What is the passage mainly about?

Kept off the ships, Marie Tharp drew the sea floor from numbers and found a rift nobody had seen. (The passage joins the obstacle, the work she did instead, and what that work revealed. The other choices take one piece out of context.)

According to the passage, why was Tharp not allowed on the research ships?

Women were thought to bring bad luck at sea. (The first paragraph gives the reason directly, and it has nothing to do with her skill: she was a trained geologist and mapmaker.)

In this passage, a "rift" is

a place where something is being pulled apart (The passage defines it in the same sentence, right after the comma: a place where the floor was being pulled apart.)

Why did the earthquake map change Heezen's mind?

It put earthquakes exactly where she said the floor was splitting. (Two maps made from unrelated data agreed. Earthquakes falling inside her valley is what a splitting floor would produce.)

The Woman Who Drew the Sea Floor: Level 2 Reading Comprehension Questions

In 1948, Marie Tharp took a job at a laboratory in New York that studied the ocean floor. She was a trained geologist and a skilled mapmaker. She was not allowed on the research ships, because women were thought to bring bad luck at sea.

So she worked ashore with whatever the ships sent back. Bruce Heezen and others crossed the Atlantic, bouncing sound off the bottom and writing down how long each echo took to return. Tharp turned those columns of numbers into a picture of the sea floor, drawing by hand, profile by profile.

A shape kept appearing. Down the middle of the Atlantic ran a long range of mountains, and along the top of that range ran a narrow valley, like a crack. She said it looked like a rift, a place where the floor was being pulled apart. Heezen called the idea girl talk.

Then someone plotted the earthquakes of the Atlantic on the same map. They fell in a line, inside her valley. Heezen stopped calling it girl talk.

Comprehension questions