CELPIP Reading Practice Test 3 with answers

This is a CELPIP reading practice test with answers: 38 questions for the 2026 format, marked against the official answer key the second you submit, with the right option shown on every question rather than just a total at the end. Practice Test 3 is the first of the Medium sets, so it is a step up from Tests 1 and 2 in vocabulary and in how carefully the distractors are built.

A score on its own is close to useless. Knowing you got 27 out of 38 tells you nothing you can act on. Knowing that four of your eleven errors were in Part 3, and that in three of them you chose a paragraph that mentioned your keyword but not your fact, tells you exactly what to change.

What is in this reading test?

Part 1, Reading Correspondence is a letter from a colleague who has resigned from Brightbay Logistics to start the practical nursing program at Red River College Polytechnic, at forty-one. There is a restructuring in the background, with claims being folded into the Calgary office, and the writer is at pains to say the two things are not connected. Whether you believe that is more or less the point of the questions.

Part 2, Reading to Apply a Diagram compares four rental apartments available in Ottawa this September, and rent trades off against commute: The Fernwood in Centretown at $1,690 and fourteen minutes by bus, Maplecrest Tower in Vanier at $2,340 and twenty-two minutes, The Rideau Row in Old Ottawa South at $2,750 and forty-one minutes, and Bellwood Flats in Hintonburg at $2,050 and nine minutes by light rail.

Part 3, Reading for Information is on Canadian peat bogs: how a bog forms where water cannot drain, how sphagnum moss manufactures the acidity that suits it, why that same chemistry preserves the past so well, and the arithmetic that peatlands hold roughly twice the carbon of all the world's forests. This part includes the E option, "not given in any of the above paragraphs".

Part 4, Reading for Viewpoints follows Estelle Fournier, who printed one line at the bottom of every menu at Rowan Street Kitchen in Victoria: there is no tipping here, our staff are paid a wage. Then she raised prices twenty percent. Her line cooks and her servers did not react the same way, and neither did her customers.

Where the 38 answers sit

Use this grid when you review your answer key. Errors are worth counting per part rather than in total, because eleven marks lost across four parts is a pacing problem and eleven marks lost inside one part is a specific, fixable weakness.

How the answers are shown

When you submit, every question is marked against the key immediately and you can go back through the test with the passage on one side and your choices on the other. Right answers are confirmed, not skipped, which matters more than it sounds: a correct guess and a correct deduction look identical in a score total and are completely different in what they predict about test day. If you cannot say why the right answer is right, treat it as a miss.

Work your review in this order. First the questions you got wrong. Then the questions you got right but hesitated over. Then, only if you have time, the rest. Most candidates review nothing and retake immediately, which is how people take five reading tests and finish exactly where they started.

The "not given" answers are the ones to study

Part 3 of this test lets you answer E when a statement appears in none of the four paragraphs, and the peat bog passage is a good place to get burned by it. A statement can be perfectly true about bogs, sound exactly like something the passage would say, and still be E because the passage never actually says it. When you review your answers here, look specifically at every E you missed and every E you chose wrongly. That single question type separates candidates who read the text from candidates who read their own assumptions.

Tips for this test

• Before you check the answer key, mark which questions you guessed. The gap between your score and your confident score is your real score.
• In the apartment diagram, work out the emailer's ceiling on rent and their limit on commute first. Two of the four options fail on one axis each.
• For every Part 3 answer, find the sentence that proves it. If you cannot point at one, the answer is probably E.
• In the tipping article, the cooks, the servers, Fournier and the customers hold four different positions. Note them in the margin as you read, because the questions will mix them up.
• Redo only the questions you missed a few days later, not the whole test. Targeted review beats another cold attempt.