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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60135 Medium The Empress of Ireland: fourteen minutes in the St. Lawrence

Read the following passage.

A. The Empress of Ireland was built in Govan, Scotland, for the Canadian Pacific Railway and made its first voyage to Canada in June 1906. It was not designed to be the largest or the fastest liner on the North Atlantic, but it offered a comfortable weekly service and could carry 1,580 passengers in three classes. In summer it sailed between Quebec City and Liverpool. Between 1906 and 1914 the ship brought more than 100,000 immigrants to Canada, and thousands of them travelled on to homestead in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

B. On May 28, 1914, the Empress left Quebec City for Liverpool. On board were 161 Salvation Army members and their families, bound for an international congress in London. Early the next morning, after the pilot had left the ship near Rimouski, thick fog rolled in. The Norwegian collier Storstad, fully loaded with coal, came out of the fog and struck the liner's starboard side. Water poured in, the power soon failed, and passengers, most of them asleep, were left in darkness. Since the ship was leaning to starboard, the crew could not launch the boats on the port side, and the Empress sank in 14 minutes.

C. Of the 1,477 people aboard, 1,012 died and 465 survived. The Salvation Army lost almost 150 members, among them 29 of the 41 players in its Canadian Staff Band, and of the 138 children on board only four lived. The crew of the Storstad lowered their own boats and pulled hundreds of people from the water. An inquiry in Quebec City, led by Lord Mersey, who had also examined the Titanic disaster, found the Storstad at fault. However, a Norwegian inquiry in Montreal cleared the collier and its captain, and the two findings have never been reconciled.

D. The wreck lies 45 metres down in the St. Lawrence River. After it was found again in 1964, it became a famous dive site, and divers stripped away many of its fittings before it was protected; taking artifacts is now forbidden. Many victims were buried in Rimouski, where a memorial was raised. In 2009 the wreck was declared a national historic site, and the Empress of Ireland Museum shows objects from the ship alongside the testimony of passengers and their descendants. For the 100th anniversary, the Canadian Museum of History opened an exhibition about the ship. Today close to one million Canadians can trace their family history to the ship.

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.
Two official investigations disagreed about which vessel should carry the blame.

- 2.
Anyone visiting the sunken vessel underwater today must leave its objects where they lie.

- 3.
The tilt of the sinking vessel stopped some of the rescue boats from being put into the water.

- 4.
The sinking of the Empress took more lives among its travellers than the Titanic did.

- 5.
Only a handful of the youngsters on the ship came through alive.

- 6.
Nearly a million people living in Canada can link their ancestors to the ship.

- 7.
The vessel offered its travellers three different grades of accommodation.

- 8.
A large party from the Salvation Army was heading to a gathering in London.

- 9.
The collision happened a little after two o'clock in the morning.

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