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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63146 Easy Joseph-Armand Bombardier and travel on snow

Read the following passage.

A. Joseph-Armand Bombardier was born in 1907 in Valcourt, a farming village in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. As a boy he built mechanical toys, including a small locomotive driven by a clock mechanism. At 15, with his brother's help, he repaired an old Ford engine and used it to drive a sled with a propeller. His father, Alfred, worried about the dangerous propeller and ordered the machine taken apart. Alfred had also hoped his eldest son would become a priest, but Joseph-Armand left college at 17 to train as a mechanic. In 1926 Bombardier opened his own garage in Valcourt.

B. In rural Quebec, snow made country roads impossible for cars in winter. In the winter of 1934, Bombardier's two-year-old son Yvon died of peritonitis because the family could not get him to a hospital. After this loss, Bombardier worked even harder on a vehicle that could travel on snow. His key idea was a toothed wheel covered in rubber that pulled a track, while skis at the front steered the machine. He patented this system in 1937, and that same year he introduced the B7, which carried seven passengers in a closed body.

C. Demand grew. A larger model, the B12, seated 12 people and was used for school transport, ambulance work and carrying mail. From 1942 to 1946, more than 1,900 tracked military vehicles were built to his designs. Then, in the late 1940s, the Quebec government began plowing rural roads, and in one year the company's sales dropped by close to one million dollars. Bombardier responded by building tracked machines for forestry, farming and mining. One of them, the Muskeg tractor, could reach swampy ground.

D. In 1959 Bombardier took a small one-person prototype to Lansdowne House in northern Ontario, where Ojibwe drivers tested it, and he left it there as a gift. The product was meant to be called the Ski-Dog, but a printing error turned the name into Ski-Doo. Mass production began that autumn, and output rose from 225 machines in the first season to 8,352 in the fifth. The visit to Lansdowne House had changed his thinking: he now saw the snowmobile as a machine for recreation as well as for work. As the first snow machine built in large numbers, the Ski-Doo launched snowmobiling as a sport.

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 name of his small snow machine came from a mistake in printing.

- 2.
The loss of one of his children pushed him to work harder on his invention.

- 3.
His father had his first snow vehicle dismantled because it seemed unsafe.

- 4.
A decision by the authorities in Quebec about winter roads cost his firm a great deal of business in a single year.

- 5.
Canadian defence officials were the ones who asked him to design vehicles for soldiers.

- 6.
In his design, a soft-coated part with teeth drove the track forward.

- 7.
Riders in a remote Ontario settlement tried an early model before it went on sale.

- 8.
He learned his trade through night classes in Montreal.

- 9.
His father wanted him to have a career in the Church.

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