CELPIP Reading Part 3: Reading for Information

CELPIP Reading Part 3, Reading for Information, is the part most candidates find least like ordinary reading. You are given a factual passage broken into four labelled paragraphs, A to D, and nine statements. For each statement you choose the paragraph it belongs to. Nothing is quoted back at you, the statements paraphrase rather than repeat, and you have nine minutes for all nine.

This page is the part in its real setting. Reading Test 8 is a free, full-length, Easy-rated test, and its Part 3 is a passage on the tides of the Bay of Fundy. You can sit the whole test or stop after Part 3; either way the timing is the exam timing.

What Part 3 asks you to do on this test

The passage has four paragraphs. A establishes that the Bay of Fundy, between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, carries the largest tides ever measured. B explains that the cause is timing rather than force, because the tide arriving from the open Atlantic meets a basin whose natural rhythm reinforces it. C turns to the mud flats the retreating water uncovers twice a day and why biologists care about them. D covers the attempts since 1984 to turn all that moving water into electricity.

The trap is that all four paragraphs are about the same bay. A statement mentioning water, or the moon, or Nova Scotia, matches every paragraph on vocabulary and only one on meaning. What separates them is function: cause is in B, biology is in C, engineering is in D.

How to work Part 3 in nine minutes

• Read the first sentence of each of A, B, C and D before you read a single statement. Four topic sentences is about ninety seconds and it turns the task into sorting rather than searching.
• Label the paragraphs for yourself in one word each. On this test: what, why, mud, power.
• Do the statements you are sure of first. There is one budget for the whole part, not one per statement.
• A statement that seems to fit two paragraphs almost always belongs to the one whose function it matches, not the one that shares its nouns.
• Never leave one blank. Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so an unanswered statement is a mark handed back.

The rest of Reading Test 8

Part 1, Reading Correspondence is a letter to Kwame written at the front desk of a lodge twenty minutes outside Banff at ten past eleven at night, two months into a five-month season. Part 2, Reading to Apply a Diagram compares four camping options at Pinewater Provincial Park: a walk-in tent site at $28 a night with a 400 metre carry, a serviced trailer site at $54, a rustic cabin at $95 and a group campsite at $110. Part 4, Reading for Viewpoints reports on the Thornbury School District, which told its 6,400 students to drop their phones into numbered canvas pouches during class.

CELPIP Reading format: where Part 3 sits

Part 3 is the third of four parts and it carries nine of the section total of 38 questions. It is the only part with no email attached to it, and the only one that is pure matching.

How Part 3 is scored

Each of the nine statements is worth one mark, there is exactly one correct paragraph for each, and nothing is deducted for a wrong choice. Part 3 is marked instantly with the rest of the section, and your raw score out of 38 converts to a CLB level on the CELPIP reading score chart.