Ielts Reading: True, False, Not Given

More than ten years ago, while taking the temperature of the universe, astronomers found something odd. They discovered that a patch of sky, spanning the width of 20 moons, was unusually cold.

1. (Astronomers often find something odd on the sky.)

• True

• False

• Not Given

The astronomers were measuring the thermal radiation that bathes the entire universe, a glowing relic of the big bang. To gaze at this cosmic microwave background, or CMB, is to glimpse the primordial¹ universe, a time when it was less than 400,000 years old.

2. (The CMB is the thermal radiation across the entire universe.)

• True

• False

• Not Given

The CMB blankets the sky, and looks pretty much the same everywhere, existing at a feebly cold temperature of 2.725 kelvins - just a couple degrees warmer than absolute zero.

3. (The CMB varies from extremely low to very high temperatures.)

• True

• False

• Not Given

Born from the quantum froth that was the universe a half-moment after the big bang, those random fluctuations help scientists understand what the cosmos is made of and how it all came to be.

4. (Investigation of fluctuations of temperature in the space help scientists to understand what the cosmos is made of.)

• True

• False

• Not Given

But now, they're homing in on a prime suspect: an enormous cavern of emptiness called a cosmic supervoid, so big that it might be the largest structure in the universe.

5. (The cosmic supervoid is the largest structure in the universe.)

• True

• False

• Not Given