CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Sable Island and Its Wild Horses

Paragraph A

Far out in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 300 kilometres southeast of Halifax, lies a thin, curved strip of sand that has fascinated sailors, scientists and artists for centuries. Its name comes from the French word for sand, and from the air it looks like a narrow smile in the sea. Sable Island is about 40 kilometres long but never much more than a kilometre and a half wide, and it has no trees at all. Instead, its dunes are held in place by marram grass and other hardy plants whose roots trap the blowing sand. Because the island is made of sand rather than rock, it is constantly being reshaped, as storms and currents remove sand from some areas and deposit it in others.

Paragraph B

Long before it became known for its horses, Sable Island had a much darker reputation. Surrounded by shallow sandbars and frequently wrapped in fog, it has been the site of more than 350 recorded shipwrecks, earning it the nickname “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” In 1801, the colony of Nova Scotia set up a lifesaving station on the island, and its crews patrolled the beaches on horseback, ready to rescue shipwrecked sailors. Modern navigation equipment eventually made such wrecks rare, and the lifesaving station closed in the last century.

Paragraph C

Today, the island’s best-known residents are its wild horses, which number in the hundreds. They are not native; most historians believe they are descended from horses brought to the island in the eighteenth century. Since the 1960s they have been protected by law, and no one feeds them, treats them when they are sick or shelters them from storms. The horses live on the island’s grasses and dig into the sand to reach fresh water. They share their home with a huge colony of grey seals, which come ashore each winter to give birth, and with the Ipswich sparrow, a bird that nests almost nowhere else on Earth. In summer, terns and other seabirds also nest among the dunes.

Paragraph D

In 2013, Sable Island became a national park reserve managed by Parks Canada. Apart from a small number of staff and researchers, nobody lives there. Researchers come to study the horses, the seals and the birds, and weather observations have been recorded on the island for well over a century. Visiting, however, is far from simple. Most visitors arrive by small plane, which lands directly on the beach when the weather allows, while others come by private boat or on expedition ships. Every visitor must register with Parks Canada in advance and follow strict rules: no one may touch or feed the horses, and people must keep well back from them. As a result, only a few hundred people set foot on the island in a typical year.