1995-2000 Reading Full Test
Questions 1-9
The ocean bottom ------a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the
Earth ---- is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until
about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath
waters averaging over 3,600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense
pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth's surface, the deep-ocean bottom
is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void
of outer space....
