CELPIP reading format and time: Part 2, Reading to Apply a Diagram
Part 2 gives you the tightest clock in the section: 8 questions in 8 minutes. See exactly how the format is built, how the CELPIP reading time splits across all four parts, and why the answer is nearly always in the diagram rather than in the email you are filling in.
What Reading to Apply a Diagram actually asks of you
Part 2 is the strangest-looking part of the CELPIP reading format, and the one candidates most often misread as easy. There is no essay and no letter about somebody's feelings. There is a chart: four similar things placed side by side, each with three short feature bullets and a line giving a price and a validity or a term. Four transit passes. Four gym memberships. Four campsites. Four storage units.
On the right sit eight questions in two blocks. Questions 1 to 5 are blanks inside a short email in which one person walks a friend through the four options and recommends one. Questions 6 to 8 are sentence stems about that email's reasoning. So the part is not really testing whether you can read a chart. It is testing whether you can hold two documents against each other and notice when they disagree.
Here is the structural fact that decides your score: the email never contains the answer. It contains the person, their constraints and the shape of an argument, with the load-bearing facts cut out and replaced by drop-downs. Those facts are in the diagram, three columns to the left, in a bullet you have not read closely yet. Part 2 is a cross-referencing task disguised as a reading task, and candidates who answer from the email alone are answering from a text that has been deliberately hollowed out.
The second structural fact is that the four options are near-identical on purpose. They share most of their features. Each carries only two or three properties that no other one has, and every single question is built on one of those discriminators. Everything else on the diagram is padding designed to cost you time you do not have.
The CELPIP reading format for Part 2
Everything the 2026 format fixes about the diagram part, in one table.
- Official name
- Reading Part 2: Reading to Apply a Diagram
- Questions
- 8, out of 38 in the whole reading section
- Time
- About 8 minutes. Roughly one minute per question, the tightest ratio in the section.
- On the left
- A diagram comparing four similar options, each with a short feature list and a price or term line
- Questions 1 to 5
- Five blanks inside a short email applying the diagram to one named person's circumstances
- Questions 6 to 8
- Sentence stems asking why the email reached the conclusions it did
- Where the answers live
- In the diagram. The email supplies the constraints; the diagram supplies the facts.
- Answering
- Drop-down menus only. Nothing is typed, and there is no penalty for a wrong guess.
How the CELPIP reading time is divided
The clock runs per part and resets when you advance. Minutes you save in Part 1 are gone, not banked, so knowing the per-question budget before test day is worth real marks.
- Part
- Questions
- Time
- 2 · Apply a Diagram
- 8
- 8 min
- Total
- 38
- About 39 min
Look at the ratios rather than the totals. Part 4 gives you 72 seconds a question, Part 1 gives you 55, and Part 2 gives you 60 for questions that each require you to look in a second document. That is why Part 2 feels rushed even to people who read quickly: the minute is not the problem, the two trips across the screen inside the minute are.
Because the clock resets, there is no strategic hoarding to be done. What there is instead is a per-part budget you should already know before you sit down. For Part 2 the budget that works is roughly 45 seconds learning the diagram's shape, 60 seconds reading the email straight through, and about 5 minutes on the eight questions, which leaves a little over a minute of slack for the one blank that fights you.
How to attack the diagram part
Part 2 rewards a procedure more than any other part of the reading section, because the reasoning is mechanical once you are pointed at the right two lines. These five moves are the procedure.
- Read the shape, not the detail
- Spend about 45 seconds learning what the four things are and which dimensions the diagram compares: price, access, duration, restrictions. Do not study the bullets yet. You do not know what you are looking for, and the diagram is mostly padding until you do.
- Mine the email for constraints
- The email exists to tell you what this person cannot have. A wheelchair. A cello. Six weeks, not six months. Every blank is a collision between one constraint and one diagram bullet, so the constraints are the key that opens the chart.
- Find the discriminators
- Ask what each option has that the other three do not. Usually two or three things each. Every question is built on one of them, and any feature shared by three columns is automatically not the answer to why one column wins or loses.
- Name the column, then look
- Before you open a drop-down, say which of the four options this sentence is about. Then read only that column. Almost every wrong option in Part 2 is a true feature belonging to a different column, and naming the column first makes them fall away without any thought at all.
- Trust the email's own grammar
- "The only one with." "Both of those." "Twelve dollars cheaper." The email's phrasing constantly narrows what can legally fill the blank, often to one option, before you look at the diagram at all. Read the sentence whole, including the words after the blank.
The fourth move is the one that matters most, so it is worth seeing why it works. Put yourself in the test writer's chair: you need three wrong options for a blank, and they have to be plausible. Inventing them is risky, because an invented feature can be eliminated by anyone who reads the diagram. So you do not invent. You reach into the next column and take something real. The candidate half-remembers reading it, feels a flicker of recognition, and picks it.
That flicker of recognition is the trap, and naming the column first disarms it. "Is this on the diagram?" is a question with the wrong answer for three of your four options. "Is this in the row this sentence is about?" is a question with exactly one answer. It costs a second and it is worth several marks across the eight questions.
A Part 2 diagram, taken apart
Read the diagram, read the email, decide each blank, then read the reasoning. Every option is explained, including which column each wrong one was stolen from.
Riverstone Provincial Park: four campsite types
An original diagram written for this course, in the shape of a real Part 2 chart.
Hi Wren,
I went through the four site types at Riverstone for you and your dad, and I am working around the wheelchair and the one machine he cannot sleep without.
The Rustic Cabin is the obvious one to want, but it is more than three times the price of the Walk-In and it carries a 1 on Saturdays, so your one-night idea does not survive there anyway.
The Walk-In Tent Site is out for a different reason. You would have to 2, which is not happening with the chair, no matter how quiet that loop is.
That leaves the two drive-in options, and I would take the Serviced Site. It is the only one with 3, which solves the machine, and it is the closest loop to the shower building, which solves the other thing. Just know there is no tap and no drain at the site, so you are still hauling water from the building.
If the budget matters more than the power, the Standard Site is twelve dollars a night cheaper and takes the trailer, but you would be running a generator, and only 4.
Nabil
Rustic Cabin row, third bullet: "Two-night minimum on weekends." The sentence needs the reason a Saturday one-night stay collapses, and only the cabin carries that rule. Notice where the answer was: not in the email at all. You had to go and get it.
It passes the wrong test beautifully. "Book up to 12 months ahead" is genuinely in the cabin's row, and it is genuinely unique to it, so both "is this true?" and "is this the right column?" say yes. It still fails, because a longer booking window makes a night easier to get, not impossible. The sentence needs a restriction, and this is a permission.
"No generators at any hour" is the Walk-In row. This is Part 2's signature move: a real rule, printed on the diagram, one column away from where this sentence is looking. It reads well precisely because you did read it.
The 30-amp hookup is the Serviced Site. Same mechanism as C, two columns away, and with no possible bearing on a Saturday night. When three of your four options are real features of the wrong rows, naming the column before you look is what saves you.
Walk-In row, first bullet: "Park at the lot and carry your gear 400 m in." The email supplies the constraint, a wheelchair, and the diagram supplies the barrier, 400 metres of carrying. Neither document answers this on its own, which is the whole design of Part 2.
True of the Walk-In, and also true of the Standard and the Serviced. A feature shared by three of the four columns cannot explain why one of them is ruled out. Anything non-discriminating is automatically wrong in Part 2, and spotting that is faster than reasoning about it.
"Room for one vehicle and one trailer up to 6 m" is a real line, and sharing a site with a trailer sounds like a genuine camping annoyance. It belongs to the Standard row, and it contradicts the Walk-In row's defining property: no vehicle at the site at all.
"Bring your own bedding" is the cabin, a column the email discarded a paragraph earlier. Watch for distractors that quietly revive an option the email has already killed.
Serviced Site row: "30-amp electrical hookup at the post." It is the only row with power, which satisfies the email's "the only one with", and it is what "solves the machine" refers to.
The covered porch is the cabin's, and the cabin was eliminated two paragraphs up. A real feature, wrong column, already-dead option: three separate reasons to reject it, and readers still pick it because the words appeared on the screen.
This one is defeated by the email's grammar before you even look left. "The only one with" demands something unique, and the diagram says a fire ring and picnic table are "at every site". A feature every column has cannot be the thing only one column has. Read the words after the blank and this option disqualifies itself.
Water and sewer genuinely appear in the Serviced row, which is the right column, in a bullet that says there is none of either: "No water or sewer hookup at the site itself." Nabil then repeats the point immediately after the blank: "no tap and no drain at the site". The option quotes the correct row and inverts it, which is the one distractor that survives naming the column. Reading the bullet whole is the only defence.
Standard Drive-In row: "Generators allowed between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m." The email's "only" is asking for a limit, and the diagram prints the hours. Right column, right bullet, no interpretation required.
No office and no office hours appear anywhere in the diagram. It is exactly the sort of rule a real campground would have, which is the point: it is imported from your knowledge of campgrounds rather than read off the screen.
"On weekends" is a real phrase on this diagram, sitting in the cabin's two-night rule. Lifting a phrase you half-remember from one column into a sentence about another is the single most common Part 2 error, and the flicker of recognition is precisely what makes it feel safe.
Nothing in the diagram links generator rules to how close a site is to the cabins. Invented, but invented in the register of a real park rule, which is how a fabricated option earns its keep.
On the real test the stems are questions 6 to 8, and they ask about the email's reasoning rather than the diagram's contents.
Nabil rules out the Walk-In Tent Site because of
"You would have to carry everything 400 metres from the lot, which is not happening with the chair." One reason, given plainly, and it is the only Walk-In feature the email engages with at all.
Reversed. At $29.00 the Walk-In is the cheapest of the four, and the email uses it as the yardstick that makes the cabin look expensive. Price is the reason to want this site, not to reject it.
Also reversed, and more cleverly. The diagram calls this "the quietest loop", and the email concedes the point out loud: "no matter how quiet that loop is". A reader who remembers that noise and this loop were discussed in the same breath, without remembering which way round, picks this.
Five months, exactly like the Standard and the Serviced, and Nabil never mentions booking windows for anything but the cabin. Non-discriminating and unmentioned, which is two ways of being wrong at once.
Common mistakes in Reading Part 2
The diagram part fails people in ways that have nothing to do with their English.
Answering from the email
The email reads smoothly and feels like a source. It is a hollowed-out argument: the constraints stayed, the facts were removed and replaced with drop-downs. If you filled a blank without looking left, you guessed.
Studying the diagram cold
Reading all twelve bullets closely before you know the person's constraints spends three of your eight minutes on padding. Learn the shape, get the constraints, then come back for detail with a question in your hand.
Taking the feature from the next column
The defining Part 2 error. The option is real, you did read it, and it belongs to a different one of the four. Name the column the sentence is about before you open the drop-down and most of these evaporate.
Missing the negative bullet
"No water or sewer hookup." "No vehicle at the site." Diagrams state absences as if they were features, and an option that quotes the right row while dropping the "no" is the hardest distractor in the part. Read the bullet to its end.
Ignoring what a shared feature means
If three of the four options can be booked five months ahead, the booking window cannot be why one of them is rejected. Shared features are never answers. Recognising that is faster than working out whether the option is true.
Reading only up to the blank
"It is the only one with ___" and "it is ___, and it is the only one of the four that is both of those" are solved largely by grammar. The words after the blank tell you how many things the answer contains and whether it has to be unique.
5 more Part 2 questions, no timer
A second original diagram and email. Work each blank properly, naming the column before you choose, and reveal the explanation only after you have committed to an answer.
Cedarline Self Storage, Burnaby: four unit sizes
An original diagram written for this course. There is no timer here: take as long as you like.
Hi Amara,
Four sizes at Cedarline, and not one of them fits you properly, so here is the least bad. Your two hard rules, as I understand them: the cello has to stay dry and steady, and you need to get in after your shift ends at midnight.
Start with the Locker. It is half the price of anything else and the only one you can take for 1, which suits six weeks exactly. But it has no climate control, and you are storing the cello. That ends it.
The Large Unit is the other easy no. Not the space, which is generous, and not the loading bay, which you would enjoy. It is the 2: you would be paying for four and a half months you do not need.
So it is the Small or the Medium. The Medium is the one with 3, which would turn the sofa into a ten-minute job instead of an afternoon. The trouble is that its climate is the same as the parking lot's, so the cello rules it out too.
That leaves the Small. You will pay for three months to use six weeks, it is up on the second floor, and the sofa is going to be a fight even with the lift. But it is 4, and it is the only one of the four that is both of those and not a six-month commitment.
Rafi
Locker row: "Minimum term 1 month." It is the only one of the four you can take for a single month, which is what "the only one you can take for" demands, and it is what makes six weeks workable.
Three months is a real minimum term on this diagram, printed twice: on the Small and on the Medium. Two columns share it, which is exactly why it cannot fill a sentence beginning "the only one". The number is familiar because you read it, in the wrong rows.
Six months is the Large Unit's minimum, and Rafi spends the very next paragraph rejecting the Large for exactly that reason. A real number, one column over, and contradicted by the paragraph that follows it.
No term shorter than a month appears anywhere on the diagram. It is the only invented option in this set, and it is here for readers who reason that a small cheap locker ought to be rentable by the week.
Large Unit row: "Minimum term 6 months." The clause after the blank does the arithmetic for you: six months less six weeks is about four and a half months she does not need. Only a term explains a sentence about paying for time.
The Large is the most expensive at $310, so the option is true and sounds like the obvious objection to a big unit. But the sentence after the blank is about months, not dollars, and Rafi has already ruled out space and the loading bay as reasons. The email's own grammar points at a duration.
Reversed. The Large is climate controlled and humidity monitored, which makes it one of only two units that could hold the cello. This option takes the row's strength and reports it as a weakness.
Second floor is the Small Unit. Real feature, wrong column, and it contradicts the Large's own bullet, which puts it on the ground floor with a loading bay.
Medium Unit row: "Ground floor with a roll-up door and drive-up parking." Park at the door, roll the sofa in, done. It is the Medium's one genuine discriminator, and the sentence names the Medium explicitly.
The strongest distractor on the page, because a loading bay and a trolley would make a sofa easy, which is exactly what the sentence claims. It is real and it is the Large Unit's, and Rafi praised it by name one paragraph earlier ("not the loading bay, which you would enjoy"). Right idea, wrong column, and the email itself told you which column it lives in.
The goods lift is the Small Unit's, and Rafi mentions it two paragraphs later as the thing that makes the sofa "a fight even with the lift". If a lift made the sofa a ten-minute job, that later sentence would not exist.
Wrong on two counts. The 24-hour gate code belongs to the Small and the Large, not the Medium, and a gate code has nothing to do with how long a sofa takes to move. Shared by two columns and irrelevant to the sentence.
Small Unit row: "Access 24 hours a day with a gate code" and "Climate controlled and humidity monitored". Those are Amara's two hard rules from the opening paragraph, the cello and the midnight shift, and the clause after the blank confirms the count: "both of those". The Large has both as well, which is why the sentence adds "and not a six-month commitment" to break the tie.
Half of it is true, which is what makes it dangerous. The Small at $130 genuinely is cheaper than the Medium at $195. But it is on the second floor, as the same sentence has just told you, and neither property is one of Amara's two rules. A half-true option feels verified because the half you check first checks out.
False, and it is not two things. The Large is the largest at 3 m by 9 m, and "both of those" in the following clause requires an answer containing two properties. The grammar rejects this before the diagram does.
Contradicted by the sentence immediately before the blank: "You will pay for three months to use six weeks." The Locker is the single-month one. This is the answer to question 1 recycled into question 4, which is a favourite way to catch someone working backwards through the email.
Rafi's stated reason for rejecting the Medium Unit is that it
"Its climate is the same as the parking lot's, so the cello rules it out too." One reason, stated, and the same reason that killed the Locker two paragraphs earlier. The stem asks for Rafi's reason, and Rafi gives exactly one.
Completely true. The Medium is $195 and the Small is $130, so this is a real fact about the right column, and it is a real disadvantage. Rafi simply never says it. The stem asks for his stated reason, and an option can be true, relevant, and still not the answer, which is the hardest lesson in this part.
Also true, and arguably a better objection than the one Rafi gives. The Medium closes at 9 p.m., Amara's shift ends at midnight, and the email establishes that as one of her two hard rules in its opening paragraph. He still does not raise it. Two true objections and only one stated: the stem chooses between them, not you.
The Medium's minimum is three months. Six is the Large's, which Rafi rejected for that reason a paragraph earlier. Real reason, right sentence, wrong column, which is Part 2 in one line.
Reading tips for the diagram part
Budget 45 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes
Shape of the diagram, then the email, then the questions, leaving about a minute of slack. Part 2 gives you 60 seconds a question for questions that need two documents, so the budget has to be decided before test day, not during it.
Say the column name out loud, silently
"This sentence is about the Serviced Site." Then read only that row. It takes a second and it disarms the majority of the distractors in the part, because most of them are simply the wrong row's truth.
Circle the discriminators first
The two or three things each option has that no other one does. Everything else on the diagram is there to eat your minutes. Once you have the discriminators, you have the answer key to all eight questions.
Do the arithmetic the email hands you
"Twelve dollars cheaper." "Four and a half months you do not need." "More than three times the price." Those numbers are checkable against the diagram in about four seconds, and they confirm or destroy an option outright.
Beware the option that is half true
"Cheaper than the Medium and on the ground floor." The first half checks out, you stop checking, you pick it. When an option contains two claims, verify the second one first, because the first one is bait.
Answer every question
Nothing is deducted for a wrong drop-down. With a minute a question and no penalty, a blank you cannot resolve in thirty seconds should get your best guess and your immediate departure.
CELPIP reading format FAQs
What is the CELPIP reading format for Part 2?
Part 2 is Reading to Apply a Diagram. The left of the screen holds a diagram comparing four similar options, such as four passes, four plans or four campsites, each with a short list of features and a price. The right holds 8 questions: five blanks inside a short email that applies the diagram to one person's situation, then three sentence stems about that email's reasoning.
How much CELPIP reading time do I get for Part 2?
About 8 minutes for 8 questions, which is the tightest ratio in the reading section at roughly one minute per question. The reading clock runs per part and does not carry over, so minutes saved in Part 1 cannot be spent here.
How is the CELPIP reading time divided across the four parts?
Roughly 10 minutes for Part 1 and its 11 questions, 8 minutes for Part 2 and its 8 questions, 9 minutes for Part 3 and its 9 questions, and 12 minutes for Part 4 and its 10 questions. That is 38 questions in about 39 minutes, with the clock resetting at each part rather than pooling.
Where are the answers in CELPIP Reading Part 2?
Almost always in the diagram, not in the email. The email tells you whose problem it is and what their constraints are, but the facts that settle each blank sit in the diagram's feature lists. If you can answer a Part 2 blank without looking left, you have probably been caught by a distractor.
Why do the wrong options in Part 2 look so believable?
Because they are usually true. The standard Part 2 distractor is a genuine feature copied from a different column of the same diagram. It survives any check of the form "did I read this somewhere?", and only fails the check that matters: does this feature belong to the option this sentence is about?
Should I read the diagram or the email first in Part 2?
Read the diagram's shape first, not its contents: about 45 seconds to learn what the four options are and which dimensions are being compared. Then read the email to find the person's constraints. Then go back into the diagram for detail. Reading all four feature lists closely before you know what you are looking for burns half your 8 minutes.
Is the diagram in CELPIP Part 2 always four options?
In the 2026 format it is consistently a comparison of four similar items with parallel feature lists and a price or validity line each. The four are deliberately near-identical, and each one usually carries only two or three features that no other one has. Those discriminating features are where every question lives.
Does this practice course time or score my Part 2 answers?
No. There is no timer and no evaluation anywhere in the practice course. You decide on an answer, then reveal an explanation that covers why the right option is right and why each wrong option was built to look right. The timed reading tests mark your answers and report a CLB band instead.
Are these Part 2 reading questions free?
Yes. Both diagrams, 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 2 practice updated for the 2026 CELPIP format?
Yes. Everything here follows the 2026 CELPIP reading format: four parts and 38 questions, with Part 2 running 8 questions in about 8 minutes on a four-option diagram plus an email.
Where to go next
Part 3 drops the second document and replaces it with an option that means "this is not here at all". Then take the section under the real per-part clock.
Part 1: Correspondence
11 questions in 10 minutes, a personal message and a reply with five blanks.
Learn Part 1 →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 →Put the 8 minutes back on
You know where the answers live and how the distractors are made. The timed reading test gives Part 2 its real clock, alongside the other three parts.