CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Pacific Salmon And Their Journey Home

Paragraph A

Each autumn, rivers and streams across British Columbia fill with one of nature’s great spectacles: the return of the Pacific salmon. Five species of Pacific salmon spawn in Canadian waters – chinook, coho, sockeye, pink and chum – and all of them begin life in the same way, as eggs buried in the gravel of a freshwater stream. What happens next depends on the species. Pink and chum salmon head for the ocean almost as soon as they emerge, while young coho and sockeye may remain in rivers or lakes for a year or more. Once at sea, salmon feed and grow for one to several years before a powerful instinct draws them back to the very stream where they hatched. Scientists believe that, after reaching the coast, salmon rely largely on their sense of smell to pick out the distinctive scent of their home waters.

Paragraph B

The journey upstream is exhausting. Once salmon enter fresh water, they stop eating altogether and must survive on the fat reserves they built up at sea. Some Fraser River sockeye swim more than 1,000 kilometres inland, battling rapids and leaping small waterfalls along the way. As they travel, their bodies transform. Sockeye, silver in the ocean, turn a brilliant red with green heads, and the males of several species develop a hooked jaw and, in some cases, a humped back. When a female reaches the spawning grounds, she uses her tail to dig a shallow nest in the gravel, where she lays her eggs and a male fertilizes them. Within days or weeks, both parents die, their energy completely spent.

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Yet the death of the adults is far from the end of their usefulness. Salmon carcasses provide a feast for bears, eagles, gulls and many other animals at a time of year when they are preparing for winter. Bears often carry fish well away from the riverbank, eating only the richest parts and leaving the rest on the forest floor. As those remains break down, nutrients the fish gathered in the ocean are released into the soil, and researchers have found traces of these ocean-derived nutrients in trees and plants growing along salmon streams. Decaying carcasses also support the insects that young salmon later feed on, so each generation helps to nourish the next.

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For people, too, salmon have long been vital. Indigenous peoples along the Pacific coast and in the interior have fished salmon for thousands of years, and the fish remain central to their diets, economies and ceremonies. Salmon runs have also suffered at human hands. In the early twentieth century, rock blasted during railway construction in the Fraser Canyon contributed to a massive slide at Hell’s Gate, narrowing the river so severely that huge numbers of fish could not get past. Decades later, concrete fishways were built to help salmon through the narrow passage. Today, warming rivers and the loss of stream habitat pose new challenges, and many communities are working to restore the streams that salmon depend on.