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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60138 Medium Dawson City: from gold rush boomtown to a small northern town

Read the following passage.

A. In April 1899, a fire destroyed 117 buildings in Dawson, a town that was less than three years old. By then it had become the main trading and distribution centre of the Yukon, and the damaged area was rebuilt by that summer. The recovery did not last. News arrived of a gold strike at Nome, Alaska, and many residents packed up and left. By the end of that summer, Dawson was nearly empty.

B. Long before the rush, the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in spent each summer fishing for salmon on the mud flat where a salmon-rich tributary flowed into the Yukon River. The name Klondike is believed to come from a local word meaning hammer water, because the Han hammered stakes into the river bottom to trap salmon. In August 1896 the trader Joseph Ladue staked a townsite there, expecting a rush, and gold was discovered that same month. The town took its name from George M. Dawson, who directed the Geological Survey of Canada.

C. Thousands of stampeders reached the mouth of the Klondike River in the spring of 1897. They spread into Tr'ochëk, the traditional fishing settlement of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, staked the land and vandalized the fishing equipment. Chief Isaac moved his people five kilometres downriver to Moosehide Village. During the peak years of the rush, Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in labourers worked on the Yukon paddlewheelers and on building sites. Dawson became the Yukon capital in 1898, and it grew quickly as the port where men and materials were unloaded for the goldfields.

D. The town kept shrinking in the following decade, as new mining technology slowly drove people away. After the Alaska Highway was built, Whitehorse replaced Dawson as the territory's commercial and administrative centre, and the capital moved there in 1953. In 1966 the last dredge in the Klondike valley shut down, and since then tourism has been the major industry. Parks Canada began restoring buildings in the early 1960s, and the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in government is now the largest employer in town. The 2021 census counted 1,577 residents, far fewer than during the rush. Gold mining still matters, but the placer deposits are slowly being used up.

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.
Chief Isaac led his people to a new home a short way downstream.

- 2.
Within months of the blaze, the ruined section of town stood again.

- 3.
The 1899 fire left several hundred people without a place to live.

- 4.
The word Klondike is thought to describe a method once used to catch fish.

- 5.
Government offices for the Yukon moved to Whitehorse in the 1950s.

- 6.
Chief Isaac chose the new village site because the hunting there was better.

- 7.
Since the last dredge closed, visitors have been the town's leading source of business.

- 8.
Dawson had more residents in 2021 than at the official count before that one.

- 9.
The gold left in the local ground is gradually running out.

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