CBEST Reading Practice Test 1

Read the passage below. Then answer the four questions that follow Imagine going to a fast food restaurant a few years from now. You order a burger, and before you receive your order, the burger is placed through gamma-ray treatment. Order some fish, and you’ll have to wait for the fish to be placed under a pressure three times higher than the pressure found in the deepest part of the ocean. Why would restaurants go to such lengths? Simply, to make sure your food is safe. The threat of bacteria entering into our food is at an all-time high. New bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Vibrio vulnificus have alarmed many food handlers, and have caused an increasing number of food poisoning deaths for the last five years. As a result, food processors are adopting rigorous standards of cleanliness. Food scientists are helping. Many scientists are proposing radical alternatives to common food treatment, such as some of the examples described above. While the new techniques are costly, they are not as costly as the potential lawsuits, bad publicity, and human loss that one outbreak could cause. The real price to this new technology may not be in dollars, but in overall taste. Scientists admit that tastes may vary in certain foods depending on their processing treatment. As a layman, it seems that placing an oyster under 90,000 pounds of pressure sure seems likely to have some effect on the taste. I just hope that when the gamma rays remove any bacteria, they’ll leave me with the wonderful joy of eating a delicious burger. The writer’s main purpose in writing this passage is to