NewsTracker Answers for week of Dec. 17, 2018

Q: The mayor of the Chile’s Easter Island territory said last week that the British Museum might be a better home for a massive native statue taken by British seamen 150 years ago. The remote island is more than 2,000 miles from Chile’s mainland. Where is Chile?

Circle the area on this map


Q: Chilean officials and some other island dignitaries recently went to London to seek the return of the stone statue on display at the museum. The statue is one of hundreds of “Moai” carved by which people who first settled the island?

A. Incas

B. Mayans

C. Polynesians

D. Spanish


C. The island is called Rapa Nui by the descendants of the Polynesian-speaking people who came by canoe and/or catamaran sometime before 1200. It is the southeastern most point of the Polynesian Triangle which extends east to the islands of New Zealand and north to Hawaii. The islanders carved about a thousand of the Maoi statues between about 1100 and 1600.


Q: Rapa Nui Mayor Pedro Edmunds Paoa said he would rather see the British Museum offer financial help to preserve the basalt statues “buried, ignored and discarded” across the island. What creates basalt stone?

A. Limestone kilns

B. Meteorites

C. Sedimentary deposits

D. Volcanoes


D. More than 90 percent of all volcanic rock on Earth is basalt. Easter Island is volcanic high island, consisting mainly of three extinct volcanoes. Paoa said the wind and rain are badly eroding the exposed volcanic stone of the Moai on the island.


Q: Rapa Nui was named Easter Island by European navigator Jacob Roggeveen who landed on the island on Easter Sunday in 1722. He was . . .

A. Dutch

B. German

C. Portuguese

D. Spanish


A. Roggeveen was exploring for the Dutch West India Company when he landed on the island. His Easter Sunday visit resulted in the deaths of about a dozen islanders and the wounding of many others.


Q: European diseases devastated the native Polynesian population in the 19th century. And, about half the island’s population was abducted by slave raiders from the country just north of Chile. What nation is on Chile’s northern border?

A. Brazil

B. Peru

C. Uruguay

D. Venezuela


B. Chile is bordered Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far south. After a series actions by European landowners and missionaries, Rapa Nui’s native population fell to 111 by 1871. The population began to recover by the time the island was sold and annexed to Chile in 1888.