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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63127 Easy Elsie MacGill: aircraft engineer and advocate for women

Read the following passage.

A. Elsie MacGill was born in Vancouver in 1905. Her mother, Helen Gregory MacGill, later became a Juvenile Court judge in British Columbia. Elsie studied at the University of British Columbia and then at the University of Toronto, where in 1927 she became the first woman in Canada to graduate in electrical engineering. She went on to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan. Shortly before she finished, she became ill with polio and could not walk, but she still received her master's degree in 1929, the first woman in North America to earn one in that field. About three years later she was walking again, with two canes.

B. MacGill began her design career in 1934 at Fairchild Aircraft in Longueuil, Quebec. There she worked on the Super 71, the first aircraft designed and built in Canada with a metal fuselage. She also became the first woman member of the Engineering Institute of Canada. In 1938 she was hired as chief aeronautical engineer at the Canadian Car and Foundry plant in Fort William, now Thunder Bay. There she designed a training plane, the Maple Leaf II, and she is credited as the first woman in the world to design an aircraft.

C. A few weeks after war began in 1939, she learned that the plant would build military aircraft on a large scale. She was put in charge of all engineering work on the Hawker Hurricane, a British-designed fighter, and the factory was retooled for mass production. About 1,450 Hurricanes were built there, and she also designed a winter version with skis and de-icing equipment. In 1942 an American comic book series called her the 'Queen of the Hurricanes'. The plant then took on a contract to build Helldiver bombers for the American navy. Her job ended in 1943, when she and the plant manager, Bill Soulsby, were both fired on the same day.

D. MacGill then moved to Toronto and started her own engineering consulting business. In 1946 she became the first woman to serve as a technical adviser to the International Civil Aviation Organization. A fall in 1953 put her back in a wheelchair. In 1955 she published My Mother the Judge, a biography of her mother. From 1967 to 1970 she was one of the seven members of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. For the rest of her life she worked to see as many as possible of its 167 recommendations to the federal government put into effect.

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.
Her first design job included work on a model whose body was built of metal.

- 2.
Later in her life, she brought out a book about her mother.

- 3.
Her team built the Hurricane faster than the factories in Britain did.

- 4.
On one day in 1943, both she and the manager of the plant lost their jobs.

- 5.
A Canadian group of engineers admitted her as its first female member.

- 6.
She started her own firm because no company in Toronto would give her a job.

- 7.
For three years she sat on a royal commission that looked at the position of women.

- 8.
While finishing her graduate studies, she caught a disease that left her unable to walk.

- 9.
No woman in Canada had completed a degree in electrical engineering before her.

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