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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63134 Medium Banff hot springs and mountain tourism

Read the following passage.

A. People knew the hot springs on Sulphur Mountain long before the railway came. Archaeological evidence shows that people lived in the Bow Valley 10,000 years ago, and First Nations tell stories about the cave and its warm waters. In the fall of 1883, three Canadian Pacific Railway workers, the brothers William and Tom McCardell and their partner Frank McCabe, came upon a mist-filled cave there. Seeing a chance to profit from the mineral water, they put a fence around it, built a log cabin near the entrance and wrote to the government to claim the springs.

B. The government turned the claim down. It needed money to finish the railway line west, and it saw that the healing waters could draw tourists. After a legal battle over who owned the springs, it set aside 26 square kilometres around the Cave and Basin in 1885. In 1886 a tunnel was cut into the cave so that visitors could walk in rather than enter through a hole in its roof. Two years after it was created, the reserve was enlarged and became the core of Canada's first national park, which took the name Banff National Park in 1930.

C. The water begins as rain and snow on Sulphur Mountain. Some of it seeps through cracks in the rock to a depth of about 3 kilometres, where it is heated and pushed back up. How hot a spring is depends on how fast its water rises and how much cold groundwater it meets on the way, so the Upper Hot Springs are hot while the Cave and Basin is only warm. Bacteria that break down minerals dissolved in the water, such as pyrite and gypsum, cause the smell of rotten eggs. Today the Banff Upper Hot Springs are the only springs open for bathing.

D. The springs are also the only home of the Banff Springs snail, which is about the size of a popcorn kernel. By 1996 it survived in just five springs, and soaking, swimming and dipping hands or feet into the water all disturb it. It was listed as endangered in 2002, and in 2007 it received the first recovery strategy and action plan approved under the Species at Risk Act. Snails were returned to two springs in 2002 and 2003, and fences, cameras and alarms now guard closed springs. Even so, springs dry up more often, and a 2018 review found annual minimum counts below 10,000 snails in six of the ten years from 2007 to 2016.

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.
One reason officials refused to hand the springs over was that they needed funds to complete a railway.

- 2.
There are signs that humans lived in the area thousands of years before the railway crew arrived.

- 3.
The speed at which water climbs back to the surface helps decide the temperature of a spring.

- 4.
A passage was made so that the public could walk inside instead of coming down from above.

- 5.
The three railway workers were led to the site by a guide from a nearby First Nation.

- 6.
The land kept for the springs was later made bigger and formed the centre of a national park.

- 7.
Park staff count the snails in each spring once a week throughout the year.

- 8.
People getting into the water, even just with their hands or feet, can cause trouble for the small creature.

- 9.
The three men who claimed the springs in writing were employees of a railway company.

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