Practice Test #12
For the TOEFL® Listening Section
Passage #2: Transcript
Sources:
Fraknoi, A., Morrison, D., & Wolff, S.C. (2016). Gravity with more than two bodies.
Fraknoi, A., Morrison, D., & Wolff, S.C. (2016). The birth of modern astronomy.
All right, so, just to quickly pick up where we left off, the ancient Greeks and Romans believed there were seven
planets. All these were all visible to the naked eye: Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, the sun, and the moon.
Nowadays, we don't consider the sun and the moon planets, but as of right now, we have 8 planets in our solar
system. Well, 9 if you count Pluto as a planet.
Anyway, so, we have Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, Earth, of course, and later, Pluto, as I just mentioned,
which gives us seven. What two planets are we missing here?
Jeff?
Uranus and Neptune, I think.
That's right. The discovery of the planet Neptune was one of the high points in the development of gravitational
theory.
You might remember that most people before this time believed in the geocentric view of the Earth, that is, that
the Earth was the center of the universe and that the sun and the moon, and the rest of the planets revolved
around it. And it was Copernicus who first proposed the heliocentric model, that is, that the Earth and the other
planets in our solar system revolve around the sun.
Still, it took a couple of hundred years for scientists and researchers to eventually change their view and admit
that the heliocentric model was and is, indeed, accurate.
Professor, why did it take so long for people to agree with Copernicus? I mean, didn't the heliocentric
model make more sense? Of course, the other planets don't revolve around the Earth.
Well, I think it is natural for us humans to believe we are the center of the universe, but besides that, Copernicus
couldn't explain the reason why and how the planets revolved around the sun. The geocentric model had been
accepted for over a thousand years. Copernicus couldn't prove his hypothesis; it was just a theory.
Now, this is where the hero of the story of the heliocentric model, gravity, comes into play. The motion of the
planets had to be explained through some type of mechanism, and that turned out to be gravity. And it's that
gravitational pull that eventually helped astronomers understand how the planets revolve around the sun.
And that leads us to the discovery of Neptune. Okay, so, let's see who did the reading. Can anyone tell me who
discovered Uranus?
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Practice Test #12
For the TOEFL® Listening Section
Kim.
It was William Herschel, in 1781, I think. Well, other people had seen it before, but he was the first to
classify it as a planet.
And you remembered the year, too, very nice.
Right, so, in the decade following its discovery, the orbit of Uranus had been calculated, but there was a
problem. Uranus did not move in the orbit predicted by the theory of gravitational pull. And by 1840, over 50
years after it was called a planet, it was clear that Uranus did not move in orbit according to the one predicted
by gravitational theory.
In 1843, John Couch Adams, a young Englishman, began a detailed mathematical analysis of the motion of
Uranus to see whether they might be produced by the pull of an unknown planet. He guessed that there must be
a planet more distant from the sun than Uranus, and then determined the mass and orbit it had to have to
account for Uranus’ strange orbit.
About a month later, an astronomer in Germany started to look for the planet. He quickly found and identified it.
It was less than a degree from the position predicted by Adams. The discovery of the eighth planet, now known
as Neptune, was a major triumph for gravitational theory because it dramatically confirmed its laws with a great
deal of accuracy.
This discovery was a major step forward in combining gravitational theory with careful observations. Such work
continues in our own times with the discovery of planets around other stars.
And that leads me to...
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