Task 2
Questions 13-18
Read the text below.
For questions 13-18, choose the correct answer (A, B, C or D).
Mark your answer on the answer sheet.
The Hunted
In the early nineteen-seventies, Mark Owens and Delia Jones, two fresh graduates in biology with promising career prospects, were seized by the idea of resettling in remotest Africa. Although people told them they were not realistic, the two persisted with their plan. Newly wed, the Owenses organized an auction, sold their possessions, and used the modest proceeds to buy camping equipment and a pair of one-way plane tickets to Johannesburg.When they arrived, in January 1974, Delia, the daughter of farmers from Toledo, Ohio, was twenty-four years old. Mark was twenty-nine, the divorced father of a four-year-old boy named Christopher.
Mark and Delia had scoured the map of Africa, searching for a site so isolated that its wildlife would have no knowledge, and no fear, of humans. They eventually found their way to a place called Deception Valley, in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. The Owenses thought it was a perfect spot for them to make camp since the wildlife there had not been reduced in number by poaching, as it had been in other parts of Africa. Though the valley was in many ways an unforgiving place - temperatures can climb above a hundred and twenty degrees in summer - it was distant enough from the capital, Gaborone, to ensure that they would be left alone to do their work. The Kalahari is virtually empty of people: the Owenses later wrote of living with only "a few bands of Stone Age Bushmen in an area larger than Ireland."
In their book Cry of the Kalahari, the Owenses described their dreadful living conditions: "Our major concern was having to ration ourselves to seven gallons of water each per week, for bathing, cooking, and drinking. The water from the drums tasted like hot metallic tea, and to cool it for drinking, we filled tin dinner plates and set them in the shade of the acacia. But if we didn't watch it closely, the water would quickly evaporate or collect bees, twigs, and soil. After washing the dishes, we took sponge baths in the dishwater, then strained the coffee-colored liquid through a cloth into the truck's radiator."
Despite poverty, loneliness, and drought, they established a functional research station, and gained the trust of several prides of lions and clans of brown hyenas. Early on, Mark Owens went to South Africa to learn how to pilot small airplanes, and the Frankfurt Zoological Society, which became the Owenses' most important sponsor, gave him money for a single-engine Cessna. He used the plane to survey the Kalahari's wildlife, and he and Delia spent thousands of hours conducting close observation of the social life of hyenas, learning about their surprisingly communal behavior. By writing about the exploits of these predators in vivid and accessible prose, they attracted popular attention and funding for their work. They welcomed reporters who came to Deception Valley, and told their story not as one simply of research but of young love in a hard land.
In "Kalahari Romance", an article Mark Owens published in International Wildlife, he described his ideal day: "I land in the grass, most likely in a place never visited by modern man, and we sleep in the open under the wing. Now and then we wake to watch the gentle sweep of the Southern Cross constellation through the sky. Knowing that no one on Earth knows where we are, we feel special, as if we are the only two people in the universe. It's like living a dream."