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What Makes a Meteor Shower?
[1]
Long before cameras, poets have tried to capture the marvel that is a meteor shower. Even in the age of cameras, they still prove hard to catch. Scientists have pondered them in wonderment. Children look for them and point, shriek wide-eyed (1) with surprise. They've been likened with (2) diamonds and darts, pointers and prophecies. These so-called shooting stars are some of the glories of the universe, known to just about everyone. But exactly what causes them is a lesser-known fact. (3)
[2]
On a warm summer night, there might be nothing more pleasantly surprising than seeing a "star" shoot across the dark. Suppose, instead, you saw (4) 15 or 20 of these streaking lights, or perhaps a stream of them that went on for half an hour. You will be seeing (5) what scientists call a meteor shower. It would be nice to simply view these showers as the celestial cousins of rain showers, occasional events that start and stop, hopefully lasting long enough for you to catch a photo. Appropriately, (6) they actually have a slightly more complicated origin story when (7) you’re watching a meteor shower, you’re actually bearing witness to Earths’ atmosphere (8) being sprayed with dust from a passing comet.
[3]
Comets like other celestial bodies travel in orbits usually elliptical ones. (9) The planets, as we know, also travel in orbits. Earth’s orbit may, every so often, cross the orbit of a comet. To understand what happens when this intersection occurs, one would need to understand something about the structure of a comet. A comet has three main parts: its nucleus, (10) a compressed mass of gas and dust; the coma, a cloud that forms around the nucleus, and the tail, (11) a blazing band of space dust that follows the nucleus on its trajectory. Every so often, the orbit of a comet and the orbit of Earth May cross in such a way that the tail of the comet whips into Earth’s atmosphere. What happens when all that dust enters our atmosphere? Like everything else that enters our atmosphere, the dust burns up and kept (12) shooting through the sky. These meteors generally dissipate before reaching Earth’s surface, but while they last, they look to earthbound stargazers like a rain of shooting stars.
[4]
The showers have different names, earned because they happen somewhat regularly and assign (13) based on the constellation they happen to be near. Coincidentally, (14) the Perseids are close to Perseus, while the Geminids are close to Gemini. You can see the appeal of the heavens to poets, who have named their features after the large-than-life figures of myth and legend. The night sky continues to fascinate, as it well should, in both its fact and fantasy. The next time you find your eyes filled with weird sights (15) in the black sky above, know that Earth has rubbed shoulders with one of its transitory celestial neighbors.
You will be seeing what scientists call a meteor shower.
Title
What Makes a Meteor Shower?
Your Result
Correct
Difficulty
Hard
Your Pace
0:02
Others' Pace
0:23
Video Explanation
Text Explanation
The meteor shower described in this sentence is a hypothetical one. That is, it’s one the author asks the reader to imagine—not a real meteor shower taking place now, in the past, or even in the future. We can infer this from the fact that the previous sentence tells us to “suppose” we are looking at the many shooting stars that make up a meteor shower. We’re not actually looking at a whole bunch of shooting stars: we’re thinking about what it would be like to see them.
Answer A (“You will be seeing”) uses the future tense, implying that a real meteor shower is definitely going to happen in the future. But the meteor shower mentioned here is imaginary, existing in the reader’s mind. So answer A can be ruled out.
Likewise, answer C (“You were seeing”) suggests that a real meteor shower did take place and was observed by the reader. But again, this isn’t true: the meteor shower is an example that the author asks the reader to imagine. Thus, we can cross out answer C as well.
Answer D is incorrect because the verb doesn’t agree with the tense. “Will see" is future conditional tense. It is common to mix up conditional tenses ("would see" in this context is present conditional) or use them interchangeably, but they refer to separate timeframes.
That leaves us with answer B, which uses the helper verb would to indicate that we are not talking about the real world. Verb tenses with would as a helper are called conditional and describe something that is hypothetical, unlikely, or even impossible: “If you saw a stream of shooting stars, you would be seeing a meteor shower.” Answer B is the best choice because it describes an imagined event.
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