CELPIP Reading samples: Practice Test 5

If you came looking for CELPIP reading samples, this page is a full sample test rather than a scattering of example questions. That distinction matters. A loose sample question shows you what a stem looks like. A complete sample test shows you what forty seconds of hesitation in Part 2 costs you in Part 4, and that is the thing you cannot learn from an example on its own.

Practice Test 5 is rated Medium and its four passages are drawn from ordinary Canadian life: a friend struggling in a new city, a college course listing, a science passage on birds, and a workplace argument. Between them they give you at least one worked example of every question type the reading section uses.

Sample questions by part

Part 1, Reading Correspondence samples the letter type. A friend writes from Winnipeg after landing in February, the worst possible month, having been certain everyone was exaggerating about the cold. They were not. A neighbour turned up with a spare block heater, which the writer had never heard of. The real weight of the letter is professional: their licence did not carry across, the association wants a full assessment of the degree plus a year of supervised Canadian experience, and in the meantime they are a technologist in Fort Garry doing work they could have done at twenty-three. Six stems, then a five-blank reply.

Part 2, Reading to Apply a Diagram samples the comparison chart. Four evening courses at Riverbend College Continuing Education are set against tuition and hours: Bookkeeping Essentials at $890 over 12 weeks and 72 hours, Digital Marketing Foundations at $560 over 8 weeks and 40 hours, Project Coordination at $1,240 over 16 weeks and 96 hours, and Workplace Communication at $340 over 6 weeks and just 12 hours.

Part 3, Reading for Information samples paragraph matching, including the "not given" option. The passage is on the intelligence of urban crows: a corvid brain of only a few grams that behaves as if it were far larger, a long-running study on Canada's west coast where banded crows remembered the faces of the researchers who trapped them, the winter roosts that draw ribbons of birds across a city at dusk, and the reasons not everyone is charmed.

Part 4, Reading for Viewpoints samples the opinion article and reader comment. Kestrel Instruments in Kitchener, 140 people making water-testing equipment, cut the standard week to 32 hours with no cut in pay. Marguerite Lefebvre, who designed the trial, says the arguments she now hears against it are the arguments she was making herself two years ago. She expected to lose twenty percent of output and lost about four.

The format these samples follow

Every sample above sits in the slot below, which is where a full sample test earns its keep over a page of loose examples. An example teaches you the question. The grid teaches you what the question costs.

How to use a sample test properly

The temptation with samples is to read them like a textbook: skim the passage, glance at the options, nod, move on. That produces the feeling of preparation without any of it. Sit this one closed-book and timed, exactly as if it counted, and only then open it up as an example set.

On the review pass, the questions to study are not the ones you got wrong. They are the ones where the wrong option tempted you. Every distractor in this test was written to be plausible, so a distractor that nearly caught you is a small, precise map of a habit you can fix. The crows passage in particular rewards this: several statements are true of crows generally and simply are not in the text.

What your sample score means

You are marked against the answer key on submission and can see the correct option for all 38 questions. Reading is reported CLB 1 to 12 on the real exam, and the CELPIP reading score chart converts a raw count into that band. Treat a sample score as a rough position rather than a prediction: one test on one afternoon carries a fair amount of noise, and the useful signal appears once you have taken three or four and can see which part is consistently your weakest.

Tips for this test

• In the course diagram, hours and weeks matter as much as tuition. The cheapest course is also the shortest by a wide margin, and that is not an accident.
• The Winnipeg letter runs two threads at once, the personal and the professional. Most of the questions are on the second one.
• In the crows passage, ask of every statement whether the text says it or whether you simply know it. Only the first kind belongs in A to D.
• Lefebvre's numbers are specific: 32 hours, 140 staff, four percent. Specific numbers in a viewpoints article are almost always tested.
• Do not read the sample answers first. A sample you have already seen the key for measures nothing.