Western Immigration of Canada
A By the mid-1870s Canada wanted an immigrant population of agricultural settlers established in the West.
No urban centres existed on the prairies in the 1870s, and rural settlement was the focus of the federal
government’s attention. The western rural settlement was desired, as it would provide homesteads for the sons
and daughters of eastern farmers, as eastern agricultural landfilled to capacity. As well, eastern farmers and
politicians viewed western Canada, with its broad expanses of unpopulated land, as a prime location for
expanding Canada’s agricultural output, especially in terms of wheat production to serve the markets of
eastern Canada.
B To bolster Canada’s population and agricultural output, the federal government took steps to secure western
land. The Dominion of Canada purchased Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870. In 1872,
the federal government enacted the Dominion Lands Act. This act enabled settlers to acquire 160 acres of free
land, as long as settlers remained on their land for a period of three years, made certain minor improvements
to the land, and paid a $10.00 registration fee. The Canadian government also created a Mounted Police Force
in 1873. The Mounties journeyed west to secure the area for future settlers. By 1876 the NWMP had
established themselves in the West. The major posts included Swan River, Fort Saskatchewan, Fort Calgary,
Fort Walsh and Fort Macleod. All of these initiatives attracted a number of eastern-Canadian settlers, as well
as European and American immigrants, to Canada’s West, and particularly to the area of Manitoba.
C The surest way to protect Canadian territory, and to achieve the secondary goal for joining British Columbia
to the rest of the country, was to import large numbers of Eastern Canadian and British settlers. Settling the
West also made imperative the building of a transcontinental railway. The railway would work to create an
east-west economy, in which western Canada would feed the growing urban industrial population of the east,
and in return become a market for eastern Canadian manufactured goods.
D Winnipeg became the metropolis of the West during this period. Winnipeg’s growth before 1900 was the
result of a combination of land speculation, growth of housing starts, and the federal government’s solution in
1881 of Winnipeg as a major stop along the CPR. This decision culminated in a land boom between 1881 and
1883 which resulted in the transformation of hamlets like Portage la Prairie and Brandon into towns, and a
large increase in Manitoba’s population. Soon, Winnipeg stood at the junction of three transcontinental railway
lines which employed thousands in rail yards. Winnipeg also became the major processor of agricultural
products for the surrounding hinterland.
E The majority of settlers to Winnipeg, and the surrounding countryside, during this early period, were
primarily Protestant English-speaking settlers from Ontario and the British Isles. These settlers established
Winnipeg upon a British-Ontarian ethos which came to dominate the society’s social, political, and economic
spirit. This British-Ontarian ethnic homogeneity, however, did not last very long. Increasing numbers of foreign
immigrants, especially from Austria-Hungary and Ukraine soon added a new ethnic element to the recent
British, the older First Nation Métis, and Selkirk’s settler population base. Settling the West with (in particular)
Eastern Canadians and British immigrant offered the advantage of safeguarding the 49th parallel from the
threat of American take-over, had not the Minnesota legislature passed a resolution which provided for the
annexation of the Red River district. The Red River in 1870 was the most important settlement on the
Canadian prairies. It contained 11,963 inhabitants of whom 9,700 were Métis and First Nations. But
neighbouring Minnesota already had a population of over 100,000.
F Not all of the settlers who came to western Canada in the 1880s, however, desired to remain there. In the
1870s and 1880s, economic depression kept the value of Canada’s staple exports low, which discouraged
many from permanent settlement in the West. Countries including Brazil, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand
and the United States competed with Canada for immigrants. Many immigrants and thousands of Canadians
chose to settle in the accessible and attractive American frontier. Canada before 1891 has been called “a huge
demographic railway station” where thousands of men, women, and children were constantly going and
coming, and where the number of departures invariably exceeded that of arrivals.”
G By 1891 Eastern Canada had its share of both large urban centres and problems associated with city life.
While the booming economic centres of Toronto and Montreal were complete with electricity and telephones in
the cities’ wealthiest areas by the turn of the century, slum conditions characterised the poorest areas like the
district known as ‘the Ward’ in Toronto. Chickens and pigs ran through the streets; privy buckets spilled onto
backyards and lanes creating cesspools in urban slums. These same social reformers believed that rural living,
in stark contrast to urban, would lead to a healthy, moral, and charitable way of life. Social reformers praised
the ability of fresh air, hard work, and open spaces for ‘Canadianizing’ immigrants. Agricultural pursuits were
seen as especially fitting for attaining this ‘moral’ and family-oriented way of life, in opposition to the single
male-dominated atmosphere of the cities. Certainly, agriculture played an important part in the Canadian
economy in 1891. One-third of the workforce worked on farms.
H The Canadian government presented Canada’s attractions to potential overseas migrants in several ways.
The government offered free or cheap land to potential agriculturists. As well, the government established
agents and/or agencies for the purpose of attracting emigrants overseas. Assisted passage schemes, bonuses
and commissions to agents and settlers and pamphlets also attracted some immigrants to Canada. The most
influential form of attracting others to Canada, however, remained the letters home written by emigrants
already in Canada. Letters from trusted friends and family members. Letters home often contained
exaggerations of the ‘wonder of the new world.’ Migrant workers and settlers already in Canada did not want to
disappoint, or worry, their family and friends at home. Embellished tales of good fortune and happiness often
succeeded in encouraging others to come.
Questions 1-7 The Reading Passage has eight paragraphs A-H Choose the correct heading for paragraphs
A-H from the list below. Write the correct number, i-xii, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet
List of Headings
I Not all would stay in Canada forever.
Ii Government’s safeguard in the West
Iii Eastern Canada is full
Iv Built-up to the new infrastructure
V An exclusive British domination in Ontario established ever since
Vi Ethnics and language make-up
Vii Pursuing a pure life
Viii Police recruited from mid-class families
Ix Demand of western immigration
X Early major urban development of the West
Xi Attracting urban environment
Xii Advertising of Western Canada
Example: Paragraph A ix
1 Paragraph B 2 Paragraph C 3 Paragraph D 4 Paragraph E
5 Paragraph F 6 Paragraph G 7 Paragraph H
Questions 8-13 Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage Using NO MORE
THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
With the saturation of Eastern Canada, the Western rural area would supply 8 ............................... for the
descendants of easterners. Politicians also declared that Western is got potential to increase
9 ...............................of Canada according to 10 ......................... crop that consumed in the East. The federal
government started to prepare and made it happen. First, the government bought land from a private
11 ..............................., and legally offered a certain area to people who stayed for a qualifying period of time.
Then, mounted 12 ...............................was found to secure the land. However, the best way to protect citizens
was to build a 13 ...............................to transport the migrants and goods between the West and the East.
Food for thought 2
A There are not enough classrooms at the Msekeni primary school, so half the lessons take place in the
shade of yellow-blossomed acacia trees. Given this shortage, it might seem odd that one of the school’s
purpose-built classrooms has been emptied of pupils and turned into a storeroom for sacks of grain. But it
makes sense. Food matters more than shelter.
B Msekeni is in one of the poorer parts of Malawi, a landlocked southern African country of exceptional beauty
and great poverty. No war lays waste Malawi, nor is the land unusually crowed or infertile, but Malawians still
have trouble finding enough to eat. Half of the children under five are underfed to the point of stunting. Hunger
blights most aspects of Malawian life, so the country is as good a place as any to investigate how nutrition
affects development, and vice versa.
C The headmaster at Msekeni, Bernard Kumanda, has strong views on the subject. He thinks food is a
priceless teaching aid. Since 1999, his pupils have received free school lunches. Donors such as the World
Food Programme (WFP) provide the food: those sacks of grain (mostly mixed maize and soya bean flour,
enriched with vitamin A) in that converted classroom. Local volunteers do the cooking – turning the dry
ingredients into a bland but nutritious slop and spooning it out on to plastic plates. The children line up in large
crowds, cheerfully singing a song called “We are getting porridge”.
D When the school’s feeding programme was introduced, enrolment at Msekeni doubled. Some of the new
pupils had switched from nearby schools that did not give out free porridge, but most were children whose
families had previously kept them at home to work. These families were so poor that the long-term benefits of
education seemed unattractive when setting against the short-term gain of sending children out to gather
firewood or help in the fields. One plate of porridge a day completely altered the calculation. A child fed at
school will not howl so plaintively for food at home. Girls, who are more likely than boys to be kept out of
school, are given extra snacks to take home.
E When a school takes in a horde of extra students from the poorest homes, you would expect standards to
drop. Anywhere in the world, poor kids tend to perform worse than their better-off classmates. When the influx
of new pupils is not accompanied by an increase in the number of teachers, as was the case at Msekeni, you
would expect standards to fall even further. But they have not. Pass rates at Msekeni improved dramatically,
from 30% to 85%. Although this was an exceptional example, the nationwide results of school feeding
programmes were still pretty good. On average, after a Malawian school started handing out free food it
attracted 38% more girls and 24% more boys. The pass rate for boys stayed about the same, while for girls it
improved by 9.5%.
F Better nutrition makes for brighter children. Most immediately, well-fed children find it easier to concentrate.
It is hard to focus the mind on long division when your stomach is screaming for food. Mr Kumanda says that it
used to be easy to spot the kids who were really undernourished. “They were the ones who stared into space
and didn’t respond when you asked the question,” he says. More crucially, though, more and better food helps
brains grow and develop. Like any other organ in the body, the brain needs nutrition and exercise. But if it is
starved of the necessary calories, proteins and micronutrients, it is stunted, perhaps not as severely as a
muscle would be, but stunted nonetheless. That is why feeding children at schools work so well. And the fact
that the effect of feeding was more pronounced in girls than in boys gives a clue to who eats first in rural
Malawian households. It isn’t the girls.
G On a global scale, the good news is that people are eating better than ever before. Homo sapiens has
grown 50% bigger since the industrial revolution. Three centuries ago, chronic malnutrition was more or less
universal. Now, it is extremely rare in rich countries. In developing countries, where most people live, plates
and rice bowls are also fuller than ever before. The proportion of children under five in the developing world
who are malnourished to the point of stunting fell from 39% in 1990 to 30% in 2000, says the World Health
Organisation (WHO). In other places, the battle against hunger is steadily being won. Better nutrition is making
people cleverer and more energetic, which will help them grow more prosperous. And when they eventually
join the ranks of the well off, they can start fretting about growing too fast.
Questions 1-7 The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-G Choose the correct heading for paragraphs
A-G from the list below. Write the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
I Why better food helps students’ learning
Ii A song for getting porridge
Iii Surprising use of school premises
Iv Global perspective
V Brains can be starved
Vi Surprising academics outcome
Vii Girls are specially treated in the program
Viii How food program is operated
Ix How food program affects school attendance
X None of the usual reasons
Xi How to maintain an academic standard
1 Paragraph A 2 Paragraph B 3 Paragraph C 4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E 6 Paragraph F 7 Paragraph G
Questions 8-11 Complete the sentences below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
from the passage? Write your answers in boxes 8-11 on your answer sheet
8 ...............................are exclusively offered to girls in the feeding programme.
9 Instead of going to school, many children in poverty are sent to collect 9...............................in the fields.
10 The pass rate as Msekeni has risen to 10 ............................... with the help of the feeding programme.
11 Since the industrial revolution, the size of the modern human has grown by 11................................
Questions 12-13 Choose TWO letters, A-F Write your answers in boxes 12 and 13 on your answer sheet.
Which TWO of the following statements are true?
A Some children are taught in the open air.
B Malawi has trouble to feed its large population.
C No new staffs were recruited when attendance rose.
D Girls enjoy a higher status than boys in the family
E Boys and girls experience the same improvement in the pass rate.
F WHO has cooperated with WFP to provide grain to the school at Msekeni.
Paper or Computer?
A Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn’t happened. Every country in the
Western world uses more paper today, on a per- capita basis, than it did ten years ago. The consumption of
uncoated free-sheet paper, for instance the most common kind of office paper — rose almost fifteen per cent in
the United States between 1995 and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate
old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered by computerization. A
number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts, however, don’t agree. Paper has persisted, they
argue, for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many
advantages over computers. The dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk — or the spectacle of air-
traffic controllers tracking flights through notes scribbled on paper strips – arises from a fundamental confusion
about the role that paper plays in our lives.
B The case for paper is made most eloquently in “The Myth of the Paperless Office”, by two social scientists,
Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. They begin their book with an account of a study they conducted at the
International Monetary Fund, in Washington, D.c. Economists at the I.M.F. spend most of their time writing
reports on complicated economic questions, work that would seem to be perfectly suited to sitting in front of a
computer. Nonetheless, the I.M.F. is awash in paper, and Sellen and Harper wanted to find out why. Their
answer is that the business of writing reports – at least at the I.M.F. is an intensely collaborative process,
involving the professional judgments and contributions of many people. The economists bring drafts of reports
to conference rooms, spread out the relevant pages, and negotiate changes with one other. They go back to
their offices and jot down comments in the margin, taking advantage of the freedom offered by the informality
of the handwritten note. Then they deliver the annotated draft to the author in person, taking him, page by
page, through the suggested changes. At the end of the process, the author spreads out all the pages with
comments on his desk and starts to enter them on the computer — moving the pages around as he works,
organizing and reorganizing, saving and discarding.
C Without paper, this kind of collaborative and iterative work process would be much more difficult. According
to Sellen and Harper, paper has a unique set of “affordances” — that is, qualities that permit specific kinds of
uses. Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly
get a sense of it. Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that
suits US best. And it’s tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the
original text. Digital documents, of course, have then own affordances. They can be easily searched, shared,
stored, accessed remotely, and linked to other relevant material. But they lack the affordances that really
matter to a group of people working together on a report. Sellen and Harper write:
D Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you
have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in
front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles- piles of papers, journals, magazines,
binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a
mess, but they aren’t. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found
that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold
forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of thefr piles. The pile closest to the cleared,
eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within
that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over
time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and
sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in
the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.
E But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active,
ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues
that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet
categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It
may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file
the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that
many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to’’ recover a complex set
of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been
interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of
our brains.
F This idea that paper facilitates a highly specialized cognitive and social process is a far cry from the way we
have historically thought about the stuff. Paper first began to proliferate in the workplace in the late nineteenth
century as part of the move toward “systematic management.” To cope with the complexity of the industrial
economy, managers were instituting company-wide policies and demanding monthly, weekly, or even daily
updates from their subordinates. Thus was born the monthly sales report, and the office manual and the
internal company newsletter. The typewriter took off in the eighteen-eighties, making it possible to create
documents in a fraction of the time it had previously taken, and that was followed closely by the advent of
carbon paper, which meant that a typist could create ten copies of that document simultaneously. Paper was
important not to facilitate creative collaboration and thought but as an instrument of control.
Questions 1-6 The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-F Choose the correct heading for paragraphs
A-F from the list below. Write the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i. Paper continued as a sharing or managing must
ii. Piles can be more inspiring rather than disorganising
iii. Favorable situation that economists used paper pages
iv. Overview of an unexpected situation: paper survived
v. Comparison between efficiencies for using paper and using computer
vi. IMF’ paperless office seemed to be a waste of papers
vii. Example of failure for avoidance of paper record
viii. There are advantages of using a paper in offices
ix. Piles reflect certain characteristics in people’ thought
x. Joy of having the paper square in front of computer
1 Paragraph A 2 Paragraph B 3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D 5 Paragraph E 6 Paragraph F
Questions 7-10 Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than
three words from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 7-10 on your answer
sheet.
Compared with digital documents, paper has several advantages. First it allows clerks to work in a
7...................... way among colleagues. Next, paper is not like virtual digital versions, it’s 8 .....................Finally,
because it is 9 ............................., note or comments can be effortlessly added as related information.
However, shortcoming comes at the absence of convenience on task which is for a 10 ............................
Questions 11-14 Choose the correct letter, A, B, c or D. Write your answers in boxes 11-14 on your answer
sheet.
11. What do the economists from IMF say that their way of writing documents?
A they note down their comments for freedom on the drafts
B they finish all writing individually
C they share ideas on before electronic version was made
D they use electronic version fully
12. What is the implication of the “Piles ” mentioned in the passage?
A they have underlying orders
B they are necessarily a mess
C they are in time sequence order
D they are in alphabetic order
13. What does the manager believe in sophisticated economy?
A recorded paper can be as management tool
B carbon paper should be compulsory
C Teamwork is the most important
D monthly report is the best way
14. According to the end of this passage, what is the reason why paper is not replaced by electronic vision?
A paper is inexpensive to buy
B it contributed to management theories in western countries
C people need time for changing their old habit
D it is collaborative and functional for tasks implement and management
