question_answer

Direction: Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

If you decide to become a paleontologist you would study plants and other organisms that lived in prehistoric times. That would be a time more than 5,500 years ago. Someone might ask how could one study something that is lost and gone. The answer is, by studying fossils. A fossil is the mark, imprint or remain of a plant or animal left in sedimentary rocks. A fossil is formed after its marks or remains get buried in the mud or sand which is collected at the bottom of rivers, lakes or seas. With time, the weight of the upper layer presses down on the lower layers and turns it into rock.

Paleontologists study fossils to understand how a piant or an animal has changed over the years. They do this by comparing the fossils to what is alive today. But some plants and animals, like the dinosaurs, are not alive today. That makes a paleontologist?s job extremely difficult. They have to make sense out of a fossil in much the same way as you would with a jigsaw puzzle. To do this, they also need to understand whether the rocks were formed under the sea or land. They are experts at telling the age of rocks.

If you decide to become a paleontologist, you would be of great help to your country in locating oil reservoirs.

Oil is often found in rocks that contain certain fossils.

Oil companies use such fossils as clues to locate oil reservoirs.

When the upper layers of mud or sand press down on the lower layers for hundreds of years, _____.

A) the lower layers turn into soil

B) the upper layers turn into soil

C) the lower layers turn into rock

D) the upper layers turn into rock

E) None of these