CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: The Canadian Shield

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Stretching in a vast horseshoe around Hudson Bay, the Canadian Shield covers roughly eight million square kilometres and makes up nearly half of Canada’s land area. It reaches from Labrador and northern Quebec across much of Ontario and Manitoba into Saskatchewan, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, and it even extends south of the border into states such as Minnesota and New York. Geologists describe the Shield as the exposed core of the North American continent: a massive slab of ancient rock onto which younger layers were later added. Across much of the region, this bedrock lies at or just below the surface, giving the landscape its familiar look of pink and grey outcrops, low rounded hills and scattered boulders.

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The Shield contains some of the oldest rock on the planet. Near Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, a formation known as the Acasta Gneiss has been dated at about four billion years old, almost as old as Earth itself. It is hard to imagine today, but the region was once crossed by mountain ranges that may have rivalled the Himalayas. Over hundreds of millions of years, wind, rain and frost wore those peaks down to stumps. The final reshaping came during the last ice age, when sheets of ice up to three kilometres thick ground across the land, scraping away loose soil and carrying it south. When the glaciers melted roughly ten thousand years ago, they left behind a scoured surface with only a thin covering of sand and gravel.

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The retreating ice also gave the Shield its countless lakes. Glaciers gouged hollows into weaker rock, and because the hard bedrock does not absorb water, these basins filled and stayed full. Rivers wander from one lake to the next, and low-lying areas become soggy muskeg. Most of the region is covered by boreal forest, dominated by black spruce, jack pine, balsam fir and white birch, trees that tolerate cold winters and thin, acidic soil. That same soil has always made large-scale farming nearly impossible, which helps explain why so few people live on the Shield. Yet the maze of connected waterways was a highway long before roads existed: Indigenous peoples travelled it by canoe for thousands of years, and fur traders later followed the same routes.

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What the Shield lacks in farmland, it makes up for in minerals. The region holds rich deposits of nickel, copper, gold, silver, iron, uranium and, more recently, diamonds. Its mining history is closely tied to the railway: in 1883, workers blasting a path for the Canadian Pacific line near Sudbury, Ontario, uncovered a band of copper-nickel ore that grew into one of the world’s great mining districts. Twenty years later, another railway project sparked a silver rush in the town of Cobalt. Mining brought jobs and towns to the north, but at a cost. Decades of smelter emissions around Sudbury left the surrounding hills nearly bare and blackened. Since the late 1970s, a community regreening program has spread lime on the acidic ground and planted millions of seedlings, gradually returning green to the landscape.