Read the article and say whether the following statements are true (T) or false (F). If the sentence is false, correct it.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 558.

While you read

It is often said we study the past to learn more about the future. What can we learn about the present and the future by studying the past?

Why do you think people are fascinated by mysteries from the past?

Before you read

The Mystery Statues of Easter Island

Text 5.

Underline the word or phrase that makes the sentence true according to the article.

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_____ 1. Easter Island is part of a group of small islands.

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_____ 2. People have been living on Easter Island for hundreds of years.

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_____ 3. All the statues on the island are completed.

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_____ 4. Scientists have been curious about the statues on Easter Island for a long time.

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_____ 5. Most of the statues are of young children.

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_____ 6. Most of Easter Islanders know a lot about their past.

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_____ 7. Many natives of Easter Island died of smallpox.

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_____ 8. The mayor of Easter Island knew how to raise a statue and put it back in its place.

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(1) EASTER ISLAND is a little island in Polynesia surrounded by one million empty square miles of Pacific Ocean. The closest inhabited land is tiny Pitcairn Island, which is about four­teen hundred miles away.

(2) People have lived on Easter Island for hundreds of years. Long ago, the islanders farmed, using simple planting sticks and hoes. They made arrowheads and adzes[4] out of obsidian[5]. But these long-ago people also made huge and magnificent stone statues that have mystified scientists and everyone else for two centuries. Why did they do it? And how did they move the statues from the rock craters where they were carved to areas several miles away?

(3) Of the 600 statues on the island, more than 150 are unfinished. They remain near and around the rim of the volcanic crater Rano Raraku. The tools used to carve them from the rock were found in the crater. It is as if the workers were called away suddenly and never came back.

(4) The statues have long earlobes, stomachs that stick out, jutting chins, and high foreheads. Their deep-set eyes make them seem old and wise. The largest, with its topknot[6], stands as high as a seven-story building and weighs close to fifty tons. Imagine moving it, and you can understand why so many people were baffled.

(5) Some people thought the ancient islanders might have had help from outer space. Others thought the islanders had magical powers. None of the explanations made sense until archeologists began to study the statues, the island, and the people living on the island today.

(6) Archeologists study extinct cultures by examining abandoned house foundations, stone tools, and food remains and making guesses from these clues about what life in the past may have been like. They try to piece the jigsaw puzzle of past traditions together. Fact-finding for them is tough and tedious business. If they're lucky, they might find living descendants who know something about their people's roots and their ancestors, and how they did things in the past. Unfortunately, on Easter Island, very few of the natives knew about their past.

(7) A terrible disaster occurred on Easter Island long before people arrived to study the island. In 1862, slavers transported a thousand natives bound hand and foot to Peru, South America. They were to work on plantations there. Of the hundred that were finally sent back, only fifteen reached the island. The survivors, however, brought smallpox with them and, as a result, more of their people died. In 1877, only 110 natives remained on the island.

(8) In 1955, Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian expert on the history of people in the South Seas, arrived with a team of archeologists. Heyerdahl and the members of the expedition discovered things about the ancient people of Easter Island that no one had known before. But the experts still couldn't figure out how the statues had been raised.

(9) One day Thor Heyerdahl offered the mayor of Easter Island, a man descended from one of the island's oldest families, one hundred dollars if he would place a statue back on its altar. The mayor accepted the challenge.

(10) The mayor organized men to gather stones and use poles. The poles were pushed under the statue's buried face. Men leaned on them to raise the face enough so that the mayor could shove stones under it. After nine days of work, the statue lay on a pile of stones so high that the men working the poles had to hang from them by ropes. On the eighteenth day, the statue was slid onto its altar. The archeologists saw that the topknot could be rolled up the pile of stones to rest on the statue's head.

(11) Thor Heyerdahl was willing to pay the mayor his one hundred dol­lars. And the mayor showed Heyerdahl that the statues were proba­bly moved on sleds made of forked trees and pulled by many people. He had learned these things from his father and grandfather. Why had he never told this to any of the other scientists who visited the island? ‘No one ever asked me,' he said.

(12) Later, William Mulloy, a member of Heyerdahl's team of archeolo­gists, stayed on the island to raise more of the statues. From his experiments, he estimated that it would take ‘30 men one year to carve a stone statue, 90 men two months to move it, and 90 men three months to erect it.'

(13) In spite of their silence, these statues do communicate to us about the ancient people of Easter Island. To have carved, transported, and erected the statues, these people must have worked hard and coop­erated with each other. The statues show us that not only can we learn about ancient people – we can also learn from them.