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Directions: In this section, there is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions or complete statements in the fewest possible words. Please write your answers on Answer Sheet 2. Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage. Ive heard from and talked to many people who described how Mother Nature simplified their lives for them. Theyd lost their home and many or all of their possessions through fires, floods, earthquakes, or some other disaster. Losing everything you own under such circumstances can be distressing, but the people Ive heard from all saw their loss, ultimately as a blessing. The fire saved us the agony of deciding what to keep and what to get rid of, one woman wrote. And once all those things were no longer there, she and her husband saw how they had weighed them down and complicate their lives. There was so much stuff we never used and that was just taking up space. We vowed when we started over, wed replace only what we needed, and this time wed do it right. Weve kept our promise: we dont have much now, but what we have is exactly what we want. Though weve never had a catastrophic loss such as that, Gibbs and I did have a close call shortly before we decided to simplify. At that time we lived in a fire zone. One night a firestorm rages through and destroyed over six hundred homes in our community. That tragedy gave us the opportunity to look objectively at the goods wed accumulated. | 
