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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63104 Medium Monarch butterflies: Mexico-Canada migration

Read the following passage.

A. The yearly cycle of the eastern monarch starts in the mountains of central Mexico. Once the winter colonies scatter in March and early April, the butterflies head north to the Gulf Coast of the United States, and there the females lay eggs on milkweed. Two or three generations are produced there in spring, and it is the offspring of the wintering butterflies that carry the migration further north. This step-by-step journey is necessary because milkweed on the Gulf Coast dies out by June. The earliest of the returning butterflies arrive in southern Canada in late May or the first week of June.

B. Adult monarchs drink nectar from many kinds of flowers, but they breed only where milkweed grows, since its leaves are the sole food of the caterpillars. In eastern Canada the main host plant is common milkweed, while in western Canada it is showy milkweed. A single female may lay as many as 400 eggs, placing them one at a time on the undersides of leaves. Growing from egg to adult butterfly takes between 20 and 45 days, with an average of about 30. In southern Canada, eastern monarchs produce two to three generations each year from June to September.

C. The monarchs that emerge in late summer do not mature sexually; instead of breeding, they migrate. The southward flight from Canada begins in early August and continues until mid-October, and on the way the butterflies seek out nectar to build up fat for the winter. They seem reluctant to fly over large bodies of water, so they collect on peninsulas such as Point Pelee on Lake Erie, where they cluster on trees in overnight roosts before crossing. From November to late December the eastern population arrives at about 12 wintering sites in the oyamel fir forests of central Mexico.

D. In 1995, Point Pelee, Long Point and Prince Edward Point in southern Ontario were named monarch reserves under an agreement with Mexico. Since 1992 the Monarch Watch program has handed out small adhesive tags to volunteers each fall, and they have tagged more than 3 million monarchs, with tags recovered every year at the wintering sites in Mexico. The size of the eastern population is measured by the area of forest its colonies cover. In the winter of 2025 to 2026, nine colonies covered 2.93 hectares, a 64 per cent increase from 1.79 hectares the season before, after several years of some of the lowest counts on record.

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.
Butterflies that appear as summer ends travel south and do not reproduce.

- 2.
How many of the insects spend the winter is judged by the amount of woodland their groups take up.

- 3.
After the larger count, Mexico widened the protected zone around the wintering butterflies.

- 4.
Members of the public have fixed identifying labels to millions of these insects since the early 1990s.

- 5.
The butterflies keep moving past the Gulf Coast because the plants that hold their eggs die off there in early summer.

- 6.
A larva of this species reaches a length of about five centimetres before it changes form.

- 7.
Before crossing big lakes, the insects collect on strips of land that stick out into the water.

- 8.
Three spots in Ontario were set aside for the butterflies through a deal with Mexico.

- 9.
On average, it takes roughly a month for an egg to become a winged adult.

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