharks are attracted to magnetic fields, the toothy fish “were all over our magnetometer, and it got

pretty chomped up,” says Sager. When the team replaced the device with a spare, that unit was nearly ripped

off by more sharks. The magnetic field research suggests the mountain formed relatively quickly, sometime

around 145 million years ago. Part of the volcano sports magnetic "stripes," or bands with different magnetic

properties, suggesting that lava flowed out evenly from the mid-ocean ridges over time and changed in

polarity each time Earth's magnetic field reversed direction. The central part of the peak is more jumbled, so it

may have formed more quickly or through a different process.

(H) Sager isn’t sure what caused the magnetic anomalies yet, but suspects more complex forces were at

work than simply eruptions from the ridges. It’s possible a deep plume of hot rock from the mantle also

contributed to the volcano’s formation, he says. Sager hopes the analysis will also help explain about a dozen

other similar features on the ocean floor, as well as add to the overall understanding of plate tectonics.