Essential Words for the TOEFL The iBT Practice Test

[1] A key component of any vigorous economic system is its transportation system. The growth of the ability and need to transport large quantities of goods or numbers of people over long distances at high speeds in comfort and safety has been an index of civilization and, in particular, of technological progress. Communication and commerce are facilitated by the smooth and rapid movement of goods and people from one place to another. Such movement requires a well-developed infrastructure. The term “infrastructure” is used to describe all the facilities that an economic system has in place, inclusive of its network of roadways, railroads, and ports, as well as the vehicles and vessels to use them. These facilities must be in place before trade can be handled on a regular basis. Transportation systems are necessary in order for goods to reach markets where they can be sold or exchanged for other merchandise or services, and for consumers to reach those goods.

[2] There are many established benefits associated with a well-developed infrastructure. The infrastructure allows each geographic area to produce its goods and then to trade its products with other regions. [A ■] In addition to direct, or back-and-forth trading, it is also possible to use transportation to link a number of different steps in the production process, each occurring at a different geographic site. For example, car parts may be manufactured at various sites, and then shipped to and assembled in one specific, strategically located site, which is designed to facilitate the assembly and distribution of the cars.

[3] Distances are erased by speedy means of transportation. [B ■] For example, air transport allows perishable foods to be distributed to larger market areas. In addition to well-developed systems of roads that allow workers to reach their job sites quickly and efficiently, thus enhancing the opportunities for improvements to worker productivity, a well-developed infrastructure also makes it possible for a producer to reach a larger number of markets over great distances. This means that the quantity of production can be large enough to promote production economies of scale as companies can increase their customer base over a wide geographical area.

[4] The consumer also benefits from the efficient use of a well-developed infrastructure. Transportation networks make markets more competitive. [C ■] A transportation system improves the way goods and services are used because it widens the number of opportunities for suppliers and buyers to trade goods and services. This phenomenon increases availability and promotes pricing competition to the benefit of the consumer.

[5] Transportation projects have proved to be a fertile ground for investors, inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. [D ■] Much of the vigorous growth in the economies of the United States and other countries in the twentieth century can be directly attributed to the development of transportation. Take, for example, the development of the U.S. rail and road systems.

[6] During the mid-nineteenth century, railways expanded westward, bringing with them development. The presence of the railroad spurred the growth of towns, which were clustered around railroad lines. These towns quickly became cities. Then, as these cities grew, streetcar and bus lines within the cities attracted development. These lines were deemed so valuable that companies were sometimes bribed by land developers to have new lines serve their undeveloped land, thus increasing its value.

[7] Eventually, the development of infrastructure made it possible for city dwellers to flee the central city, giving birth to massive residential subdivisions located in areas just outside city limits.

[8] With the advent of automobile and truck transportation, the need arose for a means of swift and safe passage from one city to another. In the 1930s and ’40s, a national system of roads emerged, constructed by the federal government. However, this national system of roads was ill equipped to handle increasing volumes of auto traffic and commerce. Consequently, the mammoth U.S. Interstate Highway system was developed in response to strong public pressures in the 1950s for a better road system. The Clay Committee, established by President Dwight Eisenhower, studied the feasibility of constructing a new federal highway system. It recommended that an interstate highway system be constructed with federal funding. Taking more than 25 years to construct, the interstate highway system reached a total length of more than 45,000 miles, connecting nearly all of the major cities in the United States and carrying more than 20 percent of the nation’s traffic on slightly more than 1 percent of the total road and street system.

Why does the author give the example of the car manufacturing process in paragraph 2?

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Thanks to well-developed infrastructures, products such as fresh fruits and vegetables from around the world can be found on the shelves of many modern grocery stores.

Where could the sentence best be added? (A), (B), (C), or (D)

Click on a [■] to insert the sentence into the passage.

The word spurred in paragraph 6 is closest in meaning to

The phrase This phenomenon in paragraph 4 refers to

According to the passage, all of the following are mentioned as benefits of a good system of transportation EXCEPT:

According to the author, what caused the expansion of the United States toward the West?

The term on a regular basis in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to

Which of the following sentences best expresses the essential information in the sentence below? Incorrect answer choices omit important information or change the meaning of the original sentence in an important way.

In addition to well-developed systems of roads that allow workers to reach their job sites quickly and efficiently, thus enhancing the opportunities for improvements to worker productivity, a well-developed infrastructure also makes it possible to reach a larger number of markets over great distances.

According to the author, why was a system of interstate highways a necessity?

The word fertile in paragraph 5 is closest in meaning to

According to the definition of infrastructure in the passage, all of the following are examples of infrastructure EXCEPT:

Why does the author mention economies of scale in paragraph 3?

[1] The advancement of the noble profession of nursing has its origins in two sources, one scientific, the other social. From the period of the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, there was little advancement in the field of medical science. However, there was an explosion of discoveries during the nineteenth century. At that time, germs were discovered as the leading cause of death. Hence the “germ theory” of disease was developed and methods of preventing and treating infectious diseases were discovered. In addition, anesthesia was discovered. Since the time of these advancements, the sheer volume of medical knowledge has challenged healthcare professionals to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field of medicine. In fact, medical research has produced more medical and health knowledge since the 1950s than in all previous centuries combined. This expanding mass of new information to be applied by health services workers has challenged the educational systems for physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, and applied pressure on the delivery system of services to a public that is better informed about healthcare issues.

[2] This medical renaissance created an immediate need for caregivers who could better meet the everyday needs of the sick and wounded. This need gave birth to modern nursing. Before this explosion of information, nursing was viewed as a profession with low status. This perception was a product of the nature of the duties related to the general hygiene and psychological needs of patients that nurses performed. In general, only less educated women elected to pursue nursing.

[3] However, during the nineteenth century, there was a movement toward the elevation of the status of nursing-led by Florence Nightingale. Nightingale was a formidable figure who had a strong background in science, mathematics, and political economics. She researched nursing practices of several countries, formulated ideas about the emergent role of nursing, and wrote extensively on the changes that nursing had to undergo to meet the healthcare challenges of her time.

[4] Her work attracted the attention of British government officials. In 1854, Nightingale was asked to go to countries where the absence of sewers, laundering facilities, nutritional information, organized medical services, and nursing-led to death rates of more than 50 percent among the sick and wounded.

[5] The services that she, and the nurses whom she recruited, performed, brought about sufficient improvement to lower the death rates to less than three percent in some of the countries where she set up nursing programs. As a result of her work, Florence Nightingale received several monetary gifts which she used to establish schools of nursing at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London.

[6] Florence Nightingale believed nursing to be a suitable and worthy career for capable, trained women, and that nursing services had to be administered by professionals with special preparation. She insisted that there was a substantial body of knowledge and range of skills to be learned in nursing and that skilled and knowledgeable professionals had to be prepared for hospital nursing and care of the sick at home if they were to teach good health practices to patients and families. [A ■] She strongly believed that a team relationship had to be present between physicians and nurses in order for patient needs to be met. She maintained that schools of nursing should be established by nurses and physicians as part of the hospital workforce.

[7] Largely because of Nightingale’s efforts, by the end of the nineteenth century, the status of the nursing profession had been elevated. [B ■] And the idea that a nurse needed to be educated and trained had spread to most of the Western world. [C ■]

[8] Modern nursing education has had to change dramatically to prepare nurses for their expanded roles. [D ■] Traditional hospital-based nursing schools do not provide community nursing experience, nor can they offer the liberal arts curriculum of the university. Moreover, traditional nursing schools have tended to isolate students from the mainstream of higher education. To correct this situation, nursing education is now increasingly found in academic rather than in clinical settings dedicated solely to training nurses. Indeed, in some countries, the training of nurses has moved exclusively into universities.

According to the passage, all of the following are true of Nightingale’s views on nursing EXCEPT:

The word emergent in paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to

Why does the author mention the “germ theory?”

Based on the information in the passage, which of the following can be inferred about nursing training before the nineteenth century?

The word sheer in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to

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In fact, as a result of the advances in nursing, nurses have followed doctors into specialties, including pediatrics, surgery, orthopedics, ophthalmology, psychiatry, and public health.

Where could the sentence best be added? (A), (B), (C), or (D)

Click on a [■] to insert the sentence into the passage.

Which of the following sentences best expresses the essential information in the sentence below? Incorrect answer choices omit important information or change the meaning of the original sentence in an important way.

The expanding mass of new medical and health knowledge to be applied by health services workers has compelled educational systems for physicians, nurses, and other healthcare providers to stay up-to-date, and has applied pressure on the delivery system of services to a public that is well informed about healthcare issues.

Based on the information in the passage, which of the following can be inferred about the results of Nightingale’s work in other countries?

Based on the information in paragraph 1, which of the following best explains the term to keep abreast of?

All of the following statements apply to the field of medicine in the eighteenth century EXCEPT:

According to paragraph 8, which of the following is true about modern nursing training?

The phrase This perception in paragraph 2 refers to

[1] The skyscraper was born in the late nineteenth century, but it wasn’t born in that astounding city best known for iconic skyscrapers, New York City, home of the Empire State Building. Rather, it was much farther west, along the western edge of Lake Michigan, that modern urban architecture’s most striking innovation first took shape.

[2] Prior to the 1870s, U.S. architects looked to Europe for their models and inspiration. For decades, their styles derived from European history. [A ■] Townhouses, churches, and banks that resembled European temples, cathedrals, and castles were the norm. [B ■] Meanwhile, advances in engineering, and particularly in the use of tough, flexible steel structures called skeletal frames, were opening a radical alternative—namely, the possibility of putting the skeleton up first and hanging a building’s exterior sheath on the frame like a coat draped on a hanger. [C ■] Once that design breakthrough had been achieved, it was possible to imagine structures that could grow taller because their weight was suspended and distributed across a framework. It made an entirely different cityscape imaginable. [D ■]

[3] Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837, but it was the railroad that eventually joined the East and West Coasts and put the city on the map economically. The railroad made it possible to transport beef cattle from the remote plains lying to the west via the stockyards in Chicago to the slaughterhouses and kitchens in heavily populated Eastern cities. Despite a fire that gutted the city’s downtown in 1871, it soon became a boomtown again, home to big business and international banking, and commercial buildings constructed on a revolutionary principle.

[4] Economic conditions and social attitudes in Chicago favored the birth of a new, assertive architecture. At the city’s commercial core, land was at a premium: property values had soared after the downtown was rebuilt and unrelenting westward expansion continued to fuel the city’s robust economy. Thus, any plan to build taller, more narrow buildings was bound to attract capital investment. Many refugees fleeing hard times, unrest, and economic uncertainty in Europe and elsewhere had flocked to Chicago to find work, and bigger buildings meant more work and a demand for more workers. Taller buildings also appealed to Chicago’s energetic business community. The city had grown up quickly, it had recovered from a fire, it had proven itself to be a tough survivor, and now the time had come to declare its preeminence. It was time for Chicago to claim the heights.

[5] Skeletal framing was first used in the Western Union Telegraph Building in 1873, but it really took off as a structural principle once Louis Sullivan arrived in Chicago in 1875. Louis Henri Sullivan was a Bostonian who had studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in Paris. In the next 40 years, he would design dozens of buildings, primarily in the Midwest—the Auditorium Building (1889), the Wainwright Building (1891), the Carson Pirie Scott Department Store (1904), the National Farmers’ Bank (1908). Though many were only a few stories high, Sullivan’s design approach clearly showed that taller buildings were now possible. By distributing a building’s weight across its steel underpinning, he was able to build a more solid structure that could support greater heights. Later, his famous axiom—“form follows function”—would be adopted by many architects. It means that architects should start with the function of a building in mind, not its decorative potential, and represent that function honestly in the building’s design. Instead of smothering buildings in a lot of historical detail, architects after Sullivan would proudly design buildings that revealed how they were constructed and what was going on inside. By the time he died in 1924, he had replaced a nineteenth-century preference for disguised and horizontal buildings with the belief that building height is mainly limited by a lack of imagination. The Sears Tower, erected 100 years after the Western Union Telegraph Building, and for a time the world’s tallest building, was part of his legacy.

[6] Today, skyscrapers are found all over the world. By the end of the twentieth century, the tallest one was no longer in Chicago, or even the United States. The tallest in the world, at 452 meters, was the Petronas Tower in Malaysia. But the skyscraper had started more modestly a long time before that in a tough, enterprising city on a lake. It sprang from the insight that buildings didn’t have to rise slowly, stone by stone, from the bottom up. Instead, they could be hung on powerful steel frames and thereby soar to unimagined heights.

What is the main topic of the passage?

Which factor led to the construction of taller buildings?

The word striking in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to

The word preeminence in paragraph 4 is closest in meaning to

All of the following are mentioned in the reading as factors in the emergence of the skyscraper as a building type in the nineteenth century EXCEPT:The railroad gave Chicago a big economic boost.

Why does the author state that Chicago proved to be a tough survivor?

The word core in paragraph 4 is closest in meaning to

The word expansion in paragraph 4 is closest in meaning to

In stating that form follows function in paragraph 5, the author means that the design of a building should

With which of the following statements would the author of the reading passage most probably agree?

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These structures were typically made of stone and built from the ground up, like the pyramids, block by block.

Where could the sentence best be added? (A), (B), (C), or (D)

Click on a [■] to insert the sentence into the passage.

What can be inferred from the passage about Chicago’s economic success?