IELTS CAM Inspired 10 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 10 - Reading Test 3 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 4
The Reading Passage has five paragraphs A-E.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers i-vii
List of Headings
I
Travel enjoyed by the well-to-do
II
Why tourism's economic footprint is hard to detect
III
How large-scale tourism came into being
IV
Tourism's reach across the globe
V
Bringing foreign money in through tourism
VI
The part played by aviation
VII
The economic and social weight of tourism
1
Paragraph B
2
Paragraph C
3
Paragraph D
4
Paragraph E
Question 5 - 10
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
5
The Global Tourism Alliance places travel and tourism behind manufacturing among the world's industries.
6
Tourism makes up a bigger proportion of global consumer spending than of world economic production.
7
Money spent by tourists is sometimes undervalued because the same businesses also serve residents.
8
Tourism offers a more effective path to development for small communities than for large regions.
9
Dependable worldwide figures for the number of people who travel are now easy to obtain.
10
Disagreement about the way tourism ought to be defined has grown over the past ten years.
Question 11 - 13
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
11
In Iceland, tourism generates more
than any other part of the economy.
12
Travel and tourism give Fiji more
than any competing industry.
13
Because of these definitional problems, it is also difficult to establish the total sums that travellers
.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs, A-I.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-I.
14
a reference to how long the cause of red autumn colour has remained unknown
15
a description of the chemical that gives leaves their red colour
16
the theory that red leaves act as a warning of a tree's ability to defend itself
17
the idea that trees which stay yellow may have some other, unknown way of shielding themselves from strong autumn light
18
the observation that the light-screen theory appears self-contradictory at first
Question 19 - 22
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Why the 'light-screen' hypothesis is convincing
• The most deeply red leaves grow on the
19.
of the tree that receives the most direct sunlight.
• On an individual leaf, the red is most intense over the upper
20.
.
• The sharpest reds emerge when bright, rainless days give way to
21.
nights.
• The red colouring intensifies the closer one gets to colder, more northerly latitudes, where the harsher chill exposes the trees to far heavier
22.
.
Question 23 - 25
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
23
Cone-bearing evergreens keep their leaves because their chlorophyll is a different colour.
24
The amount of energy used to make anthocyanins is small compared with the protection they give the tree from insect attack.
25
Chlorophyll can take in more light than it is able to use safely.
Question 26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
26
In the passage, which of the following does the writer actually explain?
A
why some trees make red pigment while others do not
B
how insects that feed on plants select the tree on which to deposit their eggs
C
how leaves come to show yellow and orange shades in autumn
D
why evergreens keep their colour through the cold months
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Complete the summary using the list of words and phrases, A-J, below.
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes on your answer sheet.
The Tanavu burial site
A cemetery dating back around 3,000 years, left by a sea-going people known as the Maruvi, has been found on Tanavu, an island in the Pacific. It lies on the site of a disused , and it was a farm worker, not a scientist, who stumbled upon this notable entirely by chance.
Across a span of a few hundred years the Maruvi settled one Pacific island after another. Whenever they set sail they loaded their canoes with everything a new home would call for, tools among them, together with .
This has greatly added to what scientists know about the Maruvi. A team of international researchers under Emil Roshko of Rennwick University is helping with the dig. In Roshko's view, the recovered at the site is of great importance, since it proves beyond dispute that the lying inside it were Maruvi.
A
proof
B
livestock
C
urn
D
data
E
remains
F
harbour
G
find
H
estate
I
pottery
J
maps
Question 32 - 35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
32
The writer says the way the Maruvi achieved their voyages is hard to explain because
A
the few canoes that survive tell us very little.
B
the records that survive from their era cannot be trusted.
C
researchers have paid the subject little attention.
D
modern achievements have changed how their feats are judged.
33
In the sixth paragraph, what does the writer present as remarkable about the Maruvi?
A
They knew how to build vessels strong enough to cross the ocean.
B
Their traditions left no room for showing fear.
C
Their sailing expertise was inherited from earlier generations.
D
They kept going long after the shore had sunk from sight.
34
In the seventh paragraph, in the sentence 'That is what would have made the whole enterprise workable', the word 'That' refers to
A
the Maruvi's skill as sailors.
B
the Maruvi's assurance that they could get back home.
C
the Maruvi's detailed familiarity with the region.
D
the Maruvi's knack for spotting indications of nearby land.
35
In the eighth paragraph, why does the writer say the region's geography mattered?
A
It helped sailors return home safely.
B
It reduced the danger of storms during voyages.
C
It shaped important aspects of the islanders' way of life.
D
It allowed a greater number of islands to be lived on.
Question 36 - 40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In following statements below, choose
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
36
Copies of the Maruvi canoes have been built in an attempt to sail their original routes.
37
Petrovic believes the Maruvi owed their success chiefly to their own sailing ability.
38
Coral records suggest El Ninos occurred unusually often while the Maruvi were spreading out.
39
The central Pacific islands that lay ahead were smaller than those the Maruvi had already settled.
40
Why the Maruvi brought their eastward expansion to an end is now well established.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The Context, Meaning and Scope of Tourism
A
A. For as long as human beings have existed, they have been on the move: the earliest peoples ranged over great distances to hunt the animals that supplied their food and clothing, without which they could not have survived. Trade, faith, the hope of profit, warfare and the search for new homes are only some of the equally powerful motives that have set people travelling in every age since. Pleasure, too, drew the rich landowners and senior officials of ancient Rome onto the roads; at coastal retreats such as Pompeii and Herculaneum they kept holiday villas to which they might withdraw from the capital's summer heat. Save for a lull during the Dark Ages, travel has never ceased expanding, and across recorded history it has done much to shape how civilisations and their economies developed.
B
B.
Mass tourism of the kind familiar to us is very much a creation of the twentieth century. Its beginnings, historians argue, lie in the England of the industrial revolution, where a swelling middle class met transport that was, for the first time, reasonably cheap. Once commercial aviation took shape in the wake of the Second World War, and jet aircraft followed during the 1950s, journeys between countries multiplied at remarkable speed. From that expansion a substantial new industry — tourism — was born. Governments the world over were quick to take an interest, for the sector opened up fresh employment while also serving as a route to earning foreign currency.
C
Both economically and socially, tourism now carries far more weight than once it did. Across most industrialised nations it is the service sector that has grown fastest in recent years, and among the very largest components of that sector — though several of these countries still fail to treat it as a distinct activity — stands travel and tourism. The Global Tourism Alliance (1993) called it the biggest industry on earth by almost any economic yardstick, whether one weighs added value, investment, jobs or the taxes it yields. Total output, the Alliance reckoned, ran to some $4 trillion, more than 13 per cent of everything the world's consumers spend. Nowhere is there a larger employer: roughly 140 million people, close to 7 per cent of the global workforce, owe their living to it. As a contributor to output it likewise outstrips every rival, generating above 6 per cent of the world's product and drawing yearly capital investment beyond $450 billion, quite apart from the direct, indirect and personal taxes it raises. Through the broadening effect that travelling has on those who do it, and through the work it brings into being, tourism thus leaves a deep imprint not merely on the global economy but on society at large.
D
What has tended to mask this economic weight, though, is the sheer variety and fragmentation of the industry itself. Under the single heading of travel one finds hotels, motels and every other form of lodging, restaurants and catering of all sorts, the assorted means and facilities of transport, amusements and attractions, gift shops and many further concerns besides. Because so many of these also cater to local people, the money that visitors in particular bring in is easily overlooked, or reckoned too low. Ferreira (1993) makes a related point: the very notions on which the industry rests have stayed frustratingly ill-defined, alike for those who study it and for those charged with deciding its future. Such vagueness has left every nation struggling to build any dependable store of tourism data from which the sector's contribution to local, national and world economies might be gauged. Yet the same diversity that breeds the difficulty is precisely what turns travel and tourism into so promising an engine of economic development for all manner of countries, regions and communities.
E
Once something reserved for the wealthy alone, travelling for pleasure has hardened into a settled feature of ordinary life for most of the population. Halvorsen and Pratt (1991), in fact, hold that in many countries tourism has grown into the single largest item traded across borders, while in a good many others it comes second or third. In Iceland, Malta, Uruguay and much of the South Pacific, for instance, no other activity earns the nation as much foreign currency. Drawing on figures put out by the Continental Travellers' Trust, Delgado and Mowbray add that across Fiji, Kenya, Morocco, Peru, Thailand and a dozen further nations no industry supplies more jobs than travel and tourism. Even so, because the word itself resists any settled definition — and it is definition that governs what may be counted — no one can state with real assurance how many people worldwide take part in tourism, or what exactly it is worth. Much the same wall is met whenever anyone sets out to work out how much money visitors actually spend.
New Zealand science writer Callum Rennick investigates the mystery of why leaves turn red in autumn
A
A. Across much of North America, few natural spectacles rival the changing of the leaves each autumn. Splendid as those colours are, scientists have puzzled for a very long time over a simple question: why should certain trees shift to yellow or orange while others take on shades of red or purple?
B
B.
Through the summer, leaves stay green because they are packed with chlorophyll, the molecule that traps sunlight and turns its energy into fresh building materials for the tree. Once autumn arrives in the northern hemisphere and the supply of solar energy falls away sharply, most trees - cone-bearing evergreens being the one exception - do best to shut photosynthesis* down until spring. Keeping a set of now-useless leaves alive all winter would only waste the tree's reserves, so instead it sheds them; but not before it breaks apart their chlorophyll and draws the valuable nitrogen locked inside back into the twigs. With the chlorophyll gone, pigments that it had masked all summer are finally exposed. That uncovering accounts for the yellows and oranges of autumn, yet it cannot explain the vivid reds and purples of trees like the maple or the sumac.
C
Where the red comes from is no secret: it is the work of anthocyanins, water-soluble pigments that throw back the part of the visible spectrum running from red to blue. Chemically, they are sugar-based compounds of the group called flavonoids. The strange part is their timing - these anthocyanins are freshly manufactured, produced in the leaf at the very moment the tree is getting ready to cast it off. It is difficult to see the logic: why would a tree go to the trouble of building brand-new chemicals in a leaf when it is already rushing to strip out and rescue the pigments that are there?
D
A number of explanations have been put forward for anthocyanins. They may, some have argued, work as a chemical shield against insects or fungi; or draw in the birds that eat fruit; or make a leaf better able to withstand freezing. Each idea, though, runs into trouble. One difficulty is that leaves stay red for such a brief spell that the energy poured into producing the anthocyanins would cost the tree more than any protection against fungi or plant-eaters could ever be worth.
E
Another suggestion is that a tree flushes its leaves a bright red to signal to plant-eating insects that it is vigorous and perfectly capable of fighting off an infestation with its chemical arsenal. An insect that took such advertising seriously might then lay its eggs elsewhere, on some duller and presumably less well-defended tree. The weakness of this account is simply that nothing yet backs it up: no one has established either that the healthiest trees carry the brightest foliage or that insects really do pick their hosts by how intense the colour is.
F
The most convincing proposal of all may be the one known as the 'light-screen' hypothesis. At first it seems to make no sense, for its central claim is that the red pigment forms in autumn leaves precisely in order to guard chlorophyll - the very chemical whose job is to soak up light - from receiving too much of it. Why would the finest light-absorber in nature ever need shielding? And why bother shielding it just as the tree is dismantling it to recover as much as it can?
G
For all the elegance with which chlorophyll has evolved to harvest the sun's energy, there are times when that energy simply overwhelms it - most of all during drought, in the cold, or when nutrients are scarce. This vulnerability to excess light grows sharper still in autumn, while the leaf is busy taking its inner machinery apart. In a healthy summer leaf, the energy that chlorophyll captures is put straight to work; in the failing autumn leaf it is not, and the leaf is then left exposed to serious harm from the oxygen that the over-excited chlorophyll sets loose.
H
Clues to all this are not hard to find. The plainest is that, on any one tree, the leaves that redden most deeply are those on the side that catches the most direct sun, and on a single leaf the colour runs richest across its upper surface. It has likewise been known for decades that the deepest reds come out when clear, dry days are followed by cold nights - exactly the conditions under which chlorophyll is left most exposed to surplus light. And in maples and their relatives, the show grows steadily more brilliant the further north one goes, where the sharper cold puts the trees under greater stress, leaving their chlorophyll more delicate and more in need of a sunblock.
I
One puzzle, though, is still unsolved: why do some trees go to the effort of making red pigment while others simply let their yellows and oranges show through? Might those other trees have some different way of guarding against too much light in autumn? Less of a feast for the eye though it may be, their story is bound to prove every bit as subtle and involved.
* photosynthesis: the production of new material from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide.
The early voyagers who first reached the scattered islands of the Pacific
On Tanavu, an island in the Pacific chain known as the Sereni group, a major archaeological find has uncovered traces of a long-vanished seafaring people, ancestors of many of the central Pacific's inhabitants today. The discovery owed everything to chance. While clearing the overgrown grounds of an abandoned plantation, a farm labourer's spade broke into a grave — the first of several dozen in a cemetery some 3,000 years old. Nothing older has ever been unearthed in the Pacific islands, and within it lie the remains of a people archaeologists have named the Maruvi.
In simple canoes these bold open-sea travellers ranged across the ocean, yet they were more than explorers. They were colonists too, loading their vessels with everything a new settlement might need — the animals they raised, seedlings of taro, and tools of worked stone. In a few centuries they pushed the edges of their known world outward, from the forested volcanoes of Pelua to the remote, wave-washed coral specks of Sohari.
Very little evidence about the Maruvi had survived, so the Tanavu site enlarges the pool of data enormously. Sixty-two sets of human remains have been recovered so far, and, to the excavators' delight, six intact Maruvi pots. Among the other finds was a Maruvi burial urn, its rim modelled with small birds that seem to gaze down at the bones sealed within. Dr Emil Roshko, professor of archaeology at Rennwick University, who directs the international team at the site, calls it 'an important discovery, because it puts the identity of the remains beyond doubt: these people were Maruvi.'
Genetic material coaxed from the bones could settle one of the thorniest puzzles in the study of Pacific peoples: are all the region's islanders descended from a single stock, or from many? Did one wave of migrants come from a single place in Asia, or several from scattered points? For Roshko, the site offers 'the best chance yet to establish who the Maruvi really were, where they came from, and which living people are their nearest kin.'
One obstinate question still lies beyond the reach of archaeology: how did the Maruvi pull off what was, in their era, the equivalent of a moon landing — and do so repeatedly? Not one of their canoes has ever turned up, nor any rigging to show how such vessels were sailed. The spoken histories of later islanders are no help either, since they dissolve into myth well before they reach back to Maruvi times.
'One thing is certain,' says Sigrun Halvorsen, professor of archaeology at Kelvedon University: 'the vessels the Maruvi built could survive the open ocean, and their crews had the seafaring to handle them.' Such skill, on her account, was the work of thousands of years, passed from generation to generation as sailors picked a way through the western Pacific's island clusters in short hops from shore to shore. What set the Maruvi's own venture apart was the moment their descendants pushed on until land sank from sight and nothing but bare horizon lay around them — a feat as daunting in their day as reaching the moon is in ours. Different from their forebears they plainly were; but where did the nerve for such perilous crossings come from?
The Maruvi drove eastward into the Pacific, straight into the prevailing trade winds, Halvorsen observes — and those persistent headwinds, she suggests, may be exactly why they succeeded. 'For days they could push into unknown waters and take stock, confident that, if nothing came of it, they had only to come about and let the trade winds carry them home. That is what would have made the whole enterprise workable.' Out at sea, a practised navigator would have picked up signs pointing to land — seabirds, coconuts and twigs carried offshore by the currents, and the bank of cloud that builds over the horizon each afternoon, often marking an island beyond view.
Whether or not a voyage had succeeded, the layout of a navigator's home archipelago would have served as a safety net on the way back. Without such a reference, a crew could easily overshoot its home harbours, lose its bearings and sail on into oblivion. The Sereni chain is a good example: it runs upwards of 500 miles along a northwest-to-southeast line, its many islands, each visible from the next, forming a wall that catches sailors running home before the trade winds.
All of this rests on one crucial assumption, warns Dragan Petrovic, professor of prehistory at Rennwick University: that the Maruvi had mastered the demanding skill of sailing into the wind. 'That they were able to do so has never once been demonstrated,' he says. 'The assumption has simply been made and acted on — people have gone so far as to build replica craft and sail those routes again. But the design of the originals, and the way they carried their sails, is a complete blank.'
Petrovic prefers to give at least some of the credit to chance rather than human skill. The Maruvi, he proposes, may in part have been scattered by El Nino — the same climatic upheaval that still disrupts the Pacific today. His evidence comes from slow-growing corals across the region, whose records point to a run of exceptionally frequent El Ninos around the period when the Maruvi were spreading out. For weeks at a time, these unusually strong events would have reversed the usual east-to-west flow of the trade winds, carrying the Maruvi off on long voyages they had never meant to make.
A third of the way across the Pacific was as far as the Maruvi ever got; there they halted, and why they did so is a secret they kept to themselves. Perhaps, with the great emptiness of the central Pacific still ahead, they had by then grown too few and too scattered to go on. Their total number, after all, is unlikely ever to have topped a few thousand, and yet the rapid push eastward had already taken them past hundreds of islands — the Kaelo group by itself accounting for more than 300.
Mass tourism of the kind familiar to us is very much a creation of the twentieth century. Its beginnings, historians argue, lie in the England of the industrial revolution, where a swelling middle class met transport that was, for the first time, reasonably cheap. Once commercial aviation took shape in the wake of the Second World War, and jet aircraft followed during the 1950s, journeys between countries multiplied at remarkable speed. From that expansion a substantial new industry — tourism — was born. Governments the world over were quick to take an interest, for the sector opened up fresh employment while also serving as a route to earning foreign currency.
C. Both economically and socially, tourism now carries far more weight than once it did. Across most industrialised nations it is the service sector that has grown fastest in recent years, and among the very largest components of that sector — though several of these countries still fail to treat it as a distinct activity — stands travel and tourism. The Global Tourism Alliance (1993) called it the biggest industry on earth by almost any economic yardstick, whether one weighs added value, investment, jobs or the taxes it yields. Total output, the Alliance reckoned, ran to some $4 trillion, more than 13 per cent of everything the world's consumers spend. Nowhere is there a larger employer: roughly 140 million people, close to 7 per cent of the global workforce, owe their living to it. As a contributor to output it likewise outstrips every rival, generating above 6 per cent of the world's product and drawing yearly capital investment beyond $450 billion, quite apart from the direct, indirect and personal taxes it raises. Through the broadening effect that travelling has on those who do it, and through the work it brings into being, tourism thus leaves a deep imprint not merely on the global economy but on society at large.
D. What has tended to mask this economic weight, though, is the sheer variety and fragmentation of the industry itself. Under the single heading of travel one finds hotels, motels and every other form of lodging, restaurants and catering of all sorts, the assorted means and facilities of transport, amusements and attractions, gift shops and many further concerns besides. Because so many of these also cater to local people, the money that visitors in particular bring in is easily overlooked, or reckoned too low. Ferreira (1993) makes a related point: the very notions on which the industry rests have stayed frustratingly ill-defined, alike for those who study it and for those charged with deciding its future. Such vagueness has left every nation struggling to build any dependable store of tourism data from which the sector's contribution to local, national and world economies might be gauged. Yet the same diversity that breeds the difficulty is precisely what turns travel and tourism into so promising an engine of economic development for all manner of countries, regions and communities.
E. Once something reserved for the wealthy alone, travelling for pleasure has hardened into a settled feature of ordinary life for most of the population. Halvorsen and Pratt (1991), in fact, hold that in many countries tourism has grown into the single largest item traded across borders, while in a good many others it comes second or third. In Iceland, Malta, Uruguay and much of the South Pacific, for instance, no other activity earns the nation as much foreign currency. Drawing on figures put out by the Continental Travellers' Trust, Delgado and Mowbray add that across Fiji, Kenya, Morocco, Peru, Thailand and a dozen further nations no industry supplies more jobs than travel and tourism. Even so, because the word itself resists any settled definition — and it is definition that governs what may be counted — no one can state with real assurance how many people worldwide take part in tourism, or what exactly it is worth. Much the same wall is met whenever anyone sets out to work out how much money visitors actually spend.
Through the summer, leaves stay green because they are packed with chlorophyll, the molecule that traps sunlight and turns its energy into fresh building materials for the tree. Once autumn arrives in the northern hemisphere and the supply of solar energy falls away sharply, most trees - cone-bearing evergreens being the one exception - do best to shut photosynthesis* down until spring. Keeping a set of now-useless leaves alive all winter would only waste the tree's reserves, so instead it sheds them; but not before it breaks apart their chlorophyll and draws the valuable nitrogen locked inside back into the twigs. With the chlorophyll gone, pigments that it had masked all summer are finally exposed. That uncovering accounts for the yellows and oranges of autumn, yet it cannot explain the vivid reds and purples of trees like the maple or the sumac.
C. Where the red comes from is no secret: it is the work of anthocyanins, water-soluble pigments that throw back the part of the visible spectrum running from red to blue. Chemically, they are sugar-based compounds of the group called flavonoids. The strange part is their timing - these anthocyanins are freshly manufactured, produced in the leaf at the very moment the tree is getting ready to cast it off. It is difficult to see the logic: why would a tree go to the trouble of building brand-new chemicals in a leaf when it is already rushing to strip out and rescue the pigments that are there?
D. A number of explanations have been put forward for anthocyanins. They may, some have argued, work as a chemical shield against insects or fungi; or draw in the birds that eat fruit; or make a leaf better able to withstand freezing. Each idea, though, runs into trouble. One difficulty is that leaves stay red for such a brief spell that the energy poured into producing the anthocyanins would cost the tree more than any protection against fungi or plant-eaters could ever be worth.
E. Another suggestion is that a tree flushes its leaves a bright red to signal to plant-eating insects that it is vigorous and perfectly capable of fighting off an infestation with its chemical arsenal. An insect that took such advertising seriously might then lay its eggs elsewhere, on some duller and presumably less well-defended tree. The weakness of this account is simply that nothing yet backs it up: no one has established either that the healthiest trees carry the brightest foliage or that insects really do pick their hosts by how intense the colour is.
F. The most convincing proposal of all may be the one known as the 'light-screen' hypothesis. At first it seems to make no sense, for its central claim is that the red pigment forms in autumn leaves precisely in order to guard chlorophyll - the very chemical whose job is to soak up light - from receiving too much of it. Why would the finest light-absorber in nature ever need shielding? And why bother shielding it just as the tree is dismantling it to recover as much as it can?
G. For all the elegance with which chlorophyll has evolved to harvest the sun's energy, there are times when that energy simply overwhelms it - most of all during drought, in the cold, or when nutrients are scarce. This vulnerability to excess light grows sharper still in autumn, while the leaf is busy taking its inner machinery apart. In a healthy summer leaf, the energy that chlorophyll captures is put straight to work; in the failing autumn leaf it is not, and the leaf is then left exposed to serious harm from the oxygen that the over-excited chlorophyll sets loose.
H. Clues to all this are not hard to find. The plainest is that, on any one tree, the leaves that redden most deeply are those on the side that catches the most direct sun, and on a single leaf the colour runs richest across its upper surface. It has likewise been known for decades that the deepest reds come out when clear, dry days are followed by cold nights - exactly the conditions under which chlorophyll is left most exposed to surplus light. And in maples and their relatives, the show grows steadily more brilliant the further north one goes, where the sharper cold puts the trees under greater stress, leaving their chlorophyll more delicate and more in need of a sunblock.
I. One puzzle, though, is still unsolved: why do some trees go to the effort of making red pigment while others simply let their yellows and oranges show through? Might those other trees have some different way of guarding against too much light in autumn? Less of a feast for the eye though it may be, their story is bound to prove every bit as subtle and involved.
* photosynthesis: the production of new material from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide.
On Tanavu, an island in the Pacific chain known as the Sereni group, a major archaeological find has uncovered traces of a long-vanished seafaring people, ancestors of many of the central Pacific's inhabitants today. The discovery owed everything to chance. While clearing the overgrown grounds of an abandoned plantation, a farm labourer's spade broke into a grave — the first of several dozen in a cemetery some 3,000 years old. Nothing older has ever been unearthed in the Pacific islands, and within it lie the remains of a people archaeologists have named the Maruvi.
In simple canoes these bold open-sea travellers ranged across the ocean, yet they were more than explorers. They were colonists too, loading their vessels with everything a new settlement might need — the animals they raised, seedlings of taro, and tools of worked stone. In a few centuries they pushed the edges of their known world outward, from the forested volcanoes of Pelua to the remote, wave-washed coral specks of Sohari.
Very little evidence about the Maruvi had survived, so the Tanavu site enlarges the pool of data enormously. Sixty-two sets of human remains have been recovered so far, and, to the excavators' delight, six intact Maruvi pots. Among the other finds was a Maruvi burial urn, its rim modelled with small birds that seem to gaze down at the bones sealed within. Dr Emil Roshko, professor of archaeology at Rennwick University, who directs the international team at the site, calls it 'an important discovery, because it puts the identity of the remains beyond doubt: these people were Maruvi.'
Genetic material coaxed from the bones could settle one of the thorniest puzzles in the study of Pacific peoples: are all the region's islanders descended from a single stock, or from many? Did one wave of migrants come from a single place in Asia, or several from scattered points? For Roshko, the site offers 'the best chance yet to establish who the Maruvi really were, where they came from, and which living people are their nearest kin.'
One obstinate question still lies beyond the reach of archaeology: how did the Maruvi pull off what was, in their era, the equivalent of a moon landing — and do so repeatedly? Not one of their canoes has ever turned up, nor any rigging to show how such vessels were sailed. The spoken histories of later islanders are no help either, since they dissolve into myth well before they reach back to Maruvi times.
'One thing is certain,' says Sigrun Halvorsen, professor of archaeology at Kelvedon University: 'the vessels the Maruvi built could survive the open ocean, and their crews had the seafaring to handle them.' Such skill, on her account, was the work of thousands of years, passed from generation to generation as sailors picked a way through the western Pacific's island clusters in short hops from shore to shore. What set the Maruvi's own venture apart was the moment their descendants pushed on until land sank from sight and nothing but bare horizon lay around them — a feat as daunting in their day as reaching the moon is in ours. Different from their forebears they plainly were; but where did the nerve for such perilous crossings come from?
The Maruvi drove eastward into the Pacific, straight into the prevailing trade winds, Halvorsen observes — and those persistent headwinds, she suggests, may be exactly why they succeeded. 'For days they could push into unknown waters and take stock, confident that, if nothing came of it, they had only to come about and let the trade winds carry them home. That is what would have made the whole enterprise workable.' Out at sea, a practised navigator would have picked up signs pointing to land — seabirds, coconuts and twigs carried offshore by the currents, and the bank of cloud that builds over the horizon each afternoon, often marking an island beyond view.
Whether or not a voyage had succeeded, the layout of a navigator's home archipelago would have served as a safety net on the way back. Without such a reference, a crew could easily overshoot its home harbours, lose its bearings and sail on into oblivion. The Sereni chain is a good example: it runs upwards of 500 miles along a northwest-to-southeast line, its many islands, each visible from the next, forming a wall that catches sailors running home before the trade winds.
All of this rests on one crucial assumption, warns Dragan Petrovic, professor of prehistory at Rennwick University: that the Maruvi had mastered the demanding skill of sailing into the wind. 'That they were able to do so has never once been demonstrated,' he says. 'The assumption has simply been made and acted on — people have gone so far as to build replica craft and sail those routes again. But the design of the originals, and the way they carried their sails, is a complete blank.'
Petrovic prefers to give at least some of the credit to chance rather than human skill. The Maruvi, he proposes, may in part have been scattered by El Nino — the same climatic upheaval that still disrupts the Pacific today. His evidence comes from slow-growing corals across the region, whose records point to a run of exceptionally frequent El Ninos around the period when the Maruvi were spreading out. For weeks at a time, these unusually strong events would have reversed the usual east-to-west flow of the trade winds, carrying the Maruvi off on long voyages they had never meant to make.
A third of the way across the Pacific was as far as the Maruvi ever got; there they halted, and why they did so is a secret they kept to themselves. Perhaps, with the great emptiness of the central Pacific still ahead, they had by then grown too few and too scattered to go on. Their total number, after all, is unlikely ever to have topped a few thousand, and yet the rapid push eastward had already taken them past hundreds of islands — the Kaelo group by itself accounting for more than 300.
On Tanavu, an island in the Pacific chain known as the Sereni group, a major archaeological find has uncovered traces of a long-vanished seafaring people, ancestors of many of the central Pacific's inhabitants today. The discovery owed everything to chance. While clearing the overgrown grounds of an abandoned plantation, a farm labourer's spade broke into a grave — the first of several dozen in a cemetery some 3,000 years old. Nothing older has ever been unearthed in the Pacific islands, and within it lie the remains of a people archaeologists have named the Maruvi.
In simple canoes these bold open-sea travellers ranged across the ocean, yet they were more than explorers. They were colonists too, loading their vessels with everything a new settlement might need — the animals they raised, seedlings of taro, and tools of worked stone. In a few centuries they pushed the edges of their known world outward, from the forested volcanoes of Pelua to the remote, wave-washed coral specks of Sohari.
Very little evidence about the Maruvi had survived, so the Tanavu site enlarges the pool of data enormously. Sixty-two sets of human remains have been recovered so far, and, to the excavators' delight, six intact Maruvi pots. Among the other finds was a Maruvi burial urn, its rim modelled with small birds that seem to gaze down at the bones sealed within. Dr Emil Roshko, professor of archaeology at Rennwick University, who directs the international team at the site, calls it 'an important discovery, because it puts the identity of the remains beyond doubt: these people were Maruvi.'
Genetic material coaxed from the bones could settle one of the thorniest puzzles in the study of Pacific peoples: are all the region's islanders descended from a single stock, or from many? Did one wave of migrants come from a single place in Asia, or several from scattered points? For Roshko, the site offers 'the best chance yet to establish who the Maruvi really were, where they came from, and which living people are their nearest kin.'
One obstinate question still lies beyond the reach of archaeology: how did the Maruvi pull off what was, in their era, the equivalent of a moon landing — and do so repeatedly? Not one of their canoes has ever turned up, nor any rigging to show how such vessels were sailed. The spoken histories of later islanders are no help either, since they dissolve into myth well before they reach back to Maruvi times.
'One thing is certain,' says Sigrun Halvorsen, professor of archaeology at Kelvedon University: 'the vessels the Maruvi built could survive the open ocean, and their crews had the seafaring to handle them.' Such skill, on her account, was the work of thousands of years, passed from generation to generation as sailors picked a way through the western Pacific's island clusters in short hops from shore to shore. What set the Maruvi's own venture apart was the moment their descendants pushed on until land sank from sight and nothing but bare horizon lay around them — a feat as daunting in their day as reaching the moon is in ours. Different from their forebears they plainly were; but where did the nerve for such perilous crossings come from?
The Maruvi drove eastward into the Pacific, straight into the prevailing trade winds, Halvorsen observes — and those persistent headwinds, she suggests, may be exactly why they succeeded. 'For days they could push into unknown waters and take stock, confident that, if nothing came of it, they had only to come about and let the trade winds carry them home. That is what would have made the whole enterprise workable.' Out at sea, a practised navigator would have picked up signs pointing to land — seabirds, coconuts and twigs carried offshore by the currents, and the bank of cloud that builds over the horizon each afternoon, often marking an island beyond view.
Whether or not a voyage had succeeded, the layout of a navigator's home archipelago would have served as a safety net on the way back. Without such a reference, a crew could easily overshoot its home harbours, lose its bearings and sail on into oblivion. The Sereni chain is a good example: it runs upwards of 500 miles along a northwest-to-southeast line, its many islands, each visible from the next, forming a wall that catches sailors running home before the trade winds.
All of this rests on one crucial assumption, warns Dragan Petrovic, professor of prehistory at Rennwick University: that the Maruvi had mastered the demanding skill of sailing into the wind. 'That they were able to do so has never once been demonstrated,' he says. 'The assumption has simply been made and acted on — people have gone so far as to build replica craft and sail those routes again. But the design of the originals, and the way they carried their sails, is a complete blank.'
Petrovic prefers to give at least some of the credit to chance rather than human skill. The Maruvi, he proposes, may in part have been scattered by El Nino — the same climatic upheaval that still disrupts the Pacific today. His evidence comes from slow-growing corals across the region, whose records point to a run of exceptionally frequent El Ninos around the period when the Maruvi were spreading out. For weeks at a time, these unusually strong events would have reversed the usual east-to-west flow of the trade winds, carrying the Maruvi off on long voyages they had never meant to make.
A third of the way across the Pacific was as far as the Maruvi ever got; there they halted, and why they did so is a secret they kept to themselves. Perhaps, with the great emptiness of the central Pacific still ahead, they had by then grown too few and too scattered to go on. Their total number, after all, is unlikely ever to have topped a few thousand, and yet the rapid push eastward had already taken them past hundreds of islands — the Kaelo group by itself accounting for more than 300.
