Treasure at the bottom of the sea

READING

Е классы

Time: 60 min

Task I. For questions 1 – 10, look at the sentences below about a search for two ships. Read the text to decide if each sentence is correct (C) or incorrect (I).

1. The Margarita and the Atocha sank a day after they had left Cuba.

2. The two ships were forgotten about for 350 years.

3. Fisher had to borrow money to start his company ‘Treasure Salvors’.

4. Fisher read historical documents to find out where to begin his search.

5. Lyon told Fisher that the two ships had sunk in the Marquesas Keys area.

6. The team was certain that the treasure found in 1973 was from the Atocha.

7. Fisher continued looking for the Atocha in the Quicksands area.

8. Journalists wrote about the valuable objects found on the Margarita.

9. Soon after he had sold objects from the Margarita, Fisher thought about stopping his search for the Atocha.

10. In July 1985, some valuable objects were discovered by Fisher near the Atocha.

Treasure at the bottom of the sea

In the 17^th century, there were many Spanish sailing ships called galleons that carried gold and jewels from the Americas to Europe. On September 4 1622, two galleons called the Nuestra Senora de Atocha and the Santa Margarita left Cuba for Spain. Just a day later, both ships sank during a terrible storm.

Although the lost ships were known to contain huge amounts of treasure, nobody disturbed them for the next 350 years. Despite numerous efforts, no one was able to find them and they became known as the ‘Ghost Galleons’.

In 1969, a treasure hunter named Mel Fisher set up a company, ‘Treasure Salvors’, to search for the ‘Ghost Galleons’. Fisher used to be a farmer, but since 1962 he has worked at sea searching for lost ships. He was so successful at this that he could afford to set up his own company. His boat, Holly’s Folly, began the search in 1969 in an area called the Middle Keys, near Florida. Fisher had studied diaries and reports from the 17^th century and according to them the Atocha had sunk here.

But Fisher found nothing and he decided to get the help of Eugene Lyon, an expert in 17^th century Spanish history. Lyon soon realized what had gone wrong. Some of the islands in the area had been renamed and Holly’s Folly was looking in the wrong place. Lyon redirected the search to the tiny Marquesas Keys.

It was two more years, however, before the team found a few silver coins and gold bars from the Atocha. Then, in 1973, they found 4, 000 silver coins and three silver bars stamped with numbers that proved they came from the Atocha. The treasure was extremely valuable but the ship itself was nowhere to be found.

It was expensive to continue the search but Fisher didn’t want to give up. He concentrated instead on finding the Margarita and started looking in an area called the Quicksands. To start with, just a few pieces of treasure were discovered by the team and then, at last, they found some half-buried pieces of wood. It was the Margarita. The divers continued taking objects from the Margarita for another two years. Stories about the find appeared in newspapers around the world and the treasure was eventually sold for £ 25 million. Fisher was rich and famous but he was still determined to find the Atocha and in 1985 he continued his search.

This time he concentrated on an area called the Hawk Channel. Finally on July 20, Fisher found hundreds of silver bars and chests of silver coins lying on the seabed close to the Atocha. It had taken 16 years, but at last he had found both ships.

Task II. Choose from the list A-I the sentence which best summerises each part (11-17) of the article. There is one extra sentence that you do not need to use. There is an example at the beginning.

A A variety of tricks are used.

B Cheats may be more intelligent.

C This behehaviour is familiar.

D Abnormal behaviour is informative.

E Deception proves effective.

F Males cheat more.

G You couldn’t fool her.

H There may be problems with research.

I Parental help is requested.

Nature’s Cheats

Anna is digging in the ground for a potato, when along comes Paul. Paul looks to see what Anna’s doing and then, seeing that there is no one in sight, starts to scream as loud as he can. Paul’s angry mother rushes over and chases Anna away. Once his Mum has gone, Paul walks over and helps himself to Anna’s potato.

Does this ring a bell? I’m sure it does. We’ve all experienced annoying tricks when we were young – the brother who stole your toys and then got you into trouble by telling your parents you had hit him. But Anna and Paul are not humans. They’re African baboons, and playing tricks is as much part of monkey behaviour as it is of human behaviour.

Throughout nature, tricks like this are common – they are part of daily survival. There are insects that hide from their enemies by looking like leaves or twigs, and harmless snakes that imitate poisonous ones. Such behaviour, developed over hundreds of thousand of years, is instinctive and completely natural. Some animals, however, go further and use a more deliberate kind of deception – they use normal behaviour to trick other animals. In most cases the animal probably doesn’t know it is deceiving, only that certain actions give it an advantage. But in apes and some monkeys the behaviour seems much more like that of humans.

What about Paul the baboon? His scream and his mother’s attack on Anna could have been a matter of chance, but Paul was later seen playing the same trick on others. This use of a third individual to achieve a goal is only one of the many tricks commonly used by apes. Another tactic is the ‘Look behind you! ’ trick. When one young male baboon was attacked by several others, he stood on his back legs and looked into the distance, as if there was an enemy there. The attackers turned to look behind them and lost interest in their victim. In fact, there was no enemy.

Studying behaviour like this is complicated because it’s difficult to do laboratory experiments to test whether behaviour is intentional. It would be easy to suggest that these cases mean the baboons were deliberately tricking other animals, but they might have learnt the behaviour without understanding how it worked. So the psychologists talked to colleagues who studied apes and asked them if they had noticed this kind of deception. They discovered many liars and cheats, but the cleverest were apes who clearly showed that they intended to deceive and knew when they themselves had been deceived.

An amusing example of this comes from a psychologist working in Tanzania. A young chimp was annoying him, so he tricked her into going away by pretending he had seen something interesting in the distance. When the chimp looked and found nothing, she ‘walked back, hit me over the head with her hand and ignored me for the rest of the day’.

Another way to decide whether an animal’s behaviour is deliberate is to look for actions that are not normal for that animal. A zoo worker describes how a gorilla dealt with an enemy. ‘He slowly crept up behind the other gorilla, walking on tiptoe. When he got close to his enemy he pushed him violently in the back, then ran indoors.’ Wild gorillas do not normally walk on tiptoe. Of course it’s possible that the gorilla could have learnt from humans that such behaviour works, without understanding why. But looking at the many cases of deliberate deception in apes, it is impossible to explain them all as simple imitation.

Taking all the evidence into account, it seems that deception does play an important part in ape societies where there are complex social rules and relationships and where problems are better solved by social pressure than by physical conflict. The ability of animals to deceive and cheat may be a better measure of their intelligence than their use of tools. Studying the intelligence of our closest relatives could be the way to understand the development of human intelligence.