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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63094 Medium Inuit throat singing: practice and performance

Read the following passage.

A. Inuit throat singing is a vocal game, usually played by two women who stand very close together, facing each other, and sometimes holding each other's shoulders. It is playful but competitive, with a winner and a loser: the game stops when one singer runs out of breath or laughs. Players are still admired for their endurance and for the quality of their sounds. The Inuit have no general term for music, and these games belong to the wider family of traditional Inuit games. The name katajjaq is used most often, although it applies only to Arctic Quebec and the south of Baffin Island.

B. Each game is built from a short motif that is repeated many times. Some of its sounds are voiced and others unvoiced, and some are made while breathing in, others while breathing out. The second singer usually copies the first singer's motif half a beat later, so listeners seem to hear one chain of low sounds and another of high sounds. Without warning, one player may change her motif, and her partner must follow without breaking the rhythm. The result should sound so uniform that the audience cannot make out exactly who does what.

C. Katajjaq has been performed at any time of day and in any season, to put babies to sleep, on returning from the hunt and during long journeys. An Inuit elder, Aulla Tullaugak, has described singing it in her childhood, when there was little to do and eat, as a way to wait for the hunters to come back. Boys learned the games too, but their participation declined once they were old enough to join the adult men on the hunt. Throat singing is practised in all fourteen Inuit communities of Quebec, where women have handed it down from generation to generation.

D. The practice has changed a great deal over the last century. Christian missionaries banned Inuit vocal games, and throat singing nearly died out. In Puvirnituq, an elder asked the community's four remaining throat singers to teach a new generation of women, and a wider resurgence began in the 1980s. In 2001 the Avataq Cultural Institute organized the first Inuit throat singing conference. Quebec later designated throat singing as intangible heritage under its Cultural Heritage Act, the first element to receive that status under the act. Tanya Tagaq, from Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, performs throat singing without a partner. In March 2020, Shina Novalinga began sharing throat singing videos on TikTok.

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.
Religious workers tried to stop this kind of singing by forbidding it.

- 2.
A player can suddenly switch to a fresh sound pattern, and her partner has to keep up.

- 3.
Boys often gave up playing when they were big enough to track animals with grown men.

- 4.
The Quebec government paid for the first conference of throat singers.

- 5.
One singer performs the game alone instead of with a second voice.

- 6.
There is no single Inuit word for music in general.

- 7.
Women sang during the men's absence so that the men would find more animals to catch.

- 8.
A round finishes as soon as one player starts giggling or has no air left.

- 9.
Ideally, anyone hearing the pair should be unable to say which singer produces each sound.

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