[originaltext]W: Hello, David.M: Oh, Hi, sorry, Mia. I’m a bit late.W: Oh! No

W: Hello, David.
M: Oh, Hi, sorry, Mia. I’m a bit late.
W: Oh! No problem. Thanks for agreeing to help me with my assignment today.
M: Sure. You are going to talk about European rock art, aren’t you?
W: Yes, the rock drawings in the caves of Lascaux in western France.
M: Oh, fantastic, over 13,000 years old, I believe. What sort of drawings are they?
W: They’re drawings of animals on the whole, but you can also find some human representations. There are roughly 600 drawings at Lascaux.
M: Really? Were they mostly pictures of bulls?
W: Well, no, actually. The animal most depicted was the horse. Have a look at this graph. It shows the distribution of different animals. You see... first the horse, and then after that a sort of prehistoric bull. And the third most commonly drawn creature was the stag.
M: What are the drawings like?
W: Well, the bulls are depicted very figuratively—they’re very realistic. They are very big comparing to other drawings, of people. They appear to be almost three-dimensional in some cases.
M: Amazing. Perhaps they felt these animals were the most impressive and needed to be represented like that.
W: Yeah, maybe. The drawings of the humans by contrast consist of just simple lines, like the stick figures my little sister draws. Perhaps humans were seen as less important.
M: So apart from the bulls and horses and stags, were there any other creatures depicted?
W: In one or two chambers, you do find pictures of fish but they’re quite rare.
M: What sort of size is the cave? It must be quite large to have that many pictures.
W: Well, it’s actually a number of mter-linking chambers, really. The first 20 metres inside the cave slope down very steeply to the first hall in the network. That’s called the Great Hall of the Bulls. Then off to the left we have the Painted Gallery, which is about 30 metres long. Then further into the cave we find a second, lower gallery called the Lateral Passage. This opens off the aisle to the right of the Great Hall of the Bulls.
M: Is the cave open to the public today?
W: Well, no. After the initial discovery in 1940, it was opened and literally millions of people came through to see the drawings. Then in the fifties the experts started to worry about the damage being done to the drawings, and the government finally closed the Lascaux cave in 1963.
1. What is the woman going to talk about?
2. What can we learn from the conversation about the drawings?
3. What might be seen as less important according to the woman?
4. What can we learn from the conversation about the chambers in the cave?
5. When was the cave open to the public?