CELPIP Listening Test Practice: Test 2

Test 2 is the second of the two Easy sittings on celpipmocks.com, and it is the one to reach for once Test 1 has shown you how the section behaves. It is not a step up in difficulty. It is a second repetition with everything swapped underneath: different voices, a different city, a different answer key, the same 38 scored questions in the same six parts.

That repetition is the entire point. Practice for a listening exam is not knowledge you accumulate. It is a habit you build, and the habit only forms if you make yourself sit still for 41 minutes while recordings you cannot rewind go past you once each.

What you will hear

Part 1, Listening to Problem Solving is a Winnipeg hardware store, and a woman who has to put her shoulder into the back door to line the deadbolt up since the January cold snap. The employee works out that the door is not the problem: the concrete slab outside is heaving with the frost and pushing the frame out of square. It arrives as three recordings with questions after each, and by the third the two of them are talking about her eavestrough.

Part 2, Listening to a Daily Life Conversation catches Lorna and Devon at their curling club one evening. The board is moving league night off Thursday and neither of them has quite settled how they feel: half the league drives in from past the Perimeter, the juniors are stuck with forty minutes of ice at four thirty, and Devon plays hockey on Wednesdays.

Part 3, Listening for Information is Rosa at a print shop, walking a choir member through an order he has never placed before. Programs for a spring concert. She talks him up from two hundred copies to two hundred and fifty because the price break makes the bigger order cheaper, off card stock, out of colour, and into a deadline he had not thought about.

Part 4, Listening to a News Item is ninety seconds of a single reader: the transit customer service centre is leaving the concourse below Portage and Main after thirty years and reopening inside a library branch. Priscilla Reimer explains why, a seniors group objects, and one service quietly moves somewhere else entirely.

Part 5, Listening to a Discussion gives you Ingrid, Keith and Abel, three volunteers at a food bank that served two hundred and ten families last Wednesday and ran out of food by four. Ingrid can count. Keith wants a second opening day, then a van. Abel wants to stop pre-packing hampers. None of them is wrong, which is what makes the questions hard.

Part 6, Listening for Viewpoints runs about three minutes: Marcus Chorney, a road safety researcher, telling a Winnipeg room that Manitoba is spending against the wrong half of its own statistics. He builds the case patiently through salt chemistry and brine and thermal mapping, then discards his own best material and lands somewhere unfashionable. Follow the turn and the questions are straightforward. Miss it and they are not.

What each part is actually practising

Six parts means six different jobs. Going in knowing which job is in front of you is most of the difference between a decent score and a frustrating one.

The format you are practising against

Listening opens the CELPIP test, so this grid is the first thing that happens to you on exam day.

Look at that last column, because the section changes engines halfway through and does not announce it. Through the first three parts the question is spoken to you and never written down: it comes after the recording, on its own, with four options on screen and 30 seconds to hear it and answer it before the next one arrives. You take them in the order given. From Part 4 onwards you read instead: sentence-completion items, the whole set on a single screen, one shared budget of time, answerable in any order you like. Rosa's prices are questions you will hear. Priscilla Reimer's counter is questions you will read. Practising one does not practise the other, which is why a full sitting beats any amount of clip drilling.

Budget your reading half like a reading test. Sweep the screen, answer what you know, then come back. Nothing forces you to work top to bottom.

One pass, and how to rehearse it

Every recording starts on its own and plays through exactly once. There is no play button, no pause, no scrubber and no progress bar, on the official test or on this one. If your attention drifts for eight seconds, those eight seconds are simply gone.

So rehearse the recovery, not the perfection. When you lose a sentence, the instinct is to chase it, and chasing it costs you the next three. Let it go, mark a gap in your notes and rejoin. Remember also that the questions tend to come in roughly the order the answers appeared in the recording, so a gap in the middle of your notes usually predicts which question you are about to guess at. Guess it and move, because there is no penalty for being wrong and every second you spend on it is stolen from a question you could have had.

Use the notes panel. The test centre issues you paper and a pen precisely because this section is unreasonable without them. Nothing you write is collected, seen or marked.

Where this differs from the official test

Our speakers are North American rather than Canadian. Paragon casts Canadian accents. No text-to-speech service we have access to offers a Canadian voice at all, so rather than describe an American voice as Canadian we put the effort into the writing. Everything in Test 2 is Manitoban: hydro bills and eavestroughs, a toque and a snowsuit at the rink, a niece in grade four in the little rocks program, a bonspiel, the drive in from past the Perimeter. That lexis is what a candidate actually stumbles on, and it is all here.

Part 5 is video on the real exam. Here it is audio, with Ingrid, Keith and Abel drawn as three portraits in fixed positions, left to right, and the current speaker lit up as they talk. Paragon's own guidance says to label your three speakers by their positions on screen, and says outright that visual details unrelated to the conversation are never tested. The labelling is therefore the whole examinable content of that video, and it is what you get. We would rather tell you that than dress up a slideshow as film.

How the marking works

This section is marked against a key, not assessed by a person or a model. One point per correct answer, 38 available, and your report appears the instant you press submit because the marking happens in your browser rather than on a server somewhere. No wrong answer costs you anything, so answer all 38 even if some of them are coin flips. Note as well that CELPIP may quietly include an unscored part without telling you which one it is, so there is no part you can safely coast through.

The raw score maps to a CELPIP level from 1 to 12. Our listening score chart converts it and shows the published bands, and if you want to see what your reading score is worth on the same 38-point scale, the reading tests work the same way.

Tips for this test

• Rule a page into three columns before Part 5 and head them Ingrid, Keith and Abel. Their positions on screen match that order, and the questions turn on which of them said what.
• Part 3 is dense with figures. Write the numbers down as Rosa says them; do not try to remember which of them mattered while she is still talking.
• In Part 1, the diagnosis lands in the middle recording, not the first. Do not decide what the problem is before the employee has finished asking about the back step.
• Chorney spends most of Part 6 arguing for one thing and then tells you he does not think it is the answer. Note where a speaker changes direction, because that sentence is nearly always an item.
• Answer the sentence-completion questions in Parts 4 to 6 out of order on purpose. Doing the easy ones first is the whole reason they give you the screen at once.
• Take this one on a different day from Test 1 rather than back to back. The point is a cold start, and you only get one cold start per sitting.