PSAT Writing and Language Practice Test 7: The Ecological Recovery of Detroit

Questions 34-44 refer to the following information.

The Ecological Recovery of Detroit

The borderland between the United States and Canada was 34 hotly contested in its early history. Fighting between the English, the French, the Native Americans, and the newly independent Americans made the region one of the most volatile of the early 1800s. While many humans and animals have influenced the history of the region, one 35 animals influence, the beavers, has been as significant as it is overlooked. Although Michigan eventually became a powerhouse in the later part of the Industrial Revolution, it was initially attractive to settlers who wanted to cash in on the fur trade, and beaver pelts were some of the hottest commodities.

The city of Detroit was founded on le détroit, 36 which is where the name obviously comes from. Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, and his fellow settlers saw this "détroit" as the perfect place to build a fort to protect their fur interests. Their plans were successful, and within a very short 37 span. Furs had become the dominant trade items in the region. By the mid-1700s, after the British had seized control of the region, beaver skins had become almost universally accepted as currency, and the Hudson Bay Company issued beaver-shaped tokens that were valued at one skin each.

38 Finite resources built the unfortunate universal popularity of it. For instance, beaver skins were popular in the stylish clothes of the day, particularly hats. Although silks had become more popular than animal skins in the early 1800s, by that time the beaver had been hunted to the point that 39 it was nearly eliminated from the region altogether. In addition, the region around Detroit had grown in population, and much of the beaver habitat around the rivers had been replaced by homes and would soon be replaced by factories. 40 Then, in the twentieth century, Detroit became the "Motor City," the main producer of automobiles in the United States, certainly not a place where wildlife could 41 think about living anymore.

Detroit's population peaked in the 1950s, but since the 1960s, the auto industry and population have declined precipitately. 42 Between 1990 and 2010 alone, the population of Detroit was reduced by over half. Large parts of the city are now abandoned, and thousands of abandoned houses and lots are overgrown with nature, earning them the title "urban prairies." Although Detroit 43 may have long been seen as a hotbed of urban blight, it is now becoming a place of new beginnings. Where one might see urban decay, for instance, many have come to see a resurgence of the wilderness, emblematized by, of all things, the return of the beaver. 44 Unlike other cities, parts of Detroit, it seems, may be returning to something like a "natural state." Josh Hartig, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has called the renaturalization of the area "one of the most dramatic ecological recovery stories in North America."