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Passage 18
A study conducted by an Australian science agency has discovered signs that the country’s ancient Aborigines may have been the world’s first astronomers, _1_ Stonehenge (巨石阵）in Britain by more than a thousand years.
Professor Ray Norris, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO), said _2_ knowledge of the stars through songs and stories had been passed down through generations by the Aboriginal people, whose history dates back tens of thousands of years.
“We know there are many stories about the sky: songs, legends, myths to mark out the seasons， so they are very _3_,” Norris said. “People _4_ changed settlement, so when Pleiades (the Seven Sisters star _5_ ) was up they would move to where the nuts and berries are. Another sign and it would be time to move to the rivers to fish for barramundi, and so on.”
Norris, who has studied Aboriginal culture _6_ and has made several journeys to Arnhem Land in Australia’s Outback, said the research also _7_ more detailed astronomical thought. “Clearly some thinker in the past has been sitting down in the bush, watching the _8_ and trying to figure out how it works,” he said. “Those thoughts are then encoded in the songs and ceremonies.” Norris is now looking for _9_ that might date the earliest signs of Aboriginal astronomy, such as a stone carving of a meteor strike or comet.
Norris is confident that the Aborigines pre-dated European astronomers, including Stonehenge and Egypt’s great pyramid Giza, both of which are _10_ at around 3100 BC. “We’ve established there is all this astronomy, what I don’t know is how far back this goes. If it goes back 10,000 or 20,000 years, that makes Aborigines the world’s first astronomers,” he said.
A) detailed B) boosted C) eclipse D) vigorous
E) practical F) evidence G) revealed H) estimated
I) regularly J) routine K) cluster L) preceding
M) extensively N) rectifying O) respectively
