# Oral Storytelling Before Writing IELTS Academic Reading - 13 questions - 20 minutes - Matching headings, Flow-chart completion, Multiple choice (choose more than one), Multiple choice Source: Written by Testmigo. ## The passage You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on the passage below. **A** Writing is a fairly recent invention. The earliest known writing systems developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt between about 3400 and 3100 BC, and in many parts of the world it arrived only in the last few centuries. Until then, everything a community needed to know, from family histories to the achievements of its founders, had to be stored in human memory and handed on by word of mouth. Scientists have tended to doubt that spoken accounts could survive for thousands of years without being lost or badly changed. Two very different traditions, one in West Africa and one in Australia, suggest that this doubt may be misplaced. **B** Among the Mande peoples of Mali, Guinea and neighbouring countries, the task of remembering belongs to the jeliw (singular jeli), usually called griots in English. They act as historians, praise singers and musicians, and the role is hereditary: jeliw generally marry within their own group. Children born into these families are surrounded from an early age by verbal art, music and genealogy. They learn not in a classroom but by watching, repeating and taking part in real performances under guidance. Their most celebrated material is the epic of Sundiata Keita, the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire. In the epic, Sundiata is given a griot called Balla Fasséké as an adviser, and the Kouyaté family of griots, whose line Balla Fasséké is said to have founded, continues to this day. In the village of Kangaba in Mali, a sacred building called the Kamablon receives a new thatched roof every seven years, and griots from the nearby village of Kela use the occasion to recount the oral history of the region. **C** How is so much material held in the mind? In his 1982 book Orality and Literacy, the scholar Walter Ong argued that people in cultures without writing tend to express knowledge through fixed, often-repeated phrases and patterns, because such structures are easier to remember, and that speakers deliberately return to important ideas more than once. Music offers further support. A griot's narrative is normally accompanied by an instrument such as the kora, a twenty-one-stringed harp-lute, or the balafon, a kind of xylophone. The Australian researcher Lynne Kelly has drawn attention to another aid: place. She argues that mobile peoples attached information to features of the landscape, a version of the method of loci, while settled communities built circles of timber or stone to serve the same purpose. Yet a strong memory does not mean a fixed text. Griots are expected to interpret and adapt what they have learned, and there is no single authoritative version of the Sundiata epic. **D** The Australian evidence comes from the coast. At the coldest point of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago, the sea stood roughly 120 metres below its present level. As the ice sheets melted, the sea rose and flooded wide areas of land, reaching its current height around Australia about 7,000 years ago. In a 2016 paper in the journal Australian Geographer, the geographer Patrick Nunn and the linguist Nicholas Reid presented Aboriginal stories from 21 places around the coastline that describe this flooding. The Narrangga people, for example, remember Spencer Gulf as a floodplain dotted with freshwater lagoons. In a Ngarrindjeri story, the ancestral figure Ngurunderi pursues his wives to Kangaroo Island, which could then be reached almost entirely by walking, before making the sea rise. And according to a government report from 1859, Aboriginal people at Port Phillip Bay recalled a time when the bay had been a hunting ground for kangaroos. **E** To estimate how old the stories are, Nunn and Reid started from the physical details that each one contains. If a story says that people once walked to an island, for instance, the researchers looked at the depth of the water that now separates it from the mainland and calculated how much lower the sea must have been for the journey to be possible. They then consulted scientific reconstructions of past sea levels to find when the sea last stood that low, which gave a minimum age for the story. Across the 21 locations, the results ranged from about 7,250 to 13,070 years. The authors link this remarkable survival to the way knowledge was handled: a conservative attitude to traditional law, the high value placed on preserving information, and kin-based systems in which relatives helped to check that stories were passed on accurately. **F** Writing has had mixed effects on these traditions. In 1960 the Guinean historian Djibril Tamsir Niane published a French prose account based on the telling of one griot, Djeli Mamoudou Kouyaté. Such books reached readers worldwide, but each fixes a single performer's version of a story that griots have always varied. Modern schooling, including reading and writing, has also reduced the importance of the griot. In the Guinean village of Nyagassola, where the Kouyaté griots guard a balafon said to have belonged to a thirteenth-century king, the number of pupils learning the instrument has fallen as people leave the countryside. Yet the tradition has adapted: microphones and amplifiers allow griots to perform for much larger audiences, and in cities such as Bamako and Dakar they play alongside electric guitars. In Australia, meanwhile, some of the flood stories can still be studied today partly because colonial officials wrote them down, as in that report from 1859. ## Questions ### Questions 14-19: Matching headings The passage has six paragraphs, A-F. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings. - **i** Questioning an old assumption about memory - **ii** Accounts of a coastline that has since disappeared - **iii** A family trade passed down through the generations - **iv** Rival versions that historians have rejected - **v** Turning the depth of the sea into dates - **vi** Ways of making large amounts of knowledge easier to recall - **vii** Losses and gains since writing arrived - **viii** The territory controlled by the Mali Empire - **ix** Why rising seas forced coastal groups to move inland 14. Paragraph A 15. Paragraph B 16. Paragraph C 17. Paragraph D 18. Paragraph E 19. Paragraph F ### Questions 20-23: Flow-chart completion Complete the flow-chart below, which shows how Nunn and Reid estimated the age of a story. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Pick out the concrete **(20)** _____ each story gives, e.g. walking to what is now an island. Check the **(21)** _____ of the channel now dividing the island from the coast. Calculate how far below today's level the sea needed to be for that crossing on foot. Compare this with **(22)** _____ of earlier sea levels produced by scientists. The result is the **(23)** _____ age: the story could be older but not younger. ### Questions 24-25: Multiple choice (choose more than one) Choose TWO letters, A-E. Which TWO changes in the griot tradition in recent times does the writer mention? - **A** fewer students learning a traditional instrument in one village - **B** electric guitars replacing traditional instruments in cities - **C** griots agreeing on one official written version of the Sundiata epic - **D** sound equipment allowing performances for bigger crowds - **E** griots refusing to let scholars write down their stories 24. Which TWO changes in the griot tradition in recent times does the writer mention? ### Question 26: Multiple choice Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. 26. What is the writer's main purpose in the passage? - A. to argue that written records are less reliable than spoken accounts - B. to show that knowledge can be kept in memory for very long periods without writing - C. to compare the training of storytellers in Africa and Australia - D. to describe a new scientific method for measuring changes in sea level [Practice online with a timer and instant marking](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/oral-storytelling-before-writing) - [Answers and explanations](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/oral-storytelling-before-writing/answers)