Practice test 2_ngocphan

Apparently, both the listening and the reading discuss China’s discovery of America, but an opposition to the reading’s arguments is implied in the listening at three points as follows.

The first point the professor casts doubt on the reading is the artifacts found off California coast. According to the passage, the ship anchors resembling those used on ancient Chinese junks and ship wreckage predating Columbus’s expedition are among the most compelling evidence to claim that Chinese explorers set foot in this place before Columbus’s exploration in 1492.  However, the lecturer affirms that the ship anchors were composed of rocks native to California, not China and those ones were most likely made by Chinese-American fishermen in the 19^th century, not in 15^th century.

The professor’s next argument focuses on Newport Tower. It is stated in the reading that Chinese may have established early settlements in North America because the Newport Tower which is believed to be built by some pre-Columbian explorers was designed according to the architecture of the Ming Dynasty in China. On the contrary, the lecturer asserts that a lot of studies including excavations, mortar comparisons and radiocarbon dating of the structure’s stones consistently trace the Newport Tower to the 1600s. Moreover, there is no evidence that Chinese settlers erected this structure a century or two earlier.

Finally, with regard to the similarities between Native American and Chinese words, the lecturer refutes the notion presented in the passage that some linguistic similarities show the relation between Native American and Chinese languages because she believes that it is hard to compare the two languages since Native American and Chinese language have a lot of dialects. Plus, many “shared words” are proven by historians and linguists to be false. The genuine similarities can be just explained to be mere coincidences.   

In conclusion, the lecturer contradicts the passage in terms of all three pieces of evidence: artifacts on California coast, architecture and linguistic similarities.