Passage
Read the full passage. Bracketed letters like [A] mark the four positions for the insert-text question.
The Battle No One Lived to Describe
¶1 For more than a century, one of the most famous battles in American history was known through a single story pieced together after the fighting was over. Every soldier who fought in its final, deadliest phase died before he could describe what happened. Historians filled the silence with indirect evidence and assumptions about how soldiers were supposed to behave under fire. That account hardened into a national legend, repeated in paintings, books, and films. Only in the 1980s did new evidence pulled directly out of the ground force historians to ask how much of the legend had actually happened.
¶2 On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led about six hundred soldiers of the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry against a large camp of Lakota, Cheyenne, and other Native nations of the northern Plains. The camp was set up along the Little Bighorn River, in what is now Montana. He split the regiment into three groups, sending two to attack the camp from different directions while he led about two hundred men toward the northern end of the village. The other two groups met heavy resistance of their own and never reached him. Within about an hour, every soldier who had ridden with Custer that afternoon was dead. When reinforcements arrived two days later, no one remained from that group to explain what had happened.
¶3 Investigators who reached the battlefield afterward noted where the bodies had come to rest. Many, including Custer's, were clustered on a single low hill, a pattern that seemed to fit a familiar story: soldiers gathering under fire for one last, organized defense. Captain Edward Godfrey, who had fought elsewhere on the field and survived, published an influential 1892 account built directly on this pattern. He argued that Custer's men had recognized they were overwhelmed and deliberately formed a defensive line rather than scattering. Godfrey's account matched what readers already expected of soldiers under attack. For the next ninety years, it shaped nearly every popular retelling of the battle, appearing in textbooks and films as settled fact rather than one officer's reconstruction.
¶4 That settled status lasted until 1983, when a grass fire swept across the battlefield and burned away the vegetation that had covered it for a century. [A] The cleared ground gave archaeologists, led by Douglas Scott, their first real chance to search the site systematically with metal detectors. Among the thousands of objects recovered were hundreds of spent cartridge cases, the metal shells a rifle ejects after firing. [B] Each one carries a firing-pin signature, a set of tiny marks left by the weapon that fired it, almost as distinctive as a fingerprint. [C] By matching these marks, the team could trace where a single weapon had been fired from during the fight. [D] Because the cases from individual weapons turned up scattered across a wide stretch of hillside rather than concentrated in one place, the team concluded that Custer's men had not held a fixed defensive line but had been forced into a fast-moving, scattered retreat.
¶5 This picture did not come from nowhere. Native American participants had described a chaotic, fast-moving fight in interviews given decades after 1876, but those accounts were largely dismissed at the time as unreliable. The archaeological evidence gave those earlier descriptions a kind of confirmation that oral testimony alone had never been granted. Some historians now argue that Godfrey's account said more about nineteenth-century ideas of military honor than about what actually happened on the hillside. Others urge caution, noting that a single afternoon of gunfire cannot fully explain a battle that unfolded in stages. The fire itself may have destroyed evidence as easily as it exposed it. How much of Custer's last stand was invented, and how much simply went unrecorded, remains a question historians are still working through.
Questions
11 questions — every TOEFL Reading question type, in test order.
Answer
Answer
Answer
Answer
Answer
Highlighted: "Because the cases from individual weapons turned up scattered across a wide stretch of hillside rather than concentrated in one place, the team concluded that Custer's men had not held a fixed defensive line but had been forced into a fast-moving, scattered retreat."
Answer
Answer
Answer
Answer
None of this would have been possible without the accident that came first.
Where would the sentence best fit?
Answer
For more than a century, the battle known as Custer's Last Stand was understood only through an account built after the fighting ended, and archaeological evidence recovered in the 1980s has forced historians to reconsider how much of that account was ever accurate.