CELPIP reading practice: Part 1, Reading Correspondence
Untimed CELPIP reading practice for Part 1, the message and reply task. Learn how the 11 questions are built, work through an example where the reasoning behind every option is spelled out, then try 5 more reading questions and reveal the explanation for each.
What CELPIP Reading Part 1 actually shows you
Part 1 opens the reading section with a single personal message: a letter or an email from one named person to another, usually three or four hundred words, always about something ordinary and Canadian. Somebody has moved, taken a job, cancelled a plan, inherited a problem. The text sits on the left of the screen for the whole part, and you never have to scroll to find it again.
What makes Part 1 unusual is that it is two tasks wearing one coat. Questions 1 to 6 are sentence stems with a drop-down of four options each, and they walk down the message in order. Questions 7 to 11 then show you something new: a short reply written back to the sender, with five blanks in it. You fill each blank from a drop-down. Same message, completely different reading job.
That second block is where the marks quietly go. The reply is a text you have never seen, written by a person who has read the message you just read, and every blank in it is constrained by something in the original. The reply itself never contains the answer. It only contains the shape of the answer: a sentence with a hole in it, and the hole has to be filled with something the first text will support.
The other thing worth internalising early is that a Part 1 message hides almost nothing in plain statements. A letter writer does not tell you they are worried about their partner. They mention him in one sentence, call it "the sentence I find hardest to write", and move on. Six of the eleven questions are built on that kind of implication, which is why fast literal readers often score worse here than slow careful ones.
CELPIP Reading Part 1 format at a glance
The 2026 CELPIP reading format for the correspondence part specifically.
- Official name
- Reading Part 1: Reading Correspondence
- Questions
- 11, out of 38 in the whole reading section
- Time
- About 10 minutes. The clock runs per part and does not carry over.
- What you read
- One personal message, roughly 300 to 400 words, from one named person to another
- Questions 1 to 6
- Sentence stems. Each has a drop-down of four options, and they follow the message from top to bottom.
- Questions 7 to 11
- A short reply to the message with five blanks. Each blank is filled from a drop-down of four options.
- Answering
- Drop-down menus only. Nothing is typed, and there is no penalty for a wrong guess.
- Reported as
- Your reading total across all four parts becomes one band on the CLB 1 to 12 scale
How to attack the correspondence part
Generic reading advice is useless here, because Part 1 has a specific machine inside it. These are the five moves that match the machine.
- Read it once, properly
- Do not skim and hunt. The message is short enough to read whole in about ninety seconds, and six of the questions ask what the writer implies rather than what they state. You cannot scan for an implication. Read the letter like a letter, once, then start.
- Ride the order
- Questions 1 to 6 track the message top to bottom. Question 1 lives in the opening, question 6 near the close. If you find yourself rereading paragraph two for question 5, you have almost certainly misread question 5.
- Answer the stem, not the letter
- Most wrong options in Part 1 are true. They are real details from the message wired to the wrong question, the wrong person or the wrong moment. Before you pick, reread the stem and check that the option answers that sentence rather than merely agreeing with the text.
- Read the whole reply first
- For questions 7 to 11, read the reply straight through with the blanks still empty before choosing anything. Later sentences routinely settle earlier blanks, and a blank filled from the six words in front of it is a blank filled by luck.
- Point at the line
- Every reply blank is anchored to one specific line in the original message. Find that line before you commit. If you cannot point to it, you are guessing from the reply, and the reply was written to make guessing feel reasonable.
Two of those five deserve a longer word. The first is the order rule, because it converts a ten minute part into a six minute one. Candidates who do not trust the order reread the message eleven times, once per question, and then arrive at the reply with three minutes left. The reply is the slower half. It needs the time.
The second is the anchoring rule. Picture the test writer's job: they have to build three wrong options for a blank inside a reply, and the easiest way to build a convincing wrong option is to reach into the original message and pull out a genuine detail. So the mother who is mentioned once becomes an option. The cheese wheel becomes an option. Every one of them is a real thing from a real sentence, dropped into a slot it does not belong in. Which is why "is this true?" is the wrong question and "does this fit here?" is the right one.
A Part 1 message, taken apart
Read the message, decide your answers, then read the reasoning. Every option is explained: why the right one is right, and why each wrong one was built to look right.
Hi Renée,
I have started this letter four times since March and thrown all four out, which should tell you something about the state of my head.
You will have heard the headline from my mother by now: I have taken over Grandma Pilon's diner on Bay Street. What you will not have heard is that I said no twice first. The first time was at the funeral, when the lawyer read out the part about the building and everyone turned to look at me, and I said no in a voice I did not recognise. The second was in January, on the phone, sensibly, with a list of reasons in front of me. Then I drove up in February to sign the papers that would sell it, let myself in, and stood in the kitchen for about ten minutes. I did not sign anything. I called the realtor from the parking lot and apologised.
The place is exactly as she left it, which is both the charm and the problem. The grill is older than I am. The menu is laminated and has a photograph of a hot beef sandwich that has not been on the menu since 2009. The regulars, all eleven of them, arrive at six-forty and sit in the same four booths, and on my first morning three of them told me I was making the coffee wrong. They were correct.
Marc has stayed in Toronto for now, which is the sentence in this letter I find hardest to write. He calls it a trial year. I call it a trial year too, when he is listening.
Come in August. I will feed you badly and talk your ear off, and you can tell me whether I have lost my mind. Bring your good boots, the floor is uneven.
Elise
An original message written for this course, in the shape and length of a real Part 1 text. Thunder Bay, roughly 330 words.
Elise mentions the four discarded drafts in order to suggest that she
The clause that does the work is "which should tell you something about the state of my head". Elise attaches the four drafts to her mind, not to her calendar and not to her skill. Everything that follows in the letter, the two refusals and the ten minutes in the kitchen, confirms it.
She is running a diner single-handed, so busyness is real and a busy person does write late. But she never offers it as the reason. You supply it. The stem asks what she is suggesting, and she suggests her head, not her hours.
Throwing out four drafts does sound like a writing problem, and the option is the most literal reading of the sentence. It falls apart against the evidence: she writes 330 fluent, funny, well-shaped words. The difficulty is the subject, not the sentences.
Her mother exists in this letter for exactly one purpose: to have spread the news already. She never advises, approves or withholds anything. This is the classic Part 1 distractor, a genuine name from the text given a role the text never gave it.
Elise's account of the day she went to sign the papers shows that she
She drove up "to sign the papers that would sell it", stood in the kitchen ten minutes, "did not sign anything", and phoned the realtor to apologise. Intention on arrival, the opposite action on departure, and the ten silent minutes sitting in between. That is a mind changing in real time.
This is the trap of reading backwards. You already know she took the diner over, so it feels natural to assume she always meant to. The letter blocks it twice: she said no on two separate occasions, and she drove up specifically to sell. The outcome is not the intention.
The realtor is on the receiving end of an apology from a parking lot. Elise wrecked the realtor's afternoon, not the reverse. Once again a real person from the message has been handed the wrong role, and the reversal is easy to miss if you only remember that a realtor was involved.
Money never appears in this letter. No price, no valuation, no offer. It is a thoroughly sensible real-world reason to keep a building, imported from outside the text, and importing outside logic is the second most expensive habit in CELPIP reading.
In describing the regulars, Elise suggests that they
Three of them told the new owner she was making the coffee wrong, and the next sentence is three words long: "They were correct." That concession is the entire point of the paragraph. She holds the deed; they hold the knowledge.
Being corrected on your first morning reads as hostility if you are primed for it, and a recent death plus a new owner primes most readers nicely. But they turned up at six-forty as always and nobody objects to her at all. Correcting the coffee is how these people participate, not how they protest.
"All eleven of them" is a dry joke about a small crowd, and the joke invites you to finish it with a thought about the business failing. Elise never finishes it. The letter says nothing about takings, rent or survival. The option is an inference the writer declined to make.
Flatly contradicted: they "arrive at six-forty and sit in the same four booths". This is the option that catches skimmers, because the detail is sitting in the same sentence as the correct answer and has simply been reversed.
Elise's comment about Marc suggests that she
"He calls it a trial year. I call it a trial year too, when he is listening." Those last four words undo the sentence they are attached to: she uses his phrase in his presence and does not hold it in his absence. It is also why this is "the sentence in this letter I find hardest to write".
"For now" and "trial year" both point at a future together, and hope is a natural way to read a friend's letter. But the aside demolishes exactly that hope. This option is what Marc believes. The stem asks about Elise, and Part 1 loves the gap between what one person says and what another thinks of it.
Impossible on the face of it. He has a settled opinion about the arrangement and a name for it, so he plainly knows. An option that the text makes logically impossible is usually there to catch someone answering from a half-memory of the paragraph.
She refused to sell, moved north, and is inviting Renée up in August. Toronto is where Marc stayed, not where she wishes she were. The option takes the one real tension in the letter and points it the wrong way round.
On the real test this is the second block, questions 7 to 11. Here is one blank from Renée's reply, so you can see how the machine works.
Elise,
Four drafts. Of course there were four drafts. I have known you since we were nineteen and you have never once done anything important without 5 first.
Renée's sentence needs a habit that the original message has already demonstrated, and the message demonstrates this one twice: a no at the funeral, then a second no in January "sensibly, with a list of reasons in front of me". Talking herself out of a thing before doing it anyway is precisely the pattern the letter documents. The answer lives in the message, not in the reply.
Her mother is genuinely in the message, and the phrase drops into the sentence without a bump. That is the whole design. The message's mother does not advise, she gossips, so there is no line to point at. A real detail in a slot it does not fit is the standard shape of a reply distractor.
The sentence before it is about drafts, so "writing it down" chimes with the words closest to the blank. But the blank says "anything important", which reaches past letters to the diner itself, and the diner was not written about. It was refused, twice. Filling a blank from the six words in front of it is what this option punishes.
The message says the reverse. She refused quietly, drove up alone, and her news reached Renée by way of her mother rather than from her. Reversal remains the cheapest wrong option to build, in the reply as much as in the stems.
Common mistakes in Reading Part 1
These are the specific ways confident English readers still drop marks on the correspondence part.
Answering the reply from the reply
Questions 7 to 11 sit inside a text that reads perfectly well on its own, which makes it feel like the source. It is not. Every blank is settled by a line in the original message, and a reply-only answer is a coin toss dressed up as reasoning.
Choosing the option that is true
Three of the four options usually contain something the message actually said. Truth is not the criterion. Fit is. Reread the stem, then ask whether the option answers that exact sentence rather than merely echoing the letter somewhere.
Reading literally
A Part 1 writer rarely states a feeling. They report a detail and let it do the work: eleven regulars, a laminated photograph, four thrown-out drafts. If you only collect facts, the six stem questions have nothing to bite on.
Rereading the message for every question
The order rule exists to stop this. Eleven passes over the same 350 words is how candidates arrive at the reply with three minutes left, and the reply is the half that needs the time.
Importing common sense
A diner might be losing money. A building might have been valued. Neither is in the letter. Options built from what would plausibly be true in life, rather than from what is on the screen, are written specifically for readers who reason well.
Losing track of who is who
A Part 1 message names four or five people in 350 words and gives each of them one job. Distractors swap those jobs: the realtor pressures, the mother approves, the friend already knows. Hold the cast list, and half the wrong options collapse.
5 more CELPIP reading questions, no timer
A second original message in the Part 1 shape. Read it, settle on an answer for each question, and only then reveal the explanation. Choosing before you read the reasoning is the whole exercise.
Dear Tobias,
You asked me in April what a person actually does with sixty thousand bees, and I said I would tell you in the fall, when I knew. It is the fall. I still do not know, but I am now wrong with much more confidence.
Two things nobody warned me about. The first is the noise. Not the buzzing, which you stop hearing inside a week, but the sound a hive makes when it is unhappy, which is a note lower and which I now hear in the grocery store. The second is that the bees are the easy part. It is the paperwork, the wasps, the neighbours and the weather that take the hours.
We lost four colonies in June to a cold snap that everyone in the valley called unusual and that every one of them has apparently seen before. Old Bernard down the road told me at the co-op that he has lost hives in June "most years, on and off, since 1978", and then charged me full price for the sugar syrup without a hint of a smile. I have decided I like him.
The honey itself: two hundred and ten kilograms, which is less than half what I budgeted for and roughly nine times what I can eat. It tastes of the wildflowers on the slope behind us and, faintly and unmistakably, of the neighbour's lavender, which I have not mentioned to her because I am afraid she will fence it.
Come at the end of May if you can. That is when the orchard flowers and the whole hillside goes stupid. Do not come in July. I will be extracting, and unfit for company.
Marisol
An original message written for this course. Okanagan Valley, roughly 300 words. There is no timer here: take as long as you like.
Marisol's remark that she is "wrong with much more confidence" is meant as
The sentence is a comic reversal: "I still do not know, but ..." sets up an admission and then delivers a boast about the quality of her ignorance. A season has taught her enough to be confidently wrong, which is a joke about learning a great deal and understanding how much is left.
The season really did go badly in places: four colonies dead, less than half the honey she budgeted for. So "failure" has evidence, just not here. This sentence is about her knowledge, not her yield, and its tone is playful rather than defeated.
"Nobody warned me" arrives in the very next paragraph and does complain about missing advice, which makes this option feel supported. It is supported by a different sentence. The stem points at one line, and that line is about her own state, not about anyone else's silence.
Lateness is in the frame, since she is answering an April question in the fall. But she does not apologise for it. She says "It is the fall", flatly, and moves on. An option can be adjacent to the truth and still not be what the sentence does.
What surprised Marisol most about keeping bees was that
"The bees are the easy part. It is the paperwork, the wasps, the neighbours and the weather that take the hours." It is the second of the two things nobody warned her about, and it is the one she measures in hours, which is how the letter ranks it above the other.
This is the sharpest distractor on the page, because it is true. The noise genuinely is the first of the two surprises. But the stem asks what surprised her most, and the paragraph ranks them for you: the noise is a curiosity she now hears in the grocery store, while the second one takes the hours. Two true options, one stem, and only the stem decides.
Wasps appear on a list of chores, not threats, and the bees themselves are called "the easy part". Danger is what a reader expects from sixty thousand bees, so the option is built on your expectation rather than on her sentence.
Extraction is mentioned once, as the reason not to visit in July. Nothing about it running long. The word is in the letter, which is the entire qualification this option has.
Marisol's story about Bernard shows that she
"I have decided I like him." She has just been quietly shown up, told her disaster is routine, and charged full price for the privilege, and her verdict is affection. The whole anecdote exists to earn that last sentence, which is how Part 1 usually works: the point is in the line after the story.
"Charged me full price" and "without a hint of a smile" both sound like grievance, and grievance is a normal response to being billed straight after bad news. She draws the opposite conclusion one sentence later. When a letter tells you what it thinks, your reading of the tone does not get a vote.
A cold snap killed the colonies. Bernard only made a remark about cold snaps. The option takes a real person and moves him from commentator to cause, which is the standard way Part 1 builds a wrong option out of a right detail.
"Most years, on and off, since 1978" is vague enough to sound like a tall tale, and readers who enjoy being sceptical reach for this. But she never questions him, and the point of the story is the reverse: he is right, and everyone else in the valley who called the snap unusual is wrong.
Marisol has not mentioned the lavender to her neighbour because she
"I am afraid she will fence it." The cause is stated outright, and a fence around the lavender is a fence between the bees and the flavour she has just described. This is one of the few questions in the set answered by a plain clause rather than an implication, which is worth noticing: not every Part 1 stem is a riddle.
"Faintly" invites exactly this, and a reader moving quickly will catch it and stop. The same sentence says "unmistakably". The letter anticipates the doubt and cancels it in the adverb immediately following, which is a favourite Part 1 move: the hedge and its correction in one breath.
She knows the neighbour well enough to predict what she would do about a fence, which is more familiarity than the option allows. Nothing in the letter suggests distance between them at all.
No sale is mentioned anywhere in the letter. She measures 210 kilograms against what she can eat, not against a market. Commercial motives are what a reader supplies for a person with too much honey, and supplying them is the error.
Marisol,
I will take the May slot, then, and stay well out of your way in July. And I promise never to ask again what a person does with sixty thousand bees, since a whole year of asking has produced 5.
The message answers his question in its second sentence with "I still do not know", and then spends 250 words on noise, Bernard and lavender, all of them funny and none of them an answer. Tobias's sentence needs the message's own verdict on itself, and the message has already given it.
It reverses "I still do not know". Reversal is the cheapest wrong option to build, and in the reply block it is disguised by the fact that a friendly correspondent would plausibly say something like this.
The letter really is full of substance, and a warm reply would want to be generous about it, which is why this option feels like the kind thing to write. But "a much better answer" contradicts "I still do not know", and the reply is not allowed to disagree with the message. Warmth is never a licence to overrule the original text.
The message does end on an invitation, so the option lands on a real detail, and "nothing else" has a joking ring that fits the tone of the exchange. But 250 words of noise, Bernard and lavender sit between the question and the invitation, so "nothing else" is simply false. Tone-matching is not evidence.
Reading tips for the correspondence part
Split the 10 minutes 4 and 6
Roughly four minutes to read the message and clear questions 1 to 6, six minutes for the reply. The reply is five blanks that each require a trip back into the message, so it costs more than its question count suggests.
Notice the one-line paragraph
When a writer gives something its own short paragraph, or ends a story with a three-word sentence, that is the letter pointing at itself. "They were correct." Those lines answer questions far more often than the long descriptive passages do.
Watch the hedge that gets cancelled
"Faintly and unmistakably." "Sensibly, with a list of reasons." A qualifier followed by its own correction is a favourite trick, and readers who stop at the first half walk straight into the distractor built from it.
Keep a cast list in your head
Name, one job each. Mother spreads news. Realtor gets apologised to. Marc stays in Toronto. Most wrong options are a name doing somebody else's job, and the list catches them without a reread.
Answer every question
Nothing is deducted for a wrong drop-down, so an unanswered question is a guaranteed zero where a guess is a one in four. If a blank is eating your minutes, choose the least bad option and move on.
Practise on real letters
Part 1 is the one CELPIP text you can find in the wild. Read a chatty email from a friend and ask what it implies that it never says. That habit is the whole skill, and it costs no study time at all.
CELPIP reading practice FAQs
What is CELPIP Reading Part 1?
Part 1 is Reading Correspondence. You read one personal message, usually a letter or an email of roughly 300 to 400 words from one person to another, and answer 11 questions in about 10 minutes. It is the first of the four reading parts in the 2026 CELPIP format.
How many CELPIP reading questions are in Part 1?
Eleven. Questions 1 to 6 are sentence stems that you complete from a drop-down of four options. Questions 7 to 11 are five blanks inside a short reply to the message, also answered from drop-down menus. Nothing is typed in the reading section.
How long do I get for CELPIP Reading Part 1?
About 10 minutes for all 11 questions. The reading clock runs per part and does not carry over, so time saved in Part 1 cannot be spent in Part 4. A workable split is roughly 4 minutes on the message and questions 1 to 6, and the remaining 6 minutes on the reply.
What is the reply section in CELPIP Reading Part 1?
Questions 7 to 11 show a short response written back to the original message, with five blanks in it. You choose what belongs in each blank from a drop-down. The reply is new text, but every blank is decided by a fact or an implication in the original message, so the answer always lives in the message rather than in the reply.
Are the CELPIP reading questions in passage order?
In Part 1, questions 1 to 6 follow the order of the message from top to bottom, so question 1 is answered near the opening and question 6 near the close. The reply blanks in questions 7 to 11 are in the order of the reply, but they point back to scattered places in the original message.
Why are the wrong options in Part 1 so tempting?
Because most of them are true. A typical Part 1 distractor is a real detail lifted from the message and attached to the wrong person, the wrong moment or the wrong question. Asking whether an option is true is not the test. The test is whether it answers the stem you were actually given.
Does this reading practice course score my answers?
No. The practice course teaches by revealing the reasoning: you choose an answer in your head, then open the explanation and read why the right option is right and why each wrong one was written to catch you. There is no timer and no evaluation here. The timed reading tests mark your answers and report a CLB band instead.
Is CELPIP Reading Part 1 the easiest part?
It has the friendliest text, because a personal letter is easier to follow than an academic passage or a diagram. It is not the easiest to score on. The message carries most of its meaning in tone and implication rather than in stated fact, so Part 1 punishes literal reading more than any other part except Part 4.
Are these CELPIP reading practice questions free?
Yes. The worked example, the five untimed questions and every explanation on this page are free, with no account and no credit card required.
Is this Part 1 practice updated for the 2026 CELPIP format?
Yes. Everything on this page follows the 2026 CELPIP reading format: four parts, 38 questions in total, and Part 1 running 11 questions in about 10 minutes with a message and a reply.
Where to go next
Part 2 is the one where the answer is not in the text you are reading. Then take the whole section under the real per-part clock.
Part 2: Apply a Diagram
8 questions in 8 minutes, and the answers hide in the diagram rather than the email.
Learn Part 2 →Part 3: For Information
Paragraph matching, A to E, where option E is there to punish a forced answer.
Learn Part 3 →Part 4: For Viewpoints
The longest part, where the distractors swap who said what.
Learn Part 4 →Timed reading tests
All 38 questions across the four parts, under the real per-part clock.
Start a reading test →Try Part 1 under the real clock
You have the method. The timed reading test puts all 11 correspondence questions back on a 10 minute clock, alongside the other three parts.