# Australia's Lost Giants: answers and explanations

The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS, Test 6, Reading Passage 2

Source: Passage, questions and answer key from The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS, Test 6, Reading Passage 2. © Cambridge University Press & Assessment. Used for educational practice. Explanations and evidence notes are written by Testmigo.

## Answer key

| Q | Answer | Proof |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 14 | F | Bones disintegrate, the land erodes, the climate changes, forests come and go, rivers change their course |
| 15 | E | Owen recognized that the Wellington cave bones belonged to an extinct marsupial. |
| 16 | A | the bones of thousands of creatures that must have fallen through holes in the ground above and become trapped. |
| 17 | E | examined in a chaotic manner that no scientist today would approve. |
| 18 | B | North America kept its deer, black bears and a small type of bison, and South America its jaguars and llamas. |
| 19 | A, C | people, who arrived on the continent around 50,000 years ago, used fire to hunt |
| 20 | A, C | the megafauna were faced with a continent where vegetation began to disappear. |
| 21 | A, D | a femur with a cut in it, possibly left there by a sharp tool. |
| 22 | A, D | Peter Murray has studied a rock painting in far northern Australia that shows what looks very much like a megafauna marsupial known as Palorchestes. |
| 23 | TRUE | it's a wonder that even more hasn't been devoted to megafauna. |
| 24 | NOT GIVEN | But this period of extinction wasn't comprehensive. |
| 25 | NOT GIVEN | Some viewed it as critical of the Aborigines, who pride themselves on living in harmony with nature. |
| 26 | FALSE | The more basic problem with Flannery's thesis is that there is no direct evidence that they killed any Australian megafauna. |

## Why these answers are right

**14. F.** The item wants natural events that make history hard to trace. Paragraph F lists them: bones disintegrate, land erodes, climate changes, forests come and go, and rivers change course, so history is destroyed or steadily concealed.

**15. E.** Paragraph E tells how Diprotodon was first found at Wellington Caves: George Rankin's rope was tied to what turned out to be a bone, Mitchell sent fossils to Richard Owen, and Owen identified them as an extinct marsupial.

**16. A.** The item asks why many kinds of animals died in one small place. Paragraph A explains that the bones in Victoria Cave came from thousands of creatures that fell through holes in the ground above and became trapped in the chamber.

The why and the trap for questions 17 onwards are free with an account on the [answers page](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/australias-lost-giants/answers).

[Practice Australia's Lost Giants](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/australias-lost-giants)