TOEFL Reading
The TOEFL Reading Test is exactly what it sounds like. You'll have to answer questions about passages designed to mimic college-level reading material. You don't have to know anything about the subjects beforehand. All the information you need will be right there on the test.
There are three kinds of questions on the TOEFL. Some will be typical multiple-choice questions. Others will ask you to insert a sentence into the passage. Each passage will also have exactly one of the third type, the 'Reading to Learn' questions. 'Reading to Learn' questions are so weird and special that they're covered in detail in another lesson. That lesson is called About the TOEFL Reading to Learn Questions, if you want to look it up.
For this lesson, we'll just be working on the multiple-choice and sentence insertion types. In this lesson, you'll read a sample passage and then answer some questions about it, just like you will on the TOEFL. Grab some paper and a pen to take notes on the passage while you read. You'll be able to do that on the real test, so it's good practice. Once you've got those, come back and get ready to read!
The Passage
First, you'll read the passage. Remember that you can take any notes you want while you're doing this. The passage will be displayed on the screen, and you can pause the video for as long as you need to read it. Try to read quickly since on the test you'll only have a few minutes per reading passage. You'll be able to look back at the text again as soon as you answer the question.
Antibiotic Resistance
Developed in the 1940s, antibiotic drugs kill bacteria that cause many common infectious diseases, like tonsillitis, strep throat, and E. Coli. (1) Before the discovery of antibiotics, these diseases killed many people, especially people with weakened immune systems. Antibiotics were embraced as 'miracle drugs,' the medicines that would relieve enormous amounts of human suffering.
Antibiotics are so common today that we take them for granted. But unfortunately, widespread use of antibiotics comes at a high price: antibiotic resistance. (2) When a doctor uses an antibiotic drug to kill bacteria, some of the bacteria will naturally have genetic abnormalities that make them resistant to the antibiotic. If the antibiotic isn't used at a high enough dose or for a long enough time, then it doesn't kill all the bacteria, only the weak ones. The strong, resistant bacteria reproduce and pass on their drug-resistant genes. This creates a new strain of drug-resistant bacteria that don't respond to the antibiotic.
Antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria can develop if a patient gets an antibiotic prescription but doesn't take all the pills. (3) They're also caused by industrial farming, where farmers feed animals very low doses of antibiotics to make them grow faster.
If a person is infected with an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria, a different antibiotic will sometimes work. (4) Increasingly, doctors are seeing infections that are resistant to every known drug, for example MRSA, Multidrug Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus.