CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: The Badlands and Hoodoos of Drumheller

Paragraph A

Less than two hours’ drive northeast of Calgary, the flat wheat fields of southern Alberta suddenly give way to a deep, winding valley. Here, along the Red Deer River near the town of Drumheller, lie some of the most dramatic badlands in Canada. The term “badlands” describes dry land that has been so heavily eroded that very little can grow on it. The valley itself is relatively young. It was carved out at the end of the last ice age, when huge volumes of meltwater from retreating glaciers rushed across the prairie and cut down through the soft ground. In doing so, the water exposed layers of rock that had been laid down tens of millions of years earlier, when the region was a warm, swampy lowland roamed by dinosaurs. The striped hillsides that visitors see today are a record of that distant past, with bands of sandstone, mudstone and dark coal stacked one above another.

Paragraph B

The area’s most famous features are its hoodoos: tall, mushroom-shaped columns of rock that can stand several metres high. Each hoodoo is topped by a flat “cap” of harder stone, which acts like an umbrella, shielding the softer sandstone beneath it from the rain. While the unprotected ground around it washes away, the column under the cap is left standing. The process is extremely slow, taking thousands of years. Yet hoodoos do not last forever. Rain, wind and repeated freezing and thawing gradually wear away the base, and once the cap topples off, the remaining pillar can crumble surprisingly quickly. Some of the surrounding slopes also contain bentonite, a clay that swells when it gets wet and cracks as it dries. It gives the surface a lumpy, popcorn-like texture and turns it as slick as soap after a rainstorm.

Paragraph C

Long before tourists arrived, the valley attracted scientists and miners. In 1884, a young geologist named Joseph Burr Tyrrell, who had been sent to survey the region for coal, came across the skull of a meat-eating dinosaur that was later named Albertosaurus. His discovery helped draw fossil hunters from around the world, and the area remains one of the richest sources of dinosaur remains anywhere. Coal, the other resource Tyrrell had noted, shaped the valley in a different way. In the early twentieth century, dozens of mines opened, and small towns grew up around them. When demand for coal fell in the decades after the Second World War, most of the mines closed, and many of those communities shrank or disappeared.

Paragraph D

Today, the badlands are among Alberta’s best-known attractions, and Drumheller is home to the Royal Tyrrell Museum, named in honour of the geologist. The hoodoos southeast of town are one of the most visited sites in the valley, and they are now protected by a viewing area with paths, railings and signs. Because climbing on the columns can damage their fragile bases, visitors are asked to admire them from the trails instead. Even with these measures, nature will have the final word: the same erosion that created the hoodoos will one day bring them down. Meanwhile, new ones are slowly taking shape in the surrounding hills, so the landscape is less a finished monument than a work in progress.