CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Ontario's Provincial Parks

Paragraph A

Ontario administers upwards of 300 provincial parks, the earliest of which is also the most venerable reserve of its kind in the country. Algonquin, gazetted in 1893, was from the outset burdened with a threefold mandate: it was simultaneously a timber reserve, a sanctuary for fish and game, and a convalescent retreat to which city dwellers repaired in search of clean air — conservation and tourism, in other words, were never disentangled. Sprawling across several thousand square kilometres between Georgian Bay and the Ottawa River, the park has never been wholly withdrawn from commercial exploitation; along a number of its canoe routes, logging continues to this day, unimpeded by the reserve's supposedly protective boundaries.

Paragraph B

What followed was a conspicuously sluggish expansion. Rondeau, a second reserve on the shore of Lake Erie, was proclaimed the following year, after which almost an entire generation passed without a further designation of any kind. A statute enacted a decade later authorized officials to withdraw from settlement any land deemed unfit for agriculture, thereby sidestepping the friction that might otherwise have arisen with farmers. Even so, by the mid-twentieth century the province could still claim no more than seven parks, and vast tracts of the northern bush remained entirely without formal protection, notwithstanding an urban appetite — steadily sharpening — for a weekend's escape from the city.

Paragraph C

In the mid-1950s, once the Department of Lands and Forests had carved out a branch answerable for parks alone, expansion proceeded at a clip the province had never before witnessed: within six years the original seven had multiplied to forty-five, and by decade's end the system was absorbing several million visits annually. Campgrounds, bathing beaches and boat launches proliferated in response to a public newly enamoured of camping as a pastime. Unlike the earliest reserves, whose rationale had been the husbanding of timber and game, these newer sites existed for one purpose only: the holidaying family.

Paragraph D

Within a decade it had become apparent that a single designation could not stretch to cover everything from an inaccessible wilderness lake to a crowded municipal beach. A policy adopted in 1967 accordingly sorted the parks into categories calibrated to whatever use each could sustainably bear, six classes eventually being settled upon. Construction of any kind was curtailed in the wilder categories, whereas campgrounds and beaches persisted in the recreational one. Not until well into the following century did the legislature supersede the statute under which the department had operated since the 1950s — the first thoroughgoing revision of park legislation in half a century.

Paragraph E

Not given in any of the above paragraphs.