I continued my “Norton Library Podcast” read along this month by reading “Dubliners” (which has been a favorite short story collection for some time. I think many followers of the blog will enjoy this short story collection. Though the stories were published more than a century ago they are accessible and easily comprehensible. You could find a cheap copy on Amazon. The collection is in the public domain so you can also find it online here and there. Make sure to check out the podcast for some listening practice.
I also read the 25 January, 2024 issue of the London Review of Books. I read and read and read and at the very end I found a perfect TOEFLish article! It’s called “Petrifying Juices” and discusses the traces of molecules that can be found in fossils that otherwise seem to be entirely stone. It describes an article that may have inspired the book “Jurassic Park” thusly:
“In 1982, the entomologist George Poinar and electron microscopist Roberta Hess published a paper on a 40-million-year-old fossil fly stuck in a glob of amber. Exquisite images taken with Hess’s instruments reveal individual cells in the fly’s abdomen, frozen in death, a microscopic Pompeii. Zoom in further and you can see structures straight out of a biology textbook: mitochondria, bubble-shaped fat reservoirs, even cellular nuclei. Poinar and Hess later speculated that if a mosquito were preserved in amber just after it had sucked blood from a dinosaur, it might be possible to recover the dinosaur’s DNA from blood cells in the mosquito’s stomach.”
If you squint hard enough you could image a TOEFL reading passage about something like this. As I recall, one of the TPO sets (or ETS books) has an integrated writing question about the possibility of finding the remains of blood cells in a dinosaur fossil.
Meanwhile, I also read a cool book about shareware by Robert Moss called “Shareware Heroes.” Get it if you are into computer software from the 80s and 90s.
