Copyright 1996

Questions 15-18 
Decide whether the following statements are true or false according to the 
reading 
passage and write T for true or F for false in the spaces numbered 15-18 on the 
answer sheet. 
15. Some older fire tests only show how a fire starts in a building's structure. 
16. A computer would be able to grade the flammability of an item. 
17. Flash-over can best be prevented with a bucket of water. 
18. An adequate computer program for predicting the effects of a fire is not 
easy to set up. 

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Question* 19-25 
Below is a list of the stages in the build-up of an indoor fire caused by a cigarette 
dropped down the back of an upholstered chair. Decide where each stage fits in 
the following table according to the time when it occurs and write the appropriate 
letters A-H in the spaces numbered 19-25 on the answer sheet. 
Stage 1 
Stage 2 
Stage 3 
Stage 4 
Up to 45 mins. 
before ignition
Up to 1 min. 
after ignition
2 mins.
3 mins and after
Example: A
19. -------
22
24. --------
20. --------
23.
21. _____
25.
List of stages 
A The cigarette smoulders unseen 
B The heat trapped in the room intensifies 
C Smoke, gases and heat rise towards the ceiling 
D The hot layer beneath the ceiling spreads heat back to the chair and other 
furniture in the room 
E A layer of heat is formed under the ceiling 
F Smoke and gases spread into other parts of the house, endangering 
anyone who may be there 
G Everything in the room reaches ignition point and bursts into flame 
H The upholstery catches fire
Questions 26-27 
What are two models for observing fire behaviour that have been developed 
overseas? Write the answers in the spaces numbered 26-27 on the answer sheet. 
26.___________________________
27.___________________________

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QUESTIONS 28-42 
You arc advised to spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-42 which refer to 
Reading 
Passage 3 below. 
READING PASSAGE 3 
SOME MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT 
ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA *
n
W
When airline pilot Percy Trezise began 
to explore the rock art galleries of Cape
York peninsula in the early 1960s— 
a hobby that was to obsess
him for the next
30 years — the consensus of
academic
opinion was that Australia had
been peopled for less than
10,000 years. Stone tools found
in Kakadu have now been dated to at least
50,000 years, and camp sites as diverse as lake
Mungo in the VVillandra lakes region of NSW
and WA's upper Swan River have yielded tools
charcoal radiocarbon-dated to between 38,000
and 45,000 years. More than a dozen other sites
date to more than 30,000 years — indisputable
evidence, says archaeologist Josephine Flood,
of the great antiquity of Aboriginal culture.
Thirty years ago, the first Australians were still
thought of as a backward race. Trezise recalls in
his book Orcani Koni/. that there was much sage
discussion o i whether they were even capable
of abstract II ought. Since then, reawakened
interest in an 1 growing knowledge of Australia's
Aboriginal h ritage has demonstrated that this is
a complex. 
M 
bile and rich culture.
I he closer we look al Australian prehistory, the
more H umlinues to confound our
assumptions. Until recently, the authoritative
view was that the population of Australia at
the time of the arrival of Europeans in 1788
was probably somewhere between 250,000 and
500,000. But the discovery, beginning two years 
ago, of a vast Aboriginal graveyard at Lake 
Victoria near the confluence of the
Murray and Darling rivers has thrown
even this into
doubt. At least 10,000 skeletons are buried in 
sands of Lake Victoria,
" possibly as 
many as 40,000. 
Researchers are
wondering if 
they have 
stumbled on the
Demographic hub of an infinitely
more populous prehistoric Australia than was 
ever previously supposed, at the
crossroads of two of its greatest river 
highways. Archaeologist Dr Colin Pardoe of 
the SA museum says the idea of 300,000 or so 
people in Australia before white settlement 
must be radically re-evaluated. 'I believe that 
we should be thinking 10 times that', he told 
science writer Julian Cribb recently. As Cribb 
noted, this would be a greater population than 
pre-Roman Britain's. 
Though Aborigines might see themselves as 
indigenous (in the sense, as Josephine Flood 
explains, that they have no race history not 
associated with this continent) there is no 
doubt that they were in fact Australia's first 
migrants. Their springboard was provided by 
the last ice age, or Pleistocene period, which 
lasted between two million and 10,000 years 
ago. So much water was locked up on land that 
the ocean level dropped perhaps 150 m. There 
was never a complete land bridge to south-east 
Asia, but Arnhem Land was linked to Papua 
New Guinea for most of the past 100,000 years,

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spread rapidly. The inland would have been 
says Flood, and this would have been one of 
the easiest routes for ice-age immigrants 
dry, but considerably more hospitable than it is
moving south. What is certain, says Flood in 
today. The inland salt pans were then fresh- 
her excellent book The Riches Of Ancient 
water lakes teeming with fish, and the country