ACTIVITY 1: READING COMPREHENSION
Read the text
and answer the questions.
Solving the World
Mysteries with Science: The Nazca Lines of Peru
The Nazca Lines in Peru are huge pictures that were
drawn into the ground by digging shallow lines into the earth. The lines take
away the red stone which covers the surface leaving the white rock below
exposed. An area of 190 square miles in the Nazca desert in Southern Peru is
covered by these simple pictures, which include birds, spiders, fish, and
sharks. Some of these pictures are nearly 200 metres wide.
What’s so mysterious about these lines? Well, although
they date back to between 400 and 650 AD, they were only discovered in the
1930s. The reason for this is that the pictures only become clear when they are
seen from the air. So, it was only when aeroplanes started flying over the area
that people realised what they were. Of course, this led to the question: how
did these pictures get there all those years ago? How could these people have
made such drawings without the ability to fly? Or did they have the ability to
fly? Author Jim Woodman suggested that the Nazca people could have invented
simple hot-air balloons and used them to produce the art. He even built a
working balloon using materials they would have had. Not many people were
convinced by his ideas though. Other people suggested the lines might be extra-terrestrial,
that they were the work of aliens visiting our Earth. More and more theories
were offered and one of the great modern mysteries was born.
However, when some wooden sticks were found in the
ground in the area and carbon-dated, it showed that they were from the same age
as the drawings. Some scientists suggested that the Nazca people might have put
these sticks in the ground to help them with the drawings. By placing the
sticks in the correct positions and connecting them with long ropes, the Nazca
people could have used them to draw the lines to make the pictures. One
scientist, Dr. Joe Nickell of the University of Kentucky was so sure that this
was the answer that he decided to try and show how it could be done. Using only
tools that the Nazca might have had he set about trying to draw a huge picture
of a bird on a piece of land. With a few friends it took him a few hours to
produce a perfect Nazca picture and show how these pictures probably got there.
Text: https://assets.cambridge.org/97811075/63254/excerpt/9781107563254_excerpt.pdf