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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60139 Medium Old Town Lunenburg: a planned town built on farming and the fishery

Read the following passage.

A. Lunenburg stands on Mi'kmaq traditional territory. The Mi'kmaq call the site E'se'katik, which means place of clams, and to the French it was known as Merliguesche. In 1753 the British government settled 1,453 foreign Protestants at Lunenburg, a place that had been home to a small Acadian settlement. Many had been recruited in southwestern Germany, and most of them spoke German. The British hoped these settlers would help counter the French and Catholic presence in Nova Scotia. Every settler received a free lot in town with a garden, plus farm land in the county. The streets were laid out on a rectangular grid, much like the plan of Halifax.

B. The first years were hard, but by the late 18th century Lunenburg supplied Halifax with many farm products. Its people had also entered the offshore fishery, and at first they fished off the Labrador coast. In the late 1860s, new trawling techniques sent the town's schooner fleet to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the Western Bank. Cod dried by a method known as the Lunenburg cure found steady markets in the West Indies, particularly Puerto Rico. The racing schooner Bluenose was launched from a local shipyard in 1921.

C. A fishing boom reported in 1888 did not last. The fish export trade became centred in Halifax, where fast steamships left directly for the West Indies as well as other markets. At the same time, buyers came to prefer fresh fish to dried fish. Local business owners, especially the Smith and Zwicker families, made changes to win back the lost trade. From the late 1920s, cold storage, processing plants and diesel trawlers replaced cod-drying flakes and the old schooners. Today the town has one of the largest fish-processing plants in Canada, owned and run by High Liner Foods.

D. The old town has kept its original layout and overall appearance, and many of its houses and public buildings are made of wood, some of them from the 18th century. A local feature is the Lunenburg bump, a five-sided dormer. Almost all of the old town is privately owned. Owners face rising property values, maintenance costs and the challenge of keeping historical accuracy in restoration work. Many tourists come, especially in summer. In 1995 Old Town Lunenburg was made a United Nations World Heritage Site. The World Heritage description calls it the best surviving example of a planned colonial settlement built by the British in North America.

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 British picked this spot because its harbour gave ships good shelter.

- 2.
Before sailing to more distant fishing grounds, local crews worked the waters near Labrador.

- 3.
Customers started to favour fish that had not gone through any drying.

- 4.
Two families in the town tried to recover business that had gone elsewhere.

- 5.
Nearly every building in the old part of town is in private hands.

- 6.
People who own the historic houses find them expensive to keep in good repair.

- 7.
Officials wanted the newcomers to offset Catholic and French influence in the region.

- 8.
High Liner Foods employs more people at its plant than any other business in town.

- 9.
In the mid-1990s the old town gained World Heritage status from the United Nations.

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