CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: The Alaska Highway: A Wartime Road North

Paragraph A

For decades, people had talked about building a road that would connect Alaska with the rest of North America by land, but the idea never got very far. Any route would have to cross enormous stretches of forest, muskeg, rivers and mountains where very few people lived, and neither Canada nor the United States saw enough reason to pay for it. Everything changed after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. American military planners worried that the ships supplying Alaska could be cut off, and they wanted a land route to support a string of airfields that already ran across northern British Columbia and the Yukon. In early 1942, the two governments reached an agreement: the United States would build the road and cover its cost, while Canada would allow it to pass through Canadian territory. The starting point was Dawson Creek, British Columbia, where the railway line ended and troops and heavy equipment could be unloaded.

Paragraph B

Construction began in March 1942, and the pace was extraordinary. Thousands of American soldiers, roughly a third of them African American, worked alongside civilian crews that included many Canadians. Teams pushed forward from several points at once, clearing trees and throwing up temporary bridges as they went. The conditions were punishing. Swarms of mosquitoes tormented the workers in summer, while temperatures in the north could plunge far below freezing. One of the hardest lessons involved permafrost. When crews stripped away the moss and plants covering the ground, the frozen soil underneath thawed into deep mud, and they had to find ways of building on top of the surface instead of cutting into it. In the autumn of 1942, crews working from the north and the south finally met in the Yukon, and an official ceremony was held near Kluane Lake that November.

Paragraph C

The first road was narrow, rough and frequently impassable, and much of it was rebuilt and rerouted by contractors in the following years. After the war, the United States handed the Canadian section over to Canada in 1946, and the Canadian Army took charge of maintaining it. Even so, the highway was not opened to unrestricted public travel until 1948. For the First Nations communities along the route, the road brought sudden and lasting change: new settlements, new jobs and a stream of outsiders, but also outbreaks of illnesses to which many people had little resistance.

Paragraph D

Today, the Alaska Highway is far smoother and straighter than the wartime trail, and decades of improvements have made the journey considerably shorter than the original route. It has become one of the continent’s great road adventures, drawing motorcyclists, cyclists and families in recreational vehicles every summer. Many travellers begin with a photograph beside the “Mile 0” post in Dawson Creek. Further north, in Watson Lake, Yukon, they stop at the Sign Post Forest. It began in 1942, when a homesick soldier working on the road put up a sign pointing toward his hometown. Visitors have been nailing up their own signs and licence plates ever since, and the collection now stretches across a large area.