Luyện IELTS Reading chủ đề: People's lives

In early 1976, Mau Piailug, a fisherman, led an expedition in which he sailed a traditional Polynesian boat across 2,500 miles of ocean from Hawaii to Tahiti. The Polynesiai Voyaging Society had organised the expedition. Its purpose was to find out if seafarers in the distant past could have found their way from one island to the other without navigational instruments, or whether the islands had been populated by accident. At the time, Mau was the only man alive who knew how to navigate just by observing the stars, the wind and the sea. He had never before sailed to Tahiti, which was a long way to the south. However, he understood how the wind and the sea behave around islands, so he was confident he could find his way. The voyage took him and his crew a month to complete and he did it without a compass or charts.

His grandfather began the task of teaching him how to navigate when he was still a baby. He showed him pools of water on the beach to teach him how the behaviour of the waves and wind changed in different places. Later, Mau used a circle of stones to memorise the positions of the stars. Each stone was laid out in the sand to represent a star.

The voyage proved that Hawaii’s first inhabitants came in small boats and navigated by reading the sea and the stars. Mau himself became a keen teacher, passing on his traditional secrets to people of other cultures so that his knowledge would not be lost. He explained the positions of the stars to his students, but he allowed them to write things down because he knew they would never be able to remember everything as he had done.

Freya Stark travelled to many areas of the Middle East, often alone. Frey Stark was an explorer who lived during a time when exploreers were regarded as heroes.She travelled to distant areas of the Middle East, where few Europeans – especially women – had travelled before. She also travelled extensively in Turkey, Greece, Italy, Nepal and Afghanistan.

Stark was born in Paris in 1893. Although she had no formal education as a child, she moved about with her artist parents and learned French, German and Italian.She entered London University in 1912, but at the start of World War I, she joined the nurse corps and was sent to Italy. After the war, she returned to London and attended the School of Oriental Studies.

Her studies there led to extensive travel in the Middle Studies, enabling her to eventually become fluent in Persian, Russian and Turkish. Stark became well known as a traveller and explorer in the Middle East. She travelled to the Lebanon in 1927 at the age of 33 when she had saved enough money, and while there, she studied Arabic.

In 1928, she travelled bu donkey to the Jebel Druze, a mountainous area in Syria. during another trip, she went to a distant region of the Elburnz, a mountain range in Iran, where she made a map. She was searching for information about an ancient Muslim sect known as the Assassions, which she wrote about in Valley of the Assassins (1934), a classic for which she was awarded a Gold Medal by Royal Geogrpahic Society.

For the next 12 years, she continued her career as a traveller and writer, establishing a style which combined an account of her journey with personal commentary on the people, places, customs, history and politics of the Midle East.