CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Wood Buffalo: Canada’s Largest National Park

Paragraph A

Straddling the border between northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories, Wood Buffalo National Park covers nearly 45,000 square kilometres, which makes it the largest national park in Canada and bigger than Switzerland. Yet despite its size and its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983, it receives only a small fraction of the visitors who crowd the Rocky Mountain parks. Few roads enter it, and the gateway community of Fort Smith is a long drive from any major city. Those who make the journey find boreal forest, vast wetlands and broad salt plains, where springs carry up minerals left behind by ancient seas, along with sinkholes that formed as underground rock dissolved.

Paragraph B

The park was created in 1922 to protect the last large herd of wood bison, the bigger northern relative of the plains bison. Its early managers soon made a decision that later generations would regret. Between 1925 and 1928, more than 6,000 plains bison were shipped north from an overcrowded park in central Alberta and released there. The newcomers interbred with the wood bison and brought tuberculosis and brucellosis, diseases that still affect the herds today. For years, it was feared that pure wood bison had disappeared altogether, until a small, isolated group was found in a remote corner of the park in 1957. Animals from that group later helped to establish herds elsewhere in Canada, while the park itself remains home to one of the world’s largest free-roaming bison herds.

Paragraph C

The park is just as important to birds. Whooping cranes had been in steep decline for decades, and no one could say where the survivors raised their young until 1954, when their nesting grounds were spotted in the park’s remote northern wetlands. It remains the breeding area of the only self-sustaining wild flock in the world, which flies roughly 4,000 kilometres to the Texas coast each fall. Farther south, the Peace-Athabasca Delta, one of the largest inland freshwater deltas in the world, lies where all four of North America’s major flyways cross, and millions of ducks, geese and other waterfowl stop there each year.

Paragraph D

The health of that delta is now the park’s most serious concern. Its wetlands depend on seasonal flooding, and hydroelectric dams and industrial development upstream, in British Columbia and northern Alberta, have raised fears about changes in the flow and quality of the water. In 2014, the Mikisew Cree First Nation, whose people have long relied on the delta, petitioned UNESCO to list the park as a World Heritage Site in Danger. A monitoring mission followed, and in 2019 the federal government released an action plan prepared with Indigenous partners and provincial and territorial governments. Whether it will be enough remains a matter of debate.