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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63092 Medium L'Anse aux Meadows: Norse site in Newfoundland

Read the following passage.

A. In 1960, the Norwegian explorer and writer Helge Ingstad came to L'Anse aux Meadows, at the tip of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula. He was searching the coast from New England northward for places where Norse ships had landed. A local resident, George Decker, led him to some overgrown bumps and ridges that seemed to mark old buildings. From 1961 to 1968, Helge's wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, led the excavations with a team from Norway, Iceland, Sweden and the United States. Their work proved that the site was Norse and dated from the 11th century.

B. The idea of Norse voyages to this coast is far older than the digs. The sagas, Norse stories told by word of mouth for many years before they were written down, trace sea voyages westward from Greenland. The Greenlanders' Saga, from the 13th century, tells how Leif Eiriksson reached North America and called the new land Vinland, Land of Wine, after one of his crew found grapes growing wild. In 1914, William Munn, a newspaper publisher from Newfoundland, became the first to suggest, in a series of articles, that the site had been a Norse settlement.

C. The digs uncovered eight buildings with walls and roofs of sod laid over a frame, the same kind used in Iceland and Greenland around the year 1000. A small hut by a brook held a furnace where iron was smelted from ore found in bogs, and many iron boat nails turned up. A spindle whorl and a whetstone for sharpening needles showed that not all of the settlers had been men. Three butternuts were found in the bog, although these trees do not grow north of eastern New Brunswick. Tools and camps of five or six Indigenous groups were also identified, since people had used the site for about 6,000 years.

D. Experts see the site as a base for exploration, not a place where the Norse settled to farm. Barns and other livestock buildings are missing, and there is no sign of grazing. Both the archaeology and the sagas point to a very brief stay. Given the camp's size and the number of people, there is a strong argument that it was Straumfjord, the main base in Erik the Red's Saga. Radiocarbon dates could not fix its age precisely. In 2021, a study of wood from three trees, cut with metal tools, found they were felled in 1021, the only secure calendar date for Europeans across the Atlantic before Columbus.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
Objects found at the camp showed that the group included women.

- 2.
The Norse chose this spot mainly because it was close to good hunting grounds.

- 3.
A man who published a newspaper first put forward the idea that the Norse had lived at the site.

- 4.
Someone who lived in the area guided the Norwegian visitor to the right spot.

- 5.
Specialists believe the Norse did not come here to raise animals or grow crops.

- 6.
The eight Norse buildings were larger than the houses the Norse built in Iceland.

- 7.
Members of the first team to excavate the site came from four countries.

- 8.
Metal was produced at the camp from material taken out of wet ground.

- 9.
One old story says the new land got its name from a plant that a sailor found.

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