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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60128 Medium Dinosaur Provincial Park and the Red Deer River badlands

Read the following passage.

A. Dinosaur Provincial Park lies in the valley of the Red Deer River in southeastern Alberta, 48 kilometres northeast of Brooks. It contains Canada's largest badlands, a landscape of bare hills, gullies and hoodoos. Three kinds of habitat sit side by side. Prairie grasses cover the land above the valley rim, cacti and sage survive in the hot, dry badlands, and tall cottonwood trees grow by the river, where water is plentiful. The riverside forest is the smallest habitat in the park, but it holds the greatest concentration of life, especially birds.

B. About 75 million years ago, this area was a subtropical coastal plain with lush forests. Rivers flowed east across the plain into a warm inland sea, and they left deposits of sand and mud. Those deposits buried the bones of the animals that lived here, including dinosaurs, and preserved them as fossils. When the last ice age ended, about 13,000 years ago, water from melting ice cut the valley. Wind and rain still wear away the soft rock, and this erosion keeps exposing new bone beds.

C. Since the 1880s, collectors have recovered more than 300 dinosaur skeletons of high quality from a 27 kilometre stretch of the river, and specimens from the park now sit in more than 30 major museums. Since 1985, the largest collection of the park's finds has been housed in the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller. UNESCO made the park a World Heritage Site in 1979. The park has also faced problems. In the past, illegal digging removed many bones from its most visited area, and five gas wells were drilled inside the park. Oil and gas still lie beneath it, and companies reach them by drilling at an angle from outside its boundaries.

D. Much of the park is now a Natural Preserve, which visitors may enter only on guided tours, and removing or disturbing any fossil is against the law. Every research or collecting project needs a permit, and the park works closely with the Royal Tyrrell Museum on research. On their own, visitors can drive, walk or cycle a 3.5 kilometre public loop road that passes two outdoor fossil displays. Park staff lead tours and hikes that visitors book in advance, and the visitor centre, which also serves as the museum's summer field station, has exhibits.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
The woods by the water take up the least space yet are the most crowded with living things.

- 2.
One museum has held the biggest share of the park's discoveries since the mid-1980s.

- 3.
Without a guide, people may tour part of the park by bicycle.

- 4.
The park is just under fifty kilometres from Brooks.

- 5.
The earliest people to search for ancient remains along this river worked for the government.

- 6.
Scientists must get official approval before they start any study or dig there.

- 7.
No area of badlands in North America is bigger than the one in this park.

- 8.
Meltwater shaped the valley at the close of the most recent glacial period.

- 9.
Cactus plants are able to live in the parched parts of the park.

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