Voyage of going: beyond the blue line 2

A. One feels a certain sympathy for Captain James Cook on the day in 1778 that he "discovered" Hawaii. Then on his third expedition to the Pacific, the British navigator had explored scores of islands across the breadth of the sea, from lush New Zealand to the lonely wastes of Easter Island This latest voyage had taken him thousands of miles north from the Society Islands to an archipelago so remote that even the ok! Polynesians back on Tahiti knew nothing about it. Imagine Cook's surprise, then, when the natives of Hawaii came paddling out in their canoes and greeted him in a familiar tongue, one he had heard on virtually every mote of inhabited land he had visited Marveling at the ubiquity of this Pacific language and culture, he later wondered in his journal: "How shall we account for this Nation spreading it self so far over this Vast ocean?"

B. Answers have been slow in coming. But now a startling archaeological find on the island of Efate, in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, has revealed an ancient seafaring people, the distant ancestors of today's Polynesians, taking their first steps into the unknown. The discoveries there have also opened a window into the shadowy work! of those early voyagers. At the same time, other pieces of this human puzzle are turning up in unlikely places. Climate data gleaned from slow-growing corals around the Pacific and from sediments in alpine lakes in South America may help explain how, more than a thousand years later, a second wave of seafarers beat their way across the entire Pacific.

C. What we have is a first- or second-generation site containing the graves of some of the Pacific's first explorers," says Spriggs, professor of archaeology at the Australian National University and co-leader of an international team excavating the site. It came to light only by luck A backhoe operator, digging up topsoil on the grounds of a derelict coconut plantation, scraped open a grave—the first of dozens in a burial ground some 3,000 years old It is the oldest cemetery ever found in the Pacific islands, and it harbors the bones of an ancient people archaeologists call the Lapita, a label that derives from a beach in New Caledonia where a landmark cache of their pottery was found in the 1950s. They were daring blue-water adventurers who roved the sea not just as expbrers but also as pioneers, bringing abng everything they would need to build new lives—their families and livestock, taro seedlings and stone tools.

D. Within the span of a few centuries the Lapita stretched the boundaries of their world from the jungle-clad vokanoes of Papua New Guinea to the bneliest coral outliers of Tonga, at feast 2,000 miles eastward in the Pacific. Abng the way they expbred millions of square miles of unknown sea, discovering and cobnizing scores of tropical islands never before seen by human eyes: Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa.

E. What little is known or surmised about them has been pieced together from fragments of pottery, animal bones, obsidian flakes, and such oblique sources as comparative linguistics and geochemistry. Although their voyages can be traced back to the northern islands of Papua New Guinea, their language variants of which are still spoken across the Pacific came from Taiwan. And their peculiar style of pottery decoration, created by pressing a carved stamp into the clay, probably had its roots in the northern Philippines. With the discovery of the Lapita cemetery on Efate, the volume of data available to researchers has expanded dramatically. The bones of at feast 62 individuals have been uncovered so far including old men, young women, even babies—and more skeletons are known to be in the ground Archaeobgists were also thrilled to discover six complete Lapita pots. It's an important find, Spriggs says, for it conclusively identifies the remains as Lapita. "It would be hard for anyone to argue that these aren't Lapita when you have human bones enshrined inside what is unmistakably a Lapita urn."

F. Several lines of evidence also undergird Spriggs's conclusion that this was a community of pioneers making their first voyages into the remote reaches of Oceania. For one thing, the radiocarbon dating of bones and charcoal places them early in the Lapita expansion. For another, the chemical makeup of the obsidian flakes littering the site indicates that the rock wasn't local; instead it was imported from a large island in Papua New Guinea's Bismarck Archipelago, the springboard for the Lapita's thrust into the Pacific. A particularly intriguing clue comes from chemical tests on the teeth of several skeletons. DNA teased from these ancient bones may also help answer one of the most puzzling questions in Pacific anthropobgy: Did all Pacific islanders spring from one source or many? Was there only one outward migration from a single point in Asia, or several from different points? "This represents the best opportunity we've had yet," says Spriggs, "to find out who the Lapita actually were, where they came from, and who their cbsest descendants are today.

G. "There is one stubborn question for which archaeobgy has yet to provide any answers: How did the Lapita accomplish the ancient equivalent of a moon landing, many times over? No one has found one of their canoes or any rigging, which could reveal how the canoes were sailed Nor do the oral histories and traditions of later Polynesians offer any insights, for they segue into myth long before they reach as far back in time as the Lapita." All we can say for certain is that the Lapita had canoes that were capable of ocean voyages, and they had the ability to sail them," says Geoff Irwin, a professor of archaeology at the University of Auckland and an avid yachtsman. Those sailing skills, he says, were developed and passed down over thousands of years by earlier mariners who worked their way through the archipelagoes of the western Pacific making short crossings to islands within sight of each other. Reaching Fiji, as they did a century or so later, meant crossing more than 500 miles of ocean, pressing on day after day into the great blue void of the Pacific. What gave them the courage to launch out on such a risky voyage?

H. The Lapita's thrust into the Pacific was eastward, against the prevailing trade winds, Irwin notes. Those nagging headwinds, he argues, may have been the key to their success. "They could sail out for days into the unknown and reconnoiter, secure in the knowledge that if they didn't find anything, they could turn about and catch a swift ride home on the trade winds. It's what made the whole thing work." Once out there, skilled seafarers would detect abundant leads to follow to land: seabirds and turtles, coconuts and twigs carried out to sea by the tides, and the afternoon pileup of clouds on the horizon that often betokens an island in the distance. Some islands may have broadcast their presence with far less subtlety than a cloud bank. Some of the most violent eruptions anywhere on the planet during the past 10,000 years occurred in Melanesia, which sits nervously in one of the most explosive volcanic regions on Earth. Even less spectacular eruptions would have sent plumes of smoke bilbwing into the stratosphere and rained ash for hundreds of miles. It's possible that the Lapita saw these signs of distant islands and later sailed off in their direction, knowing they would find land For returning explorers, successful or not, the geography of their own archipelagoes provided a safety net to keep them from overshooting their home ports and sailing off into eternity.

I. However they did it, the Lapita spread themselves a third of the way across the Pacific, then called it quits for reasons known only to them. Ahead lay the vast emptiness of the central Pacific, and perhaps they were too thinly stretched to venture farther. They probably never numbered more than a few thousand in total, and in their rapid migration eastward they encountered hundreds of islands more than 300 in Fiji alone. Still, more than a millennium would pass before the Lapita's descendants, a people we now call the Polynesians, struck out in search of new territory.

Questions 1-7

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement is true

NO if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

1 Captain cook once expected the Hawaii might speak another language of people from other pacific islands.

2 Captain cook depicted number of cultural aspects of Polynesians in his journal.

3 Professor Spriggs and his research team went to the Efate to try to find the site of ancient cemetery.

4 The Lapita completed a journey of around 2,000 miles in a period less than a centenary.

5 The Lapita were the first inhabitants in many pacific islands.

6 The unknown pots discovered in Efate had once been used for cooking.

7 The um buried in Efate site was plain as it was without any decoration.

Questions 8 -10

Summary

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than Two words from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 8-10 on your answer sheet.

Scientific Evident found in Efate site

Tests show the human remains and the charcoal found in the buried um are from the start of the Lapita period. Yet The.........8........ covering many of the Efate site did not come from that area.

Then examinations carried out on the.........9........ discovered at Efate site reveal that not everyone buried there was a native living in the area. In fact, DNA could identify the Lapita's nearest.........10...........present-days.

Questions 11-13

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

11 What did the Lapita travel in when they crossed the oceans?

12 In Irwins’s view, what would the Latipa have relied on to bring them fast back to the base?

13 Which sea creatures would have been an indication to the Lapita of where to find land?

Section 2

European Heat Wave

A. IT WAS the summer, scientists now realise, when felt. We knew that summer 2003 was remarkable: global warming at last made itself unmistakably Britain experienced its record high temperature and continental Europe saw forest fires raging out of control, great rivers drying of a trickle and thousands of heat-related deaths. But just how remarkable is only now becoming clean.

B. The three months of June, July and August were the warmest ever recorded in western and central Europe, with record national highs in Portugal, Germany and Switzerland as well as Britain. And they were the warmest by a very long way Over a great rectangular block of the earth stretching from west of Paris to northern Italy, taking in Switzerland and southern Germany, the average temperature for the summer months was 3.78°c above the long-term norm, said the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, which is one of the world's lending institutions for the monitoring and analysis of temperature records.

C. That excess might not seem a lot until you are aware of the context - but then you realise it is enormous. There is nothing like this in previous data, anywhere. It is considered so exceptional that Professor Phil Jones, the CRU's (Erector, is prepared to say openly - in a way few scientists have done before - that the 2003 extreme may be directly attributed, not to natural climate variability, but to global warming caused by human actions.

D. Meteorologists have hitherto contented themselves with the formula that recent high temperatures are consistent with predictions" of climate change. For the great block of the map - that stretching between 35-50N and 0-20E - the CRU has reliable temperature records dating back to 1781. Using as a baseline the average summer temperature recorded between 1961 andl990, departures from the temperature norm, or "anomalies': over the area as a whole can easily be plotted. As the graph shows, such is the variability of our climate that over the past 200 years, there have been at least half a dozen anomalies, in terms of excess temperature - the peaks on the graph denoting very hot years - approaching, or even exceeding, 20 °c. But there has been nothing remotely like 2003, when the anomaly is nearly four degrees.

E. "This is quite remarkable," Professor Jones told The Independent. "It's very unusual in a statistical sense. If this series had a normal statistical distribution, you wouldn't get this number. There turn period “how often it could be expected to recur” would be something like one in a thou-sand years. If we look at an excess above the average of nearly four degrees, then perhaps nearly three degrees of that is natural variability, because we’ve seen that in past summers. But the final degree of it is likely to be due to global warming, caused by human actions.

F. The summer of 2003 has, in a sense, been one that climate scientists have long been expecting. Until now, the warming has been manifesting itself mainly in winters that have been less cold than in summers that have been much hotter. Last week, the United Nations predicted that winters were warming so quickly that winter sports would die out in Europe's lower-level ski resorts. But sooner or later the unprecedented hot summer was bound to come, and this year it did.

G. One of the most dramatic features of the summer was the hot nights, especially in the first half of August. In Paris, the temperature never dropped below 230°c (73.40T) at all between 7 and 14August, and the city recorded its warmest-ever night on 11-12 August, when the mercury did not drop below 25.50°c (77.90°F). Germany recorded its warmest-ever night at Weinbiet in the Rhine valley with a lowest figure of 27.60°c (80.60T) on 13 August, and similar record-breaking night-time temperatures were recorded in Switzerland and Italy.

H. The 15,000 excess deaths in France during August, compared with previous years, have been related to the high night-time temperatures. The number gradually increased during the first 12days of the month, peaking at about 2,000 per day on the night of 12-13 August, then fell off dramatically after 14 August when the minimum temperatures fell by about 50C. The elderly were most affected, with a 70 per cent increase in mortality rate in those aged 75-94.

I. For Britain, the year as a whole is likely to be the warmest ever recorded, but despite the high temperature record on 10 August, the summer itself - defined as the June, July and August period - still comes behind 1976 and 1995, when there were longer periods of intense heat. At the moment, the year is on course to be the third-hottest ever in the global temperature record, which goes back to 1856, behind 1998 and 2002 but when all the records for October, November and December are collated, it might move into second place, Professor Jones said. The 10 hottest years in the record have all now occurred since 1990. Professor Jones is in no doubt about the astonishing nature of European summer of 2003.’The temperatures recorded were out of all proportion to the previous record," he said. "It was the warmest summer in the past 500 years and probably way beyond that It was enormously exceptional."

J. His colleagues at the University of East Anglia's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research are now planning a special study of it. "It was a summer that has not: been experienced before, either in terms of the temperature extremes that were reached, or the range and diversity of the impacts of the extreme heat," said the centre’s executive director, Professor Mike Hulme. "It will certainly have left its mark on a number of countries, as to how they think and plan for climate change in the future, much as the 2000 floods have revolutionised the way the Government is thinking about flooding in the UK. "The 2003 heat wave will have similar repercussions across Europe."

Questions 14-19

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet, write

 

TRUE	if the statement is true
FALSE	if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN	if the information is not given in the passage

14 The average summer temperature in 2003 is approximately four degrees higher than that of the past.

15 Jones believes the temperature statistic is within the normal range.

16 Human factor is one of the reasons that caused hot summer.

17 In large city, people usually measure temperature twice a day.

18 Global warming has obvious effect of warmer winter instead of hotter summer before 2003.

19 New ski resorts are to be built on a high-altitude spot.

Questions 20-21

Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR NUMBERS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 20-21 on your answer sheet

20 What are the two hottest years in Britain besides 2003?

21 What will affect UK government policies besides climate change according to Hulme?

 

Questions 22-26

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage. Write your answers in boxes 22-26 On your answer sheet

In the summer of 2003, thousands of extra death occurred in the country of____22_____. Moreover, world-widely, the third record of hottest summer date from_____23____, after the year of______24_____. According to Jones, all the 10 hottest years happened from_____25____. However, summer of 2003 was at the peak of previous ____26____years, perhaps even more.

Question 27

Choose the correct letter A, B, c or D

Write your answer in box 27 on your answer sheet

27 Which one can be best served as the title of this passage in the following options?

A Global Warming effect

B Global Warming in Europe

C The Effects of hot temperature

D Hottest summer in Europe

Section 3