Hi please check this for me and grade me out of 10. Thanks in advance.
Reading Passage
It is common knowledge that forecasting is an attempt by
meteorologists to determine what weather will be like in the future.
Hindcasting is the opposite of forecasting, an attempt to determine
what weather was like in the past. Meteorologists wish that records
of weather had been kept in full for at least a few millennia, but it
has been only in the last century that detailed records of the weather
have been kept. Thus, meteorologists need to hindcast the weather,
and they do so by using all sorts of information from other fields as
diverse as archeology, botany, geology, literature, and art. These pieces
of information from other fields that are used as a basis for drawing
conclusions about what the weather must have been like at some point
in the past are called proxies.
Listening Passage
(professor): Now let me talk about how hindcasting was
used in one particular situation. This situation has to do with the weather
in seventeenth-century Holland. It appears, from proxies in
paintings from the time by numerous artists, that the weather
in Holland in the seventeenth century was much colder than it
is today. Seventeenth-century paintings show really cold winter
landscapes with huge snow drifts and ice skaters skating on
frozen canals. Since it’s unusual today for snow to drift as high
as it is in the paintings and for the canals to freeze over so that
skaters can skate across them as they are in the paintings,
these paintings appear to serve as proxies that demonstrate
that the weather when the paintings were created in the
seventeenth century was much colder than it is today.
My response:
The reading passage gives the general idea about how the meteorologists determine the weather condition, whereas the professor discusses about hindcasting in particular.
According to the author, meteorologists adopt different techniques in order to determine how the weather turns out to be in future which is known as forecasting. He further states that in the past time information about the weather’s condition was gathered by aid of archeologists, botanists etc. He named these pieces of information obtained as proxies, which ultimately helped to find out the end result of the weather at that certain period of time in the past. He calls this whole process as hindcasting.
To support the author’s opinion, the professor gives an example of hindcasting that had been used in seventeenth century. According to him, paintings provided one of the best source to determine the weather in the particular area, for example in Holland. The snowy scenic beauty and the people playing on the frozen surface of the canals in the painting gave a clue about the weather condition at that time.Although, today it is barely possible to skate on the surface of frozen canal, but the painting showed the severity of weather condition in the past. So the painting can be considered as a proxy.
TOEFL listening lectures: A lecture from a life sciences class (2)