Day reading Passage (Australian culture and culture shock)

10
Dye (n) 
- a substance used to change the colour of something.

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11 
Book-keeping (n) 
- the job or activity of keeping an exact record of the money that 
has been spent or received by a business or other organization.
Example: The company said many o f the problems arose from insufficient controls
over its bookkeeping.
12 
To disrupt (v) 
(B2) - to prevent something, especially a system, process, or event, 
from continuing as usual or as expected.
Example: The meeting was disrupted by a group o f protesters who shouted and
threw fruit at the speaker.
13 
To cluster (v) 
- (of a group of similar things or people) to form a group, sometimes 
by surrounding something, or to make something do this.
Example: People clustered around the noticeboard to read the exam results.
14 
Succession (n) 
- a number of similar events or people that happen, exist, etc. after 
each other.
Example: Life was just an endless succession of parties and dinners.
15 
To merge (v) 
(C2) - to combine or join together, or to cause things to do this. 
Example: They decided to merge the two companies into one.
Example: There are dozens o f different dyes to choose from.

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Day 28
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
The Phoenicians: an almost forgotten people
The Phoenicians inhabited the region of modern Lebanon and Syria from about 3000 BC. 
They became the greatest traders of the pre-classical world, and were the first people to 
establish a large colonial network. Both of these activities were based on seafaring, an 
ability the Phoenicians developed from the example of their maritime predecessors, the 
Minoans of Crete.
An Egyptian narrative of about 1080 BC, the Story of Wen-Amen, provides an insight 
into the scale of their trading activity. One of the characters is Wereket-EI, a Phoenician 
merchant living at Tanis in Egypt’s Nile delta. As many as 50 ships carry out his business, 
plying back and forth between the Nile and the Phoenician port of Sidon.
The most prosperous period for Phoenicia was the 10th century BC, when the surrounding 
region was stable. Hiram, the king of the Phoenician city of Tyre, was an ally and business 
partner of Solomon, King of Israel. For Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, Hiram provided 
craftsmen with particular skills that were needed for this major construction project. He 
also supplied materials - particularly timber, including cedar from the forests of Lebanon. 
And the two kings went into trade in partnership. They sent out Phoenician vessels on long 
expeditions (of up to three years for the return trip) to bring back gold, sandalwood, ivory, 
monkeys and peacocks from Ophir. This is an unidentified place, probably on the east 
coast of Africa or the west coast of India.
Phoenicia was famous for its luxury goods. The cedar wood was not only exported as top- 
quality timber for architecture and shipbuilding. It was also carved by the Phoenicians, and 
the same skill was adapted to even more precious work in ivory. The rare and expensive 
dye for cloth, Tyrian purple, complemented another famous local product, fine linen. The 
metalworkers of the region, particularly those working in gold, were famous. Tyre and 
Sidon were also known for their glass.
These were the main products which the Phoenicians exported. In addition, as traders and 
middlemen, they took a commission on a much greater range of precious goods that they 
transported from elsewhere.
The extensive trade of Phoenicia required much book-keeping and correspondence, and 
it was in the field of writing that the Phoenicians made their most lasting contribution to 
world history. The scripts in use in the world up to the second millennium BC (in Egypt, 
Mesopotamia or China) all required the writer to learn a large number of separate 
characters - each of them expressing either a whole word or an element of its meaning.
By contrast, the Phoenicians, in about 1500 BC, developed an entirely new approach to

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Reading Passage 1
writing. The marks made (with a pointed tool called a stylus, on damp clay) now attempted 
to capture the sound of a word. This required an alphabet of individual letters.
The trading and seafaring skills of the Phoenicians resulted in a network of colonies, 
spreading westwards through the Mediterranean. The first was probably Citium, in Cyprus, 
established in the 9th century BC. But the main expansion came from the 8th century BC 
onwards, when pressure from Assyria to the east disrupted the patterns of trade on the 
Phoenician coast.
Trading colonies were developed on the string of islands in the centre of the Mediterranean 
- Crete, Sicily, Malta, Sardinia, Ibiza - and also on the coast of north Africa. The African 
colonies clustered in particular around the great promontory which, with Sicily opposite, 
forms the narrowest channel on the main Mediterranean sea route. This is the site of 
Carthage.
Carthage was the largest of the towns founded by the Phoenicians on the north African 
coast, and it rapidly assumed a leading position among the neighbouring colonies. The 
traditional date of its founding is 814 BC, but archaeological evidence suggests that it was 
probably settled a little over a century later.
The subsequent spread and growth of Phoenician colonies in the western Mediterranean, 
and even out to the Atlantic coasts of Africa and Spain, was as much the achievement of 
Carthage as of the original Phoenician trading cities such as Tyre and Sidon. But no doubt 
links were maintained with the homeland, and new colonists continued to travel west.
From the 8th century BC, many of the coastal cities of Phoenicia came under the control of 
a succession of imperial powers, each of them defeated and replaced in the region by the 
next: first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, Persians and Macedonian Greeks.
In 64 BC, the area of Phoenicia became part of the Roman province of Syria. The 
Phoenicians as an identifiable people then faded from history, merging into the populations 
of modern Lebanon and northern Syria.

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Write your answers in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.