Children nowadays spend a great deal of time watching television. However, television cannot replace the book as a learning tool, which is why children are less well‐educated today. To what extent do you agree with this statement?

Easter

Island

, which is in the Pacific Ocean more than 3,000 km from the coast of South America, has a terrible lesson to teach the modern world. When the

first

Europeans visited it in 1722, they found an

island

short of food on which about 3,000 people were living in a state of constant war. The Europeans were surprised to find a large number of huge statues, which had been moved over great distances, and which clearly belonged to a great civilization. The people whose / - they found on the

island

,

however

, were poor and backward. The Europeans supposed that these people could not have built

such

large statues, which / meant that some other mysterious people must have done so.

However

, modern research has shown that the inhabitants of Easter

Island

were responsible for the terrible condition in which the Europeans had found them in. The inhabitants were divided into many family groups, which competed with each other. Their religion involved building huge statues, which consumed time and resources. Their home was a volcanic

island

on where few trees grew, and which produced little food. To make matters worse, to build statues they cut down trees, which caused soil erosion. By the middle of the 16th century, the population had reached about 7,000, which was

to

to a degree exceeding normal or proper limits

too

great for the

island

to support. By

this

time there were no more trees, which the islanders needed to build boats. There was not enough food with which to feed

such

a large population, and they were unable to leave, so the population

felI

a numerical quantity measured or assigned or computed

value

. By the end of the 19th

cen tury

a period of 100 years

century

, there were only a hundred or so inhabitants remaining.