Online Reading Test Item 2 of 30 Emmanuel Gomez Need help? Access Wizard Read the selection and answer the question. Which of the following best describes the main idea of the selection? A The indigenous history of wild landscapes 8 The connections between animals and human beings The difficulty of an unusually long and cold winter season Excerpt from The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich It's May and I've just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep- sheltered from wind. A front is pulling the huge sky over me, and from the dark a hallstone has hit me on the head. I'm trailing a band of two thousand sheep across a stretch of Wyoming badlands, a fifty-miletrip that takes five days because sheep shade up in hot sun and won't budge until it's cool. Bunched together now, and excited into a run by the storm, they drift across dry land, tumbling Into draws like water and surge out again onto the rugged, choppy plateaus that are the building blocks of this state. The name Wyoming comes from an Indian word meaning at the great plains," but the plains are really valleys, great arid valleys, sieteen hundred square miles, with the horizon bending up on al sides into mountain ranges. This gives the vastness a sheltering look. Winter lasts six months here. Prevalling winds spill snowdrifts to the east, and new storms from the northwest replenish them. This white bulk is sometimes dizzying even nauseating to look at. At twenty, thirty and forty degrees below zero, not only does your car not work, but neither do your mind and body. The landscape hardens into a dungeon of space. During the winter, while I was riding to find a new calf, my Jeans froze to the saddle, and in the silence that such cold creates I felt like the first person on earth, or the last D The beauty and solitude that can be found in the natural world