Listening CELPIP practice test: Mock Test 5

Mock Test 5 is a free listening CELPIP practice test built to the 2026 format, and it is the complete section: six parts, 38 scored questions, an unscored practice task first, and clips that play exactly once. It is rated Medium and it sits at the top of that band. After this one, the only step left is the hard test.

All six clips are original and all six are set around Kelowna and the BC interior. A school fundraiser loses its cider press in the week it needs one. Two neighbours plan a run to the recycling depot. A guest at a hotel front desk works out where to leave a truck with a canopy on it. A backcountry trail starts asking for a day pass. A strata council splits over short-term rentals. And a wildfire coordinator describes an assessment that is free, correct and almost never booked.

What is on Listening Mock Test 5?

Part 1, Listening to Problem Solving is two strangers standing in line at a u-pick orchard, and it arrives in three audio sections with questions after each. A woman has four bins of Ambrosia, thirty parents expecting fresh cider on Saturday, and an orchard press that seized on Tuesday with the part coming out from Abbotsford. The man behind her works it: a fruit co-op past the airport, ninety dollars for a membership and a press that runs Thursdays; or Bridget's press at the farm stand, free, and good for about twenty litres in an afternoon against the hundred litres she needs. Free and too small, or ninety dollars and done in time. The third section then adds the thing that actually sinks people, which is where you find a hundred litres of empty jugs on a Thursday morning.

Part 2, Listening to a Daily Life Conversation is Noreen asking Hugo whether he is still driving out to the depot on Saturday. They know each other, so the conversation moves fast and explains nothing. Her chest freezer needs a booking rather than a drop-off, because the compressor is still in it. Cardboard gets flattened at home or she will be doing it at the gate in front of everybody. The depot shuts at four thirty on a Saturday, not five thirty.

Part 3, Listening for Information is the part where one person has what the other needs. A guest comes back to the front desk with the questions he did not think to ask at check-in, and the agent answers every one precisely: his canopy is a shade over two metres and the clearance bar underground sits at one point nine, the surface lot is eighteen dollars either way, the permit goes on the dash or a private outfit tickets him and she has no way to void it, the airport shuttle runs hourly from six until ten in the morning and never after, and the hot tub is drained until Friday.

Part 4, Listening to a News Item is one voice for about a minute and a half on a free day pass coming to the Rose Ridge trail east of Kelowna. Camille Arsenault is named in full once and is Arsenault every time after. The detail the questions reach for is that the district considered charging and rejected it, because a fee would have sorted visitors by income rather than by demand, and demand was the problem it set out to solve.

Part 5, Listening to a Discussion is three strata council members and a bylaw they have deferred twice already. Delphine has an insurance renewal in November and a ten per cent threshold that reprices the whole building rather than the unit. Sanjay has unit fourteen, a widow on a fixed income who covers her strata fees with three weekends in August. Terrence has the question neither of them wants asked, which is who enforces a cap, because the answer is him.

Part 6, Listening for Viewpoints is the longest clip at about three minutes and the hardest thing on the test. A wildfire mitigation coordinator describes a free forty minute home ignition zone assessment and then explains why hardly anyone books one. The evidence he cites is that most structures lost in the last decade of Okanagan fires were never touched by a flame front at all: they were lit by embers, sometimes hours later, sometimes two kilometres ahead of the fire. That single fact moves the decisive ground from the forest to the metre and a half around your foundation.

The CELPIP Listening format: how many parts, how many questions

Six scored parts and 38 scored questions, plus one unscored practice task that runs before Part 1 and counts for nothing. Six is the number to hold on to. If a larger one has lodged in your head from somewhere, it is almost certainly the speaking test's eight tasks, which are a different section of the exam altogether.

Listening is also the first section of the exam, so it is the one you meet cold. Paragon schedules roughly 47 to 55 minutes for the whole of it including the instruction screens, while the six parts themselves carry 41 minutes of clock. Difficulty is built to rise from Part 1 to Part 6, which is why the vocabulary in the last clip is meant to be harder than the vocabulary in the first.

Two more rules, and both belong to the exam rather than to us. The audio plays once, begins on its own, and gives you no pause button and no progress bar. And nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so a blank is a mark handed back for free. Paragon also says there may be one unscored part without telling you which, which is its own argument against writing any part off.

The two halves of the section, and why the split decides your tactics

The last column of that table is the fact almost nobody writes down, and it is the most useful thing on this page. CELPIP listening is not one question engine with a setting. It is two.

Parts 1 to 3 read the question aloud to you. The stem is audio. It arrives after the clip, spoken once, with only the four options on your screen. You get thirty seconds to take it in and answer it, the questions come one at a time in an order you cannot leave, and at zero the test advances whether you did or not.

Parts 4 to 6 put the question in print. Nothing is spoken here at all. Every question in the part is on one screen as a sentence with a gap in it, there is one budget for the whole screen instead of a clock per question, and you may answer them in any order.

That difference should change what you do. In Parts 1 to 3, a question you cannot answer is thirty seconds you are going to spend regardless, so commit to a guess early and use what is left to get your ear ready for the next stem rather than to agonize. In Parts 4 to 6 you can see the whole set at once, so take the ones you are certain of first and let the leftovers have whatever remains. Running those tactics the wrong way round is one of the cheapest ways to lose marks in this section, and it is invisible until someone tells you the engines are different.

Why Test 5 sits at the top of the medium band

Medium is not a synonym for gentle. Test 5 is the last of the medium tests and it earns that spot in one specific way: what you need is always in the audio, and it nearly always arrives attached to a condition.

Bridget's press is free, and it does twenty litres in an afternoon. The shuttle is complimentary, and the last one leaves at ten in the morning, and his flight is at two. Checkout moves to one o'clock at no charge, provided he says so the day before rather than the morning of. The day pass costs nothing, and two hundred of them go out per day, and you book up to five days ahead. Nothing is concealed. Everything is qualified. Stop listening at the comma and the distractor is already waiting for you, because it is built out of the half of the sentence you did hear.

Part 6 raises it again by asking you to hold an argument rather than a fact. The coordinator's point is not that assessments are worthwhile. It is that this one is free, accurate and still unpopular, because the list it hands you is item for item a list of the things people like about their own yards, and because the benefit is cumulative and does not accrue to whoever does the work. Listen for a recommendation and you will hear one. Listen for what he actually believes and you have to catch him saying he would book one anyway, and the reason he gives.

What we will not pretend about this test

We do not claim the voices are Canadian. Paragon's audio has Canadian accents. There is no Canadian synthetic voice we can reach: the engine reading these clips carries 102 voices, of which 45 are American, four British, two Australian and one Irish, and none Canadian. So the voices are North American and the Canadian content is entirely real: a loonie, a strata council, a u-pick, a park-and-ride, grade four, the container deposit window under the blue roof, the spelling and the lexis throughout. Between Standard Canadian English and General American, in a synthesized voice, the gap is small. We would rather name it than let you assume otherwise.

Part 5 is the section's only video, and here it is audio. The three speakers are shown and labelled where they sit: Terrence on the left, Delphine in the centre, Sanjay on the right. That is not a way around the skill. Paragon's own strategy notes say no question tests a visual detail, and what the video is actually for is letting you label three speakers by position and keep them apart for two minutes. That survives here intact.

Everything else is the section as it runs. And because listening is marked rather than judged, the result is yours the moment you submit: 38 questions against a key, the reason for each answer, review mode to replay the clips with their transcripts, and a raw score you can take to the listening score chart.

Tips for Test 5

• Listen past the offer to the condition. This test attaches one nearly every time. Free, but twenty litres. Complimentary, but not after ten. No charge, but tell her the day before.
• Take Part 1 one section at a time. The three sections here run as a sequence: the problem, the two options, then the thing nobody thought of. By the time the jugs come up, the questions about the co-op's ninety dollars have already been asked and closed.
• In Part 2, count the corrections. The freezer is not a drop-off. The deposit is not at the same window. Four thirty is not five thirty. It is a short part and almost every answer is Hugo correcting an assumption Noreen brought with her.
• Label the numbers in Part 3, do not just collect them. Two metres, one point nine, eighteen dollars, six until ten, forty-five, eleven, one. A number with no label attached is worth nothing to a sentence completion.
• Get Arsenault's reasoning, not only her decision. Part 4 asks why the fee was rejected and what enforcement will and will not do, which are both things she explains rather than announces.
• Set your notes up for three speakers before Part 5 begins. You are told it is three strata council members before you hear a word. Left, centre, right, one line each, then fill them in.
• Do not chase Part 6's vocabulary. Ember cast, radiant heat, immediate zone. The questions are about the shape of his argument, not his lexicon.