What event in 1929 led to the Great Depression?

Discover Canada records the cause of the 1930s economic collapse with one direct sentence. The guide writes: The stock market crash of 1929, however, led to the Great Depression or the "Dirty Thirties." Unemployment reached 27% in 1933 and many businesses were wiped out. The event the test wants is therefore the stock market crash — the 1929 shock that, in Discover Canada's words, "led to the Great Depression."

The contrast with the years before is part of the same passage. Discover Canada writes: "The 'Roaring Twenties' were boom times, with prosperity for businesses and low unemployment." Then 1929 turned the cycle. The 1933 figure of 27% unemployment is the guide's stark statistical anchor — barely four years after the crash, more than one in four workers had no job.

The crash hit certain Canadians hardest. Discover Canada writes: "Farmers in Western Canada were hit hardest by low grain prices and a terrible drought." So the Depression was not only a stock-market story; in Canada it became a story of grain, drought and prairie farms emptying out. The "Dirty Thirties" nickname captures both — the dust storms of the prairies and the economic dust of the financial collapse.

The Depression in Discover Canada's timeline ends with the Second World War. The guide places the next chapter — "The Second World War" — directly after the Depression paragraph, signalling that the long decade of unemployment and farm failure was followed by total mobilisation when war began in 1939.

The question is testing whether new citizens have remembered the specific event Discover Canada blames for the Great Depression. The guide commits to one cause — the stock market crash of 1929 — and pairs it with a precise economic indicator from a few years later ("unemployment reached 27% in 1933").

The wrong answer choices are each historically off-target for Discover Canada. The First World War ended in 1918 — over ten years before the 1929 crash. The invention of the automobile is not described as a Depression cause. Prohibition is not given as a trigger of the Great Depression in the guide.