Directions: In this section, you have a few short passages. After each passage, you will find some items based on the passage. First, read a passage and answer the items based on it. You are required to select your answers based on the contents of the passage and the opinion of the author only.

Extinction may be the first scientific idea that kids today have to grapple with. One-year-olds are given toy dinosaurs to play with, and two-year-olds understand, in a vague sort of way at least, that these small plastic creatures represent very large animals. If they’re quick learners or, alternatively, slow toilet trainers children still in diapers can explain that there were once lots of kinds of dinosaurs and that they all died off long ago. (My own sons, as toddlers, used to spend hours over a set of dinosaurs that could be arranged on a plastic mat depicting a forest from the Jurassic or Cretaceous. The scene featured a lava-spewing volcano, which, when you pressed on it, emitted a delightfully terrifying roar.) All of which is to say that extinction strikes us as an obvious idea. It isn’t. Aristotle wrote a ten-book History of Animals without ever considering the possibility that animals actually had a history. Pliny’s Natural History includes descriptions of animals that are real and descriptions of animals that are fabulous, but no descriptions of animals that are extinct. The idea did not crop up during the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance, when the word “fossil” was used to refer to anything dug up from the ground(hence the term “fossil fuels”). In the Enlightenment, the prevailing view was that every species was a link in a great, unbreakable “chain of being.” As Alexander Pope put it in his Essay on Man: All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul. When Carl Linnaeus introduced his system of binomial nomenclature, he made no distinction between the living and the dead because, in his view, none was required. The tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, published in 1758, lists sixty-three species of a scarab beetle, thirty-four species of cone snail, and sixteen species of flatfishes. And yet in the Systema Naturae, there is really only one kind of animal that exists. This view persisted despite a sizable body of evidence to the contrary. Cabinets of curiosities in London, Paris, and Berlin were filled with traces of strange creatures that no one had ever seen the remains of animals that would now be identified as trilobites, belemnites, and ammonites. Some of the last were so large their fossilized shells approached the size of wagon wheels. In the eighteenth century, mammoth bones increasingly made their way to Europe from Siberia. These, too, were shoehorned into the system. The bones looked a lot like those of elephants. Since there clearly were no elephants in contemporary Russia, it was decided that they must have belonged to beasts that had been washed north in the great flood of Genesis.