CELPIP Listening Practice Test 3, with answers

Test 3 is where the six listening tests here stop being gentle. Tests 1 and 2 are rated Easy; this one is the first rated Medium, and Test 6 is the Hard one at the far end. Nothing about the shape changes, though: six parts, 38 scored questions, an unscored practice task first, and clips that play once and are gone. What changes is how much help you are given.

It is set around Kingston and the townships of eastern Ontario, and it comes with answers in the way that phrase ought to mean: not a list of letters at the bottom, but a written reason for every one of the 38, and the recording and the transcript sitting there so you can go and hear the thing you missed.

The answers, and the reason behind every one

Anyone can publish a key. A key tells you that question 14 was C, which you already suspected and which teaches you nothing. What you actually need is the sentence you did not catch, and why the option you liked was built to catch you.

So every question in this test carries a written explanation naming what in the recording settles it. When you finish, three things unlock at once:

• The mark, on every question. Your answer and the correct one, side by side, all 38 of them, computed the moment you submit rather than mailed to you later.
• The reason, on every question. One sentence per item, pointing at the evidence. Rashid says the mast comes down because of ice rather than wind, and the explanation tells you that is where the item was set.
• The recordings and the transcripts. Replay any clip as many times as you want, with a proper player this time, and open the transcript underneath it. During the test the clip plays once. Afterwards it is yours.

That last one is the part that moves a score. A wrong answer in listening is nearly always one of two failures: you never heard the sentence, or you heard it and misread what it implied. Those need opposite fixes, and the only way to tell them apart is to go back to the audio and find out which one happened.

What you will hear

Part 1, Listening to Problem Solving drops you at a college print centre where Gerald has to tell a student her conference poster is not printed, three days before she drives to Ottawa to stand beside it. The wide-format machine dragged its print head when the power came back on Tuesday. He makes two phone calls and comes back with three options, each with a catch: a free machine that is six inches too narrow, a downtown shop at more than twice the price with a hard Wednesday cut-off, and a repair booked for Thursday afternoon. Three recordings, questions after each.

Part 2, Listening to a Daily Life Conversation is two coworkers on a break, and one of them turns out to spend every second Saturday giving tours at a museum. The new exhibit is the ice harvest: crews out on the lake in January sawing it into blocks, floating them down a channel and packing them in sawdust in an ice house, where they kept until August. There is a photograph from the eighteen nineties with a horse in it.

Part 3, Listening for Information is a boat yard, and a first-time owner asking Rashid the stupid questions in July rather than the expensive ones in November. Haul-out dates, ninety boats and one travel lift, the shed against a cradle in the yard, shrink-wrap against a canvas frame, and why anything over twenty-five feet loses its mast.

Part 4, Listening to a News Item is ninety seconds on the Frontenac Humane Society, which has put a veterinary clinic in a converted delivery van and drawn a lineup on its first morning out. Yolanda Delisle explains what a seventy kilometre drive each way does to a household with three cats and no car.

Part 5, Listening to a Discussion is Simone, Wes and Marguerite, a heritage committee handed an old fire hall and a dollar by the township. Wes wants the roof done. Marguerite has read the grant four times and cannot find a sentence in it that pays for shingles. Simone will not put vinyl in windows that four buildings in the county still have. They are shown on screen in that order, left to right, with the speaker lit as they talk.

Part 6, Listening for Viewpoints is Ivan Chartrand, a limnologist who has been sampling the same lake since two thousand and nine, explaining to a room that wants a cure why the algae are not the question. Three proposals are on the table. He tells you which one he would choose and, more usefully, which one he would choose if the township could afford two. About three minutes, and the vocabulary is real.

Why this test is rated Medium

The difficulty labels here are not decoration, and Medium means three specific things on this test.

You are told less before each recording. Compare the setups. On Test 1 the screen tells you that you are at a community centre desk in Dartmouth and that one speaker works there. Here you are told only that two coworkers are talking during a break at work, and that a talk concerns the future of a lake. Nobody warns you about the museum or the phosphorus. On the real exam that introduction is your only free context, and learning to build a picture from very little of it is a skill worth having before you need it.

Part 1 asks you to hold more at once. Gerald's three options each come with a condition attached, and the conditions are what the questions are about. It is not enough to remember that a downtown shop exists; it costs sixty-five dollars instead of twenty-eight and it wants the file twenty-four hours ahead, and those two facts belong to that option and not to either of the others.

The vocabulary in Part 6 is genuinely technical. Chartrand talks about external and internal loading, sediment going anoxic, riparian buffers and alum. Here is the thing worth noticing, though: he defines his own terms as he goes, because that is what a careful speaker does. So the words are not really the obstacle. The obstacle is that while you are busy decoding one of them, the argument has moved on two sentences without you. That is the skill Part 6 scores, and this is the test where it starts to bite.

CELPIP Listening format: parts, questions and time

The section that opens the exam, in one grid.

Paragon schedules the section at roughly 47 to 55 minutes. The extra minutes are instruction screens, and Listening comes first on the day, before Reading, Writing and Speaking.

The split down the middle of that table matters more than the totals. Parts 1 to 3 speak the question to you, one at a time, 30 seconds each, in a fixed order, with only the four options written down. Parts 4 to 6 print the questions as sentences with a gap in them, all of them on one screen, sharing one clock, in whatever order suits you. So the answers to Rashid's storage prices arrive as speech you get one shot at; the answers about the van in Verona arrive as text you can sit with. The review screen flattens that distinction and shows you every question as text, which is the only way to study the ones you originally had to catch by ear.

Which version of CELPIP is this for?

Both of them, and Listening is the section where that question has the easiest answer. It is the one part of the exam common to each version: the four-skill test taken for permanent residence and for citizenship, and the shorter Listening and Speaking version that some citizenship applicants sit. The Listening section does not change between them. Whichever you have booked, this is the section, these are the six parts, and 38 is the number of scored questions.

Where we depart from the official test

You will be listening to North American voices, not Canadian ones. The real recordings are Canadian and ours are not, because a Canadian synthetic voice does not exist on any service available to us. Rather than call an American voice Canadian and hope, we made the writing carry it. Test 3 is eastern Ontario down to the details: hydro goes out on the block, a truck comes in from Mississauga, haul-out starts on the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend and the list is full by Labour Day, the deposit goes by e-transfer, the men in the 1890s photograph are wearing toques, and the school groups are grade fours. That is the layer that catches candidates out, and it is intact.

Part 5 plays as video at a test centre. Ours is the audio plus three named portraits, Simone on the left, Wes in the centre and Marguerite on the right, with the current speaker highlighted. This is honest rather than convenient: Paragon's guidance is explicit that you will not be tested on visual details unrelated to the conversation, and equally explicit that you should label your notes by where the three speakers sit on screen. The examinable half of that video is the labelling, and the labelling is what we built.

Where your score comes from

Nothing here is a matter of opinion. Each question has exactly one defensible answer worth one point, and the 38 of them are totalled in your browser the moment you press submit. That is precisely why the explanations can appear straight away rather than a day later: there is no verdict to wait on.

Nothing is subtracted for a wrong answer. That makes an empty question strictly worse than a wild guess, and it makes the last five seconds of a 30 second window a good time to commit to something. Bear in mind too that one part of a CELPIP sitting may not be scored at all and you are never told which, so there is no part you can decide to skip.

Raw score becomes a CELPIP level between 1 and 12, and the mapping is not a straight line. Our CELPIP listening score chart will tell you what your 38 was worth, and why a single raw score can sit inside two of Paragon's published ranges at once.

Tips for this test

• Because you are told so little up front, spend the first fifteen seconds of every recording working out where you are and who these people are to each other. That is the context Tests 1 and 2 handed you for free.
• In Part 1, give each of Gerald's options its own line and hang its catch off it. The questions are about the catches, not the options.
• Numbers come fast in Part 3. Write the figure and one word for what it buys. A bare eleven thousand or fifty-eight in your notes will not tell you anything ten minutes later.
• For Part 5, note the concessions. Wes gives ground, Marguerite proposes the compromise, and CELPIP loves an item about who changed their mind.
• Chartrand defines each technical term the moment he uses it. Do not stop to translate. Keep up with the argument and let the definition arrive on its own.
• After you submit, do not just read the marks. Open the transcript on every part you lost a question in and find the exact sentence. That is where the next two points come from, and it is the reason the audio is unlocked at the end.