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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60165 Hard British Columbia joins Canada and the CPR

Read the following passage.

A. The colony of British Columbia was created in 1858, after some 30,000 gold seekers rushed to the Fraser River. When the Dominion of Canada was formed in 1867, British Columbians argued over joining it, and the purchase of Alaska by the United States that year raised fears that the Americans would try to annex the colony. In 1868 the newspaper publisher Amor De Cosmos founded the Confederation League, whose delegates met at Yale and asked for a wagon road to the east. Indigenous people had little or no say in these debates, and Joseph Trutch, the chief commissioner of lands, refused to negotiate treaties with First Nations.

B. Governor Frederick Seymour, who had opposed joining Canada, died in 1869, and his replacement, Anthony Musgrave, supported union. Canada agreed to take over the colony's debt, give it three senators and six members of Parliament, and build a railway to the Pacific coast within 10 years. British Columbia became the sixth province on 20 July 1871. The railway charter went to Sir Hugh Allan in 1872, but in 1873 it became known that he had given about $350,000 to the Conservative election campaign, and Macdonald's government was forced to resign. Construction finally began in 1878.

C. The Canadian Pacific Railway company was incorporated in 1881 and received $25 million in cash and 25 million acres of land. Under general manager William Van Horne, construction was pressed rapidly across the plains, and in the Selkirks the line crossed Rogers Pass, an essential but perilous link where snowy winters brought deadly avalanches. More than 15,000 Chinese labourers worked on the railway in harsh conditions for little pay, and historians estimate that at least 600 of them died. On 7 November 1885, company director Donald Smith drove the last spike at Craigellachie, near Eagle Pass, at a modest ceremony with no reporters and no politicians.

D. For many years, writers treated the railway as the project that made Canada possible, and Pierre Berton called it the "national dream." The last spike photographs became some of the best known images in Canadian history. Van Horne himself took a plainer view, insisting that the line was built to make money for its shareholders rather than to build a nation. Historians also point to what the pictures leave out. No Chinese labourer appears in them, and in 1885 a new law made Chinese immigrants pay a $50 head tax to enter Canada. Land for the railway was gained partly through the Numbered Treaties, whose terms remain contested.

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 death of an official who resisted joining Canada helped the move toward union.

- 2.
Van Horne saw the railway as a business venture rather than a patriotic one.

- 3.
Merchants in Victoria paid for the early campaign of the Confederation League.

- 4.
The United States buying Alaska made some British Columbians anxious.

- 5.
Journalists stayed away from Craigellachie because the date of the event was kept secret.

- 6.
First Nations had almost no voice while British Columbia's future was being decided.

- 7.
People arriving from China were made to pay a special charge to come into Canada.

- 8.
Hundreds of the Chinese workers lost their lives during construction.

- 9.
The charge on newcomers from China went up more than once in later years.

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