Passage
5
Questions 21 to 25 are based on the
following passage.
Charles Darwin
was born on February 12, 1809, at Shrewsbury, England, the second son of Dr.
Robert Darwin, an eminently successful physician. From his earliest youth,
Darwin was passionate lover of the outdoors. As he himself said, "I was
born a naturalist."Every aspect of nature intrigued him. He loved to
collect to fish and hunt, and to read nature books School, consisting largely
of the study of the classics, bored him intolerably. Before he turned seventeen
years old, his father sent him to the University of Edinburgh to study
medicine. But medicine terrified Charles, and he continued to devote much of
his time to the study of nature. When it became clear that he did not want to
become a physician, his father sent him early in 1828 to Cambridge to study
theology. This seemed a reasonable choice, since virtually all the naturalists
in England at that time were ministers, as were the professors at Cambridge who
taught botany and geology. Darwin's letters and biographical notes show that at
Cambridge he devoted more time to collecting beetles, discussing botany and
geology with his professors, and hunting and riding with similarly inclined
friends than to his studies. Yet he did well in his examinations, and when he
took his B.A. in 1831 he stood tenth on the list of nonhonors students. More
importantly, when Darwin had completed his Cambridge years he was an
accomplished young naturalist.
Immediately upon
finishing his studies, Darwin received an invitation to join The Beagle as
naturalist and companion of Captain Robert FitzRoy, who had been commissioned
to survey the coasts of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, and Peru to provide
information for making better charts. The voyage was to be completed within two
or three years but actually lasted five. The Beagle left Plymouth on December
27, 1831, when Darwin was twenty-two years old, and returned to England on
October 2, 1836. Darwin used these five years to their fullest extent. In his
Journal of Researches, he tells about all the places he visited-volcanic and coral
islands, tropical forests in Brazil, the vast pampas of Patagonia, a crossing
of the Andes from Chile to Tucuman in Argentina, and much, much more. Every day
brought unforgettable new experiences, a valuable background for his life's
work.He collected specimens from widely different groups of organisms, he dug
out important fossils in Patagonia, he devoted much of his time to geology, but
most of all he observed aspects of nature and asked himself many questions as
to the how and why of natural processes. He asked "why" questions not
only about geological features and animal life, but also about political and
social situations.And it was his ability to ask profound questions and his
perseverance in trying to answer them that would eventually make Darwin a great
scientist.
In his childhood, Darwin was interested in____