CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Pablum and the Hospital for Sick Children

Paragraph A

In the 1920s, doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto treated a steady stream of young patients whose troubles began not with germs but with what they ate. Rickets, a disease that softens and bends growing bones, was still common in Canadian cities and appeared most often in children who got little sunshine during the long northern winter. Some arrived with bowed legs or other visible signs of the disease. Many babies were fed thin porridges or watered-down milk, and even careful parents had little reliable advice about what a growing child needed. For the hospital’s physician-in-chief, Dr. Alan Brown, poor infant feeding was not simply a private family matter. He considered it a public health problem and believed that doctors had a duty to help solve it.

Paragraph B

Working with two colleagues, Dr. Frederick Tisdall and Dr. Theodore Drake, Brown set out to create a cereal that was nourishing, easy to digest and simple to prepare. The team combined wheat, oat and corn meal with ingredients that sound surprising today, including bone meal, dried brewer’s yeast and alfalfa, in order to supply vitamins and minerals that ordinary cereals lacked. The mixture was cooked and dried before it was packaged, so a parent needed only to stir in milk or water and serve it. At a time when preparing cereal for a baby usually meant a long session at the stove, this was a considerable convenience.

Paragraph C

The cereal reached store shelves in the early 1930s under the name Pablum, from the Latin word pabulum, meaning food. An American company was licensed to manufacture and sell it, and before long it was a familiar sight in kitchens across North America. For many parents, the box on the pantry shelf became a symbol of modern, scientific child care. The doctors did not keep the royalties for themselves. Instead, the payments went to the hospital, where for roughly twenty-five years they helped pay for research into children’s health. Toronto had already drawn international attention a decade earlier, when insulin was discovered at the city’s university, and Pablum gave its medical community a second success that ordinary families could see on their own tables.

Paragraph D

In the decades that followed, Pablum faced competition from many other infant cereals, and the brand passed through the hands of more than one company. Its most lasting influence, however, may be on the English language. Because the cereal was soft, smooth and deliberately mild, the word “pablum” came to describe speeches, writing or ideas that are bland and say nothing challenging. Many people who use the word this way have no idea that it began as a brand name. Yet for the doctors who created it, mildness was entirely the point: a food that any infant could digest and any parent could prepare was exactly what their young patients needed.