Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by choosing the
answers from the given options.

SPACE


"It scares me," said Jack Hills, an astronomer at New Mexico's Los Alamos National
Laboratory. "It really does." He and the rest of the world had good reason to be worried.
Astronomer Brian Marsden, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had just
announced that a newly discovered asteroid 1.6 km wide was headed for Earth and might
pass as close as 48,000km in the year 2028. "The chance of an actual collision is small,"
Marsden reported, "but not entirely out of the question."
An actual collision? With an asteroid of that size? It sounded like the stuff of science fiction
and grade-B movies. But front-page stories and TV newscasts around the world soon made
clear that the possibility of a direct hit and a global catastrophe well within the lifetime of
most people on Earth today was all too real.
Then suddenly, the danger was gone. Barely a day later, new data and new calculations
showed that the asteroid, dubbed 1997 XF11, presented no threat at all. It would miss Earth
by 1 million Km - closer than any previously observed asteroid of that size but a comfortable
distance. Still, the incident focused attention once and for all on the largely ignored danger
that asteroids and comets pose to life on Earth.
XF11 was discovered last Dec. 6 by astronomer Jim Scotti, a member of the University of
Arizona's Spacewatch group, which scans the skies for undiscovered comets and asteroids.
Using a 77-year-old telescope equipped with an electronic camera, he had recorded three sets
of images. The digitized images, fed into a computer programmed to look for objects moving
against the background of fixed stars, revealed an asteroid that Scotti, in an e-mail to
Marsden, described as standing out "like a sore thumb."
1. The world had reasons to worry because…………………….
a. it could come to an end
b. it would be hit by an asteroid
c. it might be hit by an asteroid
d. the astronomers had predicated a definite collision
2. The news that soon came as a relief was that………………….
a. there was no asteroid
b. the asteroid would disintegrate in space
c. it would cross the earth at a safe distance
d. it would be too small to cause harm
3. The asteroid XF11was discovered when…………………………..
a. Jim Scotti observed the sky
b. Scotti saw it through a telescope
c. Marsden discovered it through the computer
d. Jack Hills observed the sky
4. The astronomer, described the asteroid as standing out "like a sore thumb"
because………………
a. it was not a pleasant sight
b. it was noticeable in an unpleasant way

c. it was threatening and ugly
d. it had become huge as it neared the earth
5. The word in the second paragraph that means disaster is………………….
a. collision
b. dubbed
c. catastrophe
d. danger