READING PASSAGE 42

You are advised to spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-15 which refer to Reading Passage 42 below

SOME MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

When airline pilot Percy Trezise began to explore the rock art galleries of Cape York Peninsula in the early 1960s – a hobby that was to obsess Him for the next 30 years – the consensus of academic opinion was that Australia had been peopled for less than 10,000 years. Stone tools found in Kakadu have now been dated to at least 50,000 years, and campsites as diverse as Lake Mungo in the VVillandra lakes region of NSW and WA’s upper Swan River have yielded tools charcoal radiocarbon-dated to between 38,000 and 45,000 years. More than a dozen other sites date to more than 30,000 years – indisputable evidence, says archaeologist Josephine Flood, of the great antiquity of Aboriginal culture. Thirty years ago, the first Australians were still thought of as a backward race. Trezise recalls in his book Orcani Koni. That there was much sage discussion of whether they were even capable of abstract II ought, Since then, reawakened interest in a 1 growing knowledge of Australia’s Aboriginal heritage has demonstrated that this is a complex. Mobile and rich culture.

The closer we look all Australian prehistory, the more Humaines to confound our assumptions. Until recently, the authoritative view was that the population of Australia at the time of the arrival of Europeans in 1788 was probably somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. But the discovery, beginning two years ago, of a vast Aboriginal graveyard at Lake Victoria near the confluence of the Murry and Darling rivers, has thrown even this into doubt. At least 10,000 skeletons are buried in sands of Lake Victoria,“ possibly as many as 40,000. Researchers are wondering if they have stumbled on the Demographic hub of an infinitely more populous prehistoric Australia than was ever previously supposed, at the crossroads of two of its greatest river highways. Archaeologist Dr. Colin Pardoe of the SA museum says the idea of 3000,000 or so people in Australia before white settlement must be radically re-evaluated. ‘I believe that we should be thinking 10 times that’, he told science writer Julian Cribb recently. As Cribb pre-Roman Britain’s.

Though Aborigines might see themselves as indigenous (in the sense, as Josephine Flood explains, that they have no race history not associated with this continent) there is no doubt that they were, in fact, Australia’s first migrants. Their springboard was provided by the last ice age, or Pleistocene period, which lasted between two million and 10,000 years ago. So much water was locked up on land that the ocean level dropped perhaps 150 m. there was never a complete land bridge to south-east Asia, but Arnhem Land was linked to Papua New Guinea for most of the past 100,000 years, says Flood, and this would have been one of the easiest routes for ice-age immigrants moving south. What is certain, says Flood in her excellent book The Riches Of Ancient Australia, is that once here, the first Australians spread rapidly. The inland would have been dry, but considerably more hospitable than it is today. The inland salt pans were then fresh-water lakes teeming with fish, and the country was much greener.

Questions 1-10

Below is a summary of Reading Passage 3. Complete the summary by choosing ONE suitable word from the list below. Write your answers in the spaces numbered 1-10 on the answer sheet.

Note that there are more words than you need.

SUMMARY

Recent 1__________finding in Australia indicate that previous ideas about Aboriginal 2__________ 

may need to be revised. Charcoal radio-carbon dating of 3__________found in different campsites provides evidence of a society that goes back as far as 50,000 years. Furthermore, vast numbers of 4_________have been discovered buried in the Lake Victoria region, leading researchers to reconsider their estimates of 5___________before white settlement. It appears that there may have been 10 times as many 6_________as was previously thought.

If we go back far enough, we can consider the Aborigines as the first migrants because they would have been able to come 7_________ from Papua New Guinea during the last Ice Age. During this 8 __________ there was a land 9__________between Arnhem Land and Papua New Guinea which would have facilitated movement. The land itself would have been more 10____________than nowadays with fresh-water fish in the lakes and plenty of vegetation.

List of words

Period                 civilization               habitable

Population         skeletons                   inhabitants

Link                   archaeological          across

Century              exploration               out

Settled                implements        

Questions 11-15

The table below sets out information from the passage in three categories: former beliefs about Aboriginal Australia, recent changes to these beliefs, and the evidence for these changes. Sort the items of information below the table into their appropriate categories. Write the letters   A-E next to the numbers 11-15 on the answer sheet.

Table

Former	Recent changes	Evidence for changes
	11              ”	12.
Human beings had inhabited Australia for less than 10,000 years
13.	14.	15.

Items of information

A    the population was between 250,000 and 500,000

B    graves were discovered at Lake Victoria

C     the population could have been about 3,000,000

D     tools from different campsites were radio-carbon dated

E    Australia’s Aboriginal civilization goes back about 45,000 years