Resumen Del Libro Australia (Oxford)

AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND
Chapter 1:
What kind of country is Australia? Firstly, Australia is big – 7,686,848 square kilometers. In fact, only five countries in the world – Russia, Canada, the United States, China, and Brazil – are larger than Australia. One part of Australia, Western Australia, is four times as big as Texas, or eleven times as big as Great Britain. The journeys from Perth inthe west to Sydney in the east takes about four hours by plane; that is longer than the journey from Madrid to Moscow. And if you walk all around Australia along the coast, you will travel 25,760 kilometers.
Chapter 2:
The first people in Australia were the Aborigines, who came more 40,000 years ago from South East Asia. Chinese sailors visited 2,500 years ago, and much later Dutch sailors came –Willem Janszoon in 1606, and Abel Tasman in 1642. The Dutch made maps of the north and west coasts of Australia, but they did not try to live there. Then in 1770 the British sailor Captain James Cook landed on the east coast, and said that Australia now belonged to Britain. Nobody asked the Aborigines about this, and it was the beginning of a terrible time for them.
Chapter 3:
In each ofAustralia’s six states – New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania – there is a large city which is near a river and near the sea. More than half of all Australians live in these six cities – and many others live near to them. In fact, most people live only a few kilometers from the sea.

Chapter 4:
When British people came to Australia in 1788, they gavethe name ‘Aborigine’ to the people the found there. The 300,000 Aborigines who lived in Australia at that time belonged to more than 300 different groups and each group had its own land and language. They travelled to different parts of their land during the year to find food and water; they ate plants and fruits and caught animals and fish. They did not own many things, and they only buildingswere houses made from branches and leaves. This way of life did not damage or destroy the land where they lived.
Chapter 5:
One of the most beautiful things you can see in Australia is Uluru, also called Ayers Rock. It is an enormous rock alone in the middle of the dessert south-west of Alice Springs. It is 3 kilometers long and 348 meters high, but there are another 2,100 meters under the ground.Uluru is 600 million years old, and for a long time people thought that it was the largest rock of its kind in the world. (In fact, Mount Augustus in Western Australia is two and half times as big as Uluru.) Thousands of tourists come each year to walk round it and look at it. The best time to see it is at the end of the day, when its colour changes from yellow to gold, red and then purple. Somevisitors like to see Uluru from a plane; others ride out into the desert to see it from long way away. Uluru is a especial place fro Aborigines, and it belongs to the Anangu, Aboriginal people of the Pitjantjatjara group.

Chapter 6:
Australia is a rich country, and life there is good for most people. Where does its money come from? Sheep, cattle, minerals, wheat, fruit, and wine are some ofthe answers. Sheep have been important since the end of the eight tenth century. Most Australian sheep are Spanish merinos, which were first brought there in 1797. Merinos are strong animals and live happily in warm dry places. Now 20 of per cent of the world’s sheep live in Australia, mainly in New South Wales and Victoria, and 25 per cent of the world’s wool comes from there.
Chapter 7:
NezZealand Is a long way from everywhere – three hours by plane from Australia, and about twenty-six hours by plane from Britain. It is a country of islands; the North Island and the South Island are the main ones, and there are many smaller ones. It is long, narrow country; nowhere in New Zealand is more than 130 kilometers from the sea. It is a little larger than Great Britain, but Great Britain has...