Practicing on these TOEFL iBT writing tests helps raise your score in the TOEFL Writing Section. Check the audio transcript and sample essay below. This video is in the series of NEW TOEFL iBT Preparation: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2jvSGmpWX1XL96rWU4YASA7GNOE1WhJH
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READING PASSAGE (3 minutes)
Scant physical evidence remains of the first human domestication of grain. Still, there is enough to conclude that ancient peoples, motivated by the nutritional value of bread or cakes made of wild wheat, looked for controlled ways to grow it to provide a consistent food supply. Three related discoveries are likely to have led to the introduction of bread as the first grain-based food.
The first discovery was that wheat could be prepared for use by grinding. People probably began consuming wheat by chewing it raw. Because wheat is very hard, they gradually discovered that it was less trouble to eat if crushed to paste between two stones—the result would have been the ancestor of the drier, more powdery wheat flour we use today.
From there, it was a short step to the next breakthrough: baking the simplest bread, which requires no technology but fire. Loaves of wheat paste, when baked into bread, could be stored for long periods, certainly longer than raw seeds. This kept the food value of wheat available for an extended period after it had been harvested.
Finally, ancient peoples found that, if the paste was allowed to sit in the open, yeast spores from the air settled on it and began fermenting the wheat. This natural process of fermentation caused bubbles to form in the wheat paste that suggested it would be lighter in texture and even easier to eat when baked.
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TRANSCRIPT OF THE LECTURE:
Conventional wisdom says that a very primitive kind of bread was the first grain food that human societies ate. But, you know, for the last few decades, there’s been an alternative hypothesis that quite a few anthropologists are starting to give a closer look. That hypothesis says that it was, in fact, beer—not bread—that was the first grain food. Sound strange? Consider a couple of things.
For one thing, you don’t have to grind wheat to make it easier to eat. If you keep it in a moist environment, it naturally starts sprouting, with a new baby plant splitting the hard seed case in half. Sprouted wheat is sweeter, softer, and actually more nutritious than whole wheat seeds—and it would have developed without human effort. In order to discover the usefulness of ground wheat, someone had to get the bright idea of crushing it. To discover the usefulness of sprouted wheat, people just had to do nothing and let it sit. Which do you think happened first?
Another thing: What turns grain into beer is fermentation, and wheat begins to ferment almost as soon as it’s stored—from water and yeasts in the air. After the wheat sprouted, it would have started to ferment. The process would have been obvious because of the bubbles and foam that formed. People could have experimented by tasting it and discovering the first beer.
And even if you assume that people were already grinding wheat to paste, think about it. The paste ferments and bubbles. Is it likely that early peoples would have thought to fire it before eating? We’re used to cooking our food, but in prehistoric times, the idea that you would take fire to food to improve it for eating was not obvious.
