ISEE Reading Comprehension: 36 questions in 35 minutes

You climb to reach Vanasoo, as the nearby villagers call their bog. This surprises everyone who arrives with the idea that a bog lies at the bottom of things. The path from the village runs through spruce and birch on level ground and then rises, gently but unmistakably, for a few hundred meters, and the trees shrink as it rises. By the time the boards begin, you are standing on a low dome of wet moss several kilometers across, a few meters higher than the forest it grew out of. No stream feeds it. None could, since water does not run uphill. Everything that wets this place has fallen from the sky, and what drains from it trickles off the edge into a dark, ditch-like moat that circles the dome.

The color is the next thing to adjust to. From a distance the surface reads as rust and olive. Up close it breaks into cushions of sphagnum moss, crimson and ochre and acid green, each one a crowded mass of small stems with no roots. Lift a handful and squeeze, and it wrings out like a bath sponge, for it can hold many times its own weight in water. The moss makes its own conditions. It pulls what few minerals the rain carries and gives back acid, until the water around it is sourer than tomato juice. Little else can live on those terms.

What does manage to live here looks stunted or strange. The pines along the boardwalk are barely as tall as a child, with trunks no thicker than a wrist, and a forester who cuts one and counts its rings may find a hundred years. At your feet the sundews, plants no wider than a coin, hold out red leaves beaded with glue. The beads are no ornament. Insects stuck there supply the nitrogen the rain does not. Among the cushions, pools lie black as coffee and perfectly still, looking as though they must be full of fish. They hold none.

Underfoot is the real reason Vanasoo matters. The moss grows at the top and dies below, and in that sour, airless dark, decay nearly stops, so the dead stems pile up as peat. The pile rises about a millimeter a year. A corer pushed down at the center of the dome travels seven meters before it grates on the clay of an old lake floor, the floor of a lake that this entire dome began by filling. Every grain of pollen that ever drifted here is down there, in order.

Late in the day, when the wind drops, the boards stop creaking and the place sounds like nothing at all. A crane calls once from the far edge. You feel the boards tremble slightly as someone a long way off walks toward you, the whole wet skin carrying a footfall across hundreds of meters, and you understand that you are standing on something nearer to a soaked quilt than to land. It took seven thousand years to make. A few good ditches could kill it.

You climb to reach Vanasoo, as the nearby villagers call their bog. This surprises everyone who arrives with the idea that a bog lies at the bottom of things. The path from the village runs through spruce and birch on level ground and then rises, gently but unmistakably, for a few hundred meters, and the trees shrink as it rises. By the time the boards begin, you are standing on a low dome of wet moss several kilometers across, a few meters higher than the forest it grew out of. No stream feeds it. None could, since water does not run uphill. Everything that wets this place has fallen from the sky, and what drains from it trickles off the edge into a dark, ditch-like moat that circles the dome.

The color is the next thing to adjust to. From a distance the surface reads as rust and olive. Up close it breaks into cushions of sphagnum moss, crimson and ochre and acid green, each one a crowded mass of small stems with no roots. Lift a handful and squeeze, and it wrings out like a bath sponge, for it can hold many times its own weight in water. The moss makes its own conditions. It pulls what few minerals the rain carries and gives back acid, until the water around it is sourer than tomato juice. Little else can live on those terms.

What does manage to live here looks stunted or strange. The pines along the boardwalk are barely as tall as a child, with trunks no thicker than a wrist, and a forester who cuts one and counts its rings may find a hundred years. At your feet the sundews, plants no wider than a coin, hold out red leaves beaded with glue. The beads are no ornament. Insects stuck there supply the nitrogen the rain does not. Among the cushions, pools lie black as coffee and perfectly still, looking as though they must be full of fish. They hold none.

Underfoot is the real reason Vanasoo matters. The moss grows at the top and dies below, and in that sour, airless dark, decay nearly stops, so the dead stems pile up as peat. The pile rises about a millimeter a year. A corer pushed down at the center of the dome travels seven meters before it grates on the clay of an old lake floor, the floor of a lake that this entire dome began by filling. Every grain of pollen that ever drifted here is down there, in order.

Late in the day, when the wind drops, the boards stop creaking and the place sounds like nothing at all. A crane calls once from the far edge. You feel the boards tremble slightly as someone a long way off walks toward you, the whole wet skin carrying a footfall across hundreds of meters, and you understand that you are standing on something nearer to a soaked quilt than to land. It took seven thousand years to make. A few good ditches could kill it.