CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: L.M. Montgomery's Anne

Paragraph A

A mix-up at an orphanage lies at the root of a novel that has never once slipped out of print since its debut in the opening decade of the twentieth century. An elderly brother and sister farming on Prince Edward Island had petitioned an orphanage for a boy capable of working the land, only to receive, instead, Anne Shirley — a voluble, red-haired girl of volcanic temper and unchecked imagination who nonetheless won the household over. The narrative closes with the death of Matthew Cuthbert, the brother who had wanted a boy in the first place, and with Anne declining a college scholarship in order to remain at Green Gables. Public reception was immediate and considerable: ten printings sold out within the first year, and seven further Anne novels followed in due course.

Paragraph B

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on that same island during the 1870s. Tuberculosis claimed her mother before she reached the age of two; her father then departed for the west, leaving her grandparents in Cavendish to raise her in a household she would later recall as comfortable, if emotionally chilly. Publishers proved unmoved by the finished manuscript, and after a string of rejections she consigned the pages to an old hat box, where they sat untouched for nearly a year before she submitted the novel one last time — whereupon a firm in Boston finally accepted it. Montgomery subsequently married a Presbyterian clergyman, Ewan Macdonald.

Paragraph C

The heroine's staying power is scarcely accidental. Much of it stems from her refusal to become the demure, compliant girl her era demanded of her, a defiance that carries readily across cultural boundaries. Audiences in Canada and the United States warmed to her missteps and to the gradual thawing of a family that had never wanted her, yet her most fervent readership emerged in Japan, where Hanako Muraoka translated the book in secret during the Second World War. Once her rendition appeared in the early 1950s, it reached a vast readership; Japanese schools subsequently added the novel to their required reading, and Japanese travellers continue to cross the Pacific to walk the landscape it depicts.

Paragraph D

The tale escaped the printed page early on. A silent-film adaptation surfaced barely a decade after publication, and a stage musical premiered at the Charlottetown Festival in the mid-1960s, eventually becoming the longest-running annual musical production anywhere in the country. Further film and television versions followed, among them a Canadian miniseries broadcast in the 1980s. The farmhouse that inspired Green Gables belonged to cousins of Montgomery's in Cavendish; the property now holds status as a national historic site, its interior furnished to mirror the novel's descriptions, and it sits within the boundaries of Prince Edward Island National Park.

Paragraph E

Not given in any of the above paragraphs.