phiyen8701 3/13/2025 8:23:42 AM

THE MYSTERIOUS MOAI

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The Moai are beautiful stone statues that you can see on the Chilean island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), in the Pacific Ocean. There are 887 statues, and we know that the first ones were made about 1,00 years ago. However, we don’t know very much about the people who made them, or the reasons why they made them. The stones are a beautiful mystery.

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The Moai are statues of men with very large heads, and smaller bodies and arms. Only one has legs and feet.

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We know that people used hand tools to make the stones because archeologists have found examples of many old tools all over the island. They believed it must have taken about a year to make each statue, with five or six people working on each one.

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This is a more difficult question! Some of the statues are huge, and people can’t have carried them using just their hands. The largest stones are nearly ten metres long, and weigh about 18,000 kilograms. Professor Carla Lopez says, ‘The people must have had some way of moving these stones. Some archeologists think they might have pulled the stones across the island using ropes. But the stones were so heavy, it must have taken between180 and 250 men to pull each one.’

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We don’t know. Most people believe that the statues represent people who had died. However, according to Professor Lopez, ‘We can’t explain why the ancient islanders put so much work into creating these statues, and why so many of the statues are looking away from the ocean. Perhaps the artists believed they were looking towards the villages on the island, to protect them. 

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Today Easter Island is a World Heritage site. Thousands of visitors come to study and admire the statues every year. Most people just take photos, but there have been some problems. In 2008, a tourist tried to take a piece of a statue’s ear home as a souvenir. He had to pay $$17,000, and he couldn’t go back to the island for three years.

Task 1. Complete the headings with the questions below.

A. How did people make the Moai? 

B. How did people move the Moai?

C.  What about the Moai today? 

D. What are the Moai? 

E. What do the Moai look like? 

F. Why did people make the Moai?

Task 2. Read the article again. Are the sentences true (T) or false (F)?

1. There are 887 statues.                                                         __________

2. There aren’t any statues of women.                                         __________

3. The tools that people used to make the statues have all disappeared.         __________

4. It took one man a year to make each statue.                                  __________

5. Some experts believe that people carried the statues by hand.                 __________

6. Most of the statues look out towards the sea.                                 __________

7. The island is a popular tourist destination.                                __________

Task 3. Answer the questions.

1. How do archeologists know what the ancient islanders used to make the statues?

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2. Why is it possible that people carried the stones?

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3. What might the statues protect, according to one expert?

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4. How did one man damage a statue?

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6. UNIT 6. Preserving our heritage