Comprehension: Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.…
2025
Comprehension:
Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.
One potential cause of human extinction is global warming, but even without human-induced climate change, the sun's increasing radiation will eventually bring about our demise. A 2014 article in Science presents two models for this countdown, one more pessimistic than the other. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University, led by Ravi Kopparapu, predicted that with a 6% increase in solar radiation, in 150 million years, only underwater life and some resilient microbes will remain. According to this model, our species could be extinct within this timeframe.
Alternatively, if Earth's temperatures rise more gradually, we might have 600 to 700 million years left, based on the "Kopparapu model."
Wolf and Toon argue that we have 1.5 billion years left. Eventually, habitable territory would shrink to a strip around the poles. The ultimate end will come much later, in about four billion years, when the sun goes out. As the sun becomes a "red giant," it could strip away Earth's atmosphere, leaving a magma-covered surface with metal oxide icebergs floating on it.
These projections underscore the finite nature of our existence on this planet, emphasizing the importance of understanding and preparing for these eventualities.
What does the passage imply about the survival of life on Earth?
Answer: C. Only microbial life will survive eventually — An inference question does not ask for a sentence copied out of the passage. It asks which of the offered readings the passage best supports — the one the…
- A.
No life will survive the next century
- B.
Life will continue indefinitely
- C.
Only microbial life will survive eventually
- D.
Atmospheric changes will prevent any form of life
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Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
An inference question does not ask for a sentence copied out of the passage. It asks which of the offered readings the passage best supports — the one the text asserts outright or directly entails. An exact restatement is not required, and is often not on offer; the task is comparative.
Two rules settle close calls. A statement the text makes flatly outranks one it hedges with a word such as “could”. And the chosen reading must answer the question actually asked: when the stem asks what survives, a reading about surviving organisms answers it, while one that only fixes a date for the end does not.
The stem asks what the passage implies about the survival of life on Earth, so the load-bearing sentence is the passage’s one direct statement about survivors: in the Pennsylvania State University projection led by Ravi Kopparapu, a 6% increase in solar radiation leaves, in 150 million years, “only underwater life and some resilient microbes”. The passage therefore asserts a middle outcome — complex life on the surface is lost, while sheltered and hardy organisms persist — and it names microbes explicitly among what remains.
Read strictly, the passage lists two survivor categories, and “only microbial life” compresses them into one; the text does not say that all underwater life is microbial. That looseness sits in the option’s wording, not in the reading it expresses. Judged comparatively — which is what an inference question demands — it is still the only offered reading on which any life persists at all; every other choice either ends all life or preserves all life.
“No life will survive the next century” — the earliest dated projection in the passage is 150 million years, and the passage assigns no outcome at all to the coming hundred years.
“Life will continue indefinitely” — the closing sentence describes these projections as underscoring the finite nature of our existence on this planet.
“Atmospheric changes will prevent any form of life” — the closest competitor, since the sun as a red giant is described stripping away the atmosphere about four billion years out. It loses on both rules above: the passage says this “could” happen, and it never states that no form of life would remain.
“Only microbial life will survive eventually” — the one reading built on the passage’s explicit survivor sentence, in which resilient microbes are among what is left once complex life, humans included, is gone.
So the inference the passage supports is that life on Earth neither ends abruptly nor continues without limit: complex life is lost, and the hardy microbial life the passage names is what eventually remains.