TOEFL iBT Reading — Đề mẫu 01

E-mail

To: All Second-Year Engineering Students | From: k.mensah@northfield.edu | Date: 09/14/2026 | Subject: Change of room for Thursday workshops

Dear students, Beginning Monday, September 21, the Thursday design workshops will move from Room B12 to the Fabrication Annex on the north side of campus. The move gives every team access to the cutting equipment it has been waiting for since the spring.

The Annex is reached by a short flight of stairs and has no elevator. Any student who needs step-free access should write to the department office before Friday, and a ground-floor room will be reserved instead.

Please bring your own safety glasses to every session. Unlike B12, the Annex does not keep a supply for visitors. Kofi Mensah Department of Engineering

Text message chain

Nadia Osei (3:41 P.M.) Reminder: the field trip to the wetland reserve is on Saturday. The bus leaves from the library at 7 A.M. Please be on time, because the driver will not wait.

Tomas Belin (3:44 P.M.) I can't get to campus that early. Does the bus stop anywhere else?

Nadia Osei (3:46 P.M.) It picks up again at the Riverside gate at 7:15. That is the last stop before we leave the city.

Priya Nair (3:52 P.M.) What should we bring? I only own running shoes.

Nadia Osei (3:55 P.M.) Boots if you have a pair, because the paths flood after rain. Running shoes are fine if you stay on the boardwalk. Bring your own lunch as well; there is nothing to buy at the reserve.

Tomas Belin (3:58 P.M.) Understood. See everyone at Riverside.

How Forests Share Resources

A forest looks like a crowd of individual trees competing for light and water. Beneath the soil, however, a very different picture appears. Almost every tree in a temperate forest is linked to its neighbors by threads of fungus so fine that a single handful of soil may hold several kilometers of them.

These fungi form a partnership with tree roots that biologists call a mycorrhiza. The fungus cannot make its own food, so it takes sugars from the tree. In exchange it delivers water and mineral nutrients, especially phosphorus, which the tree's own roots are too coarse to gather efficiently. The arrangement is ancient: fossil evidence suggests that land plants and these fungi have been partners for more than four hundred million years.

What surprised researchers was that the network does not stop at a single tree. Because one fungus may be joined to dozens of roots, sugars and chemical signals can pass from one tree to another. In a series of experiments, carbon labeled with a rare isotope was traced from a tall, well-lit tree into seedlings growing in deep shade beneath it. Older trees appear to subsidize younger ones, and a tree under attack by insects can prompt its neighbors to raise their chemical defenses before the insects arrive.

The discovery has changed how some foresters work. A clear-cut removes not only the trees but the network they supported, which is one reason replanted ground often grows poorly for years. Leaving mature trees standing, once dismissed as wasted timber, preserves the fungal threads that will feed the next generation. Whether the network is best described as cooperation, or simply as fungi managing their own supply of sugar, is still argued; but few biologists now treat a forest as a crowd of strangers.

Notice

SHUTTLE SERVICE — TEMPORARY SCHEDULE

From Monday, October 5 until repairs to the North Bridge are finished, the campus shuttle will not stop at Hill Court. Passengers for Hill Court should use the Market Street stop, a seven-minute walk away.

The shuttle will run every twenty minutes between 7 A.M. and 7 P.M., and every forty minutes after 7 P.M. Late-evening riders should check the display at each stop, because the last departure has been moved from 11 P.M. to 10:30 P.M.

Repairs are expected to finish before the end of November.

E-mail

To: Summer Research Applicants | From: research.office@northfield.edu | Date: 03/11/2026 | Subject: Missing documents

Dear applicant, Thank you for applying to the Summer Research Program. Your application form has been received, but our records show that at least one supporting document is still missing.

Every application needs a transcript and one letter of reference. The transcript must be requested through the student portal; we cannot accept a copy sent by the applicant. The reference letter should be emailed to this address by the referee.

Documents must reach us by March 25. An application that is still incomplete on that date will be held for the following year rather than rejected, so there is no need to withdraw and apply again. The Research Office

Why Cities Are Warmer

On a still summer night, the center of a large city can be several degrees warmer than the farmland around it. Meteorologists call this difference the urban heat island, and it was first measured in London more than two hundred years ago by an amateur scientist who kept careful records of the temperature in his garden.

The cause is mostly a matter of materials. Asphalt and dark roofing absorb far more sunlight than grass or leaves, and stone and concrete hold that heat for hours after sunset. A field, by contrast, loses much of its energy through evaporation: water drawn up by plants escapes from their leaves and carries heat away with it. A city drains its rainwater into pipes within minutes, so very little is left to evaporate.

Geometry matters too. Streets lined with tall buildings behave like narrow canyons. Heat radiating from one wall does not escape to the sky but strikes the wall opposite, and the deeper the canyon, the longer the heat stays trapped. Waste heat from engines, air conditioners and lighting adds a further, smaller contribution. That is why the effect is strongest not at midday but in the hours before dawn, when the surrounding countryside has cooled and the city has not.

The consequences are uneven. Heat islands raise the demand for air conditioning, which produces more waste heat in turn, and they make heat waves considerably more dangerous for elderly residents. The districts with the fewest trees are usually the poorest, so the burden does not fall equally. Cities that have planted street trees and required pale roofing have measured reductions of two degrees or more, which suggests that this problem, unlike the climate as a whole, can be treated locally.