Question

there are several questions about this passage.
this excerpt is from a book that explains the science of everyday objects like tall buildings, bicycles, and automobiles.
from atoms under the floorboards
1
one billion cars on the planet. count them! stack them on top of one another and youd get a pile 170,000 times higher than mount everest—tall enough to reach to the moon four times over. park them bumper to bumper and theyd stretch across the united states more than 1,200 times. a billion (a thousand million) is the kind of number most of us find hard to picture. to put it in some kind of perspective, the worlds population is a smidgen over 7 billion; between us, we guzzle 2 billion cups of coffee a day. there are roughly 6 billion mobile phones in circulation—and anywhere between 1 and 2 billion sheep. if you can get past a mental image of a sheep tucked behind the wheel of a jaguar, bleating into the mobile phone thats clamped, cloven hoof - style, to its jaw, can you possibly imagine a billion cars?
2
the interesting thing for me isnt that there are so many cars in the world, but why. what is it about cars thats made them, in the space of just over a century, one of the most successful inventions of all time? not surprisingly, the answer is all to do with science.
whats so good about cars?
3
cars are chemistry labs on wheels. and though that might not sound so interesting, it accounts absolutely for their ubiquity. take away the leather seats, the gleaming chrome, the go - faster stripes and all the rest, and youre left with a handful of tin cans called cylinders, where petrol explodes into power. cars are built around engines, and engines (or internal combustion engines, to give them their full name) burn petrol with oxygen in the air to release the energy locked inside it. we think of burning as a way of making fire, but its essentially a chemical reaction between oxygen and fuel that just
part a
this sentence is from the passage.
\the simple science of cars is so utterly mundane that we scarcely give it a thought: pump the petrol in your tank, turn the key and off you go.\ (paragraph 3)
what does the word mundane mean in this sentence?

1. commonplace
2. essential
3. natural
4. sensible

part b
which detail from the sentence best supports the correct answer from part a?

1. \the simple science of cars\
2. \we scarcely give it a thought\
3. \pump the petrol in your tank\
4. \turn the key and off you go\

Explanation:

Part A

To determine the meaning of "mundane", we analyze the context. The sentence says the science of cars is so mundane we scarcely think about it (pump petrol, turn key, go). "Commonplace" means ordinary or familiar, matching the idea that car operation is routine we don't think about. "Essential" (necessary), "natural" (inherent), and "sensible" (reasonable) don't fit the context of being unremarkable/routine.

For Part A, the correct answer is "commonplace" (routine/unremarkable). The detail "we scarcely give it a thought" shows the science of cars is so ordinary we don't think about it, supporting "commonplace". Other options ("simple science", "pump petrol", "turn key") describe actions but not the ordinariness.

Answer:

1. commonplace

Part B