C2 Proficiency (CPE) >> Gapped Text Reading Worksheets >> In this part of the Reading and Use of English paper, known as 'Gapped Text' or 'Paragraph Gap Fill', students must put back paragraphs that have been removed from a text. This section of the C2 Proficiency exam will test a student's understanding of coherence, cohesion, text structure and global meaning. This text: The Training of a Forester.
Cambridge C2 Proficiency (CPE)
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C2 Proficiency
Reading: Gapped Text
In the following text, six paragraphs have been removed. Below the extract you will find the six removed paragraphs PLUS one paragraph which doesn't fit. Choose from the sentences (A-G) the one which fits each gap (1-6). Remember, there is one extra paragraph you do not need to use.
The Training of a Forester
By Gifford Pinchot
First, what is forestry? Forestry is the knowledge of the forest. (1)_____ For example, a forest may be handled so as to produce saw logs, telegraph poles, barrel hoops, firewood, tan bark, or turpentine. The main purpose of its treatment may be to prevent the washing of soil, to regulate the flow of streams, to support cattle or sheep, or it may be handled so as to supply a wide range and combination of uses. Forestry is the art of producing from the forest whatever it can yield for the service of man.
Before we can understand forestry, certain facts about the forest itself must be kept in mind. (2)_____ It has a resident population of insects and higher animals entirely distinct from that outside. Most important of all, from the Forester's point of view, the members of the forest live in an exact and intricate system of competition and mutual assistance, of help or harm, which extends to all the inhabitants of this complicated city of trees.
The trees in a forest are all helped by mutually protecting each other against high winds, and by producing a richer and moister soil than would be possible if the trees stood singly and apart. They compete among themselves by their roots for moisture in the soil, and for light and space by the growth of their crowns in height and breadth. (3)_____ The number of young trees which destroy each other in this fierce struggle for existence is prodigious, so that often a few score per acre are all that survive to middle or old age out of many tens of thousands of seedlings which entered the race of life on approximately even terms.
(4)_____ Just as in New York City, for example, the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Hungarians, and the Chinese each have quarters of their own, and in those quarters live in accordance with habits which distinguish each race from all the others, so the different species of pines and hemlocks, oaks and maples prefer and are found in certain definite types of locality, and live in accordance with definite racial habits which are as general and unfailing as the racial characteristics which distinguish, for example, the Italians from the Germans, or the Swedes from the Chinese.
The most important of these characteristics of race or species are those which are concerned with the relation of each to light, heat, and moisture. (5)_____
The tolerance of a tree for shade may vary greatly at different times of its life, but a white pine always requires more light than a hemlock, and a beech throughout its life will flourish with less sunshine or reflected light than, for example, an oak or a tulip tree.
(6)_____ Thus a bald cypress will grow both in wetter and in dryer land than an oak; a red cedar will flourish from Florida to the Canadian line, while other species, like the Eastern larch, the Western mountain hemlock, or the big trees of California, are confined in their native localities within extremely narrow limits.
Use these paragraphs to fill the spaces above. There is one extra you do not need to use.
A. Not only has a forest a character of its own, which arises from the fact that it is a community of trees, but each species of tree has peculiar characteristics and habits also.
B. A forest is not a mere collection of individual trees, just as a city is not a mere collection of unrelated men and women, or a Nation like ours merely a certain number of independent racial groups. A forest, like a city, is a complex community with a life of its own. It has a soil and an atmosphere of its own, chemically and physically different from any other, with plants and shrubs as well as trees which are peculiar to it.
C. Thus, a river birch will die if it has only as much water as will suffice to keep a post oak in the best condition, and the warm climate in which the balsam fir would perish is just suited to the requirements of a long leaf pine or a magnolia.
D. Trees are limited in their distribution also by their adaptability, in which they vary greatly.
E. In particular, it is the art of handling the forest so that it will render whatever service is required of it without being impoverished or destroyed.
F. This area must be managed just as a farm would be managed or indeed any factory that you see in the city as you pass by on your way to work. An unmanaged forest will be as unproductive as an abandoned farm or a factory whose workers have been sent home.
G. Perhaps the strongest weapon which trees have against each other is growth in height. In certain species intolerant of shade, the tree which is overtopped has lost the race for good.
