CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Bombardier and the Snowmobile

Paragraph A

For much of Canada’s history, winter meant isolation. In rural Quebec in the early twentieth century, snow-covered roads were rarely ploughed, and families could be cut off from the nearest town for weeks at a time. Doctors, priests and merchants often could not reach the people who needed them. Horses and dog sleds were slow, and early automobiles were useless once the snow got deep. Joseph-Armand Bombardier, born in 1907 in the village of Valcourt, grew up with this problem. A gifted mechanic from a young age, he built his first motorized sled at fifteen by mounting a car engine and a wooden propeller on a frame with runners. The machine ran, but his father, alarmed by the danger, ordered him to take it apart.

Paragraph B

Bombardier opened a garage in Valcourt and spent years experimenting in his spare time. His determination grew after a personal tragedy: in the winter of 1934, his two-year-old son fell gravely ill, and because the roads were blocked by snow, the boy could not be taken to hospital in time. Three years later, Bombardier received a patent for a sprocket wheel and track system that gripped the snow far better than anything before it. His first commercial vehicle, the B7, could carry seven passengers and looked like a small bus on skis and tracks. Larger models followed, and soon these machines were serving as school buses, ambulances and mail carriers across rural Quebec.

Paragraph C

Business boomed until the 1950s, when the Quebec government began ploughing rural roads in winter, sharply reducing the demand for large snow vehicles. Bombardier turned his attention to a much older dream: a light machine for one or two riders. In 1959, he introduced a small, open vehicle that he intended to call the Ski-Dog, since he saw it as a replacement for dog teams. A printing error turned the name into Ski-Doo, and Bombardier decided to keep it. The first buyers were missionaries, trappers and prospectors who worked in remote areas, but before long, the Ski-Doo was being bought by people who simply enjoyed racing across frozen lakes on weekends.

Paragraph D

Nowhere was the snowmobile’s impact greater than in the Far North. Within a decade of the Ski-Doo’s launch, many Inuit communities had largely replaced their dog teams with snowmobiles. Hunters could travel much farther in a day, reaching distant hunting grounds and returning the same evening. The change was not without costs. Snowmobiles depend on expensive gasoline and spare parts that must be shipped north, and a breakdown far from home can be life-threatening in a way that a tired dog team rarely was. Some elders also worried that traditional knowledge of dog handling and sled building was being lost. Today, many communities hold dog-sled races and youth programs to keep those skills alive, while snowmobile trails and long-distance races have also brought winter visitors to the region.