CELPIP Reading Part 4: Reading for Viewpoints

CELPIP Reading Part 4, Reading for Viewpoints, is the part that decides a lot of scores. It runs last, it holds 10 of the 38 questions, and it gives you 12 minutes, more than any other part. The material is an opinion article in which several people are quoted, followed by a reader comment with blanks you complete. The questions are almost never about what happened. They are about who thinks what, and why.

On Reading Test 9 the article is about Orillia, where Canada Day ended with fireworks over Lake Couchiching for sixty-one years and last summer ended with three hundred drones instead.

What Part 4 asks you to do on this test

Council voted in February, after a dry June the year before forced the fire department to soak the launch site twice, and after a complaint file that had grown to take in dog owners, three veterans and a naturalists group worried about nesting birds. Every one of those groups gets a voice in the article, and none of them wants the same thing for the same reason. The veterans and the dog owners both dislike the fireworks and disagree about the drones. That is the whole difficulty of Part 4 in one sentence.

The second half of the part is a reader comment with blanks. You are not choosing what you think; you are choosing what a specific commenter, whose position you worked out from the article, would write next. Answer it in your own voice and you will get it wrong.

How to work Part 4 in twelve minutes

• Build a name list as you read. On this test that is council, the fire department, the dog owners, the veterans and the naturalists group. One line each, one word for their position.
• Separate the fact from the reading of it. The vote happened. What it means is contested, and only the contested half is examined.
• Watch for people who agree on the conclusion and differ on the reason. Those pairs supply the strongest distractors here.
• For the reader comment, decide whose comment it is before you look at the options for the first blank.
• Twelve minutes is generous for the article and tight for the comment. Do not spend nine minutes reading.

The rest of Reading Test 9

Part 1, Reading Correspondence is a letter to Emmett from a friend who handed in her notice at a freight company in March and bought a one-third share in the bakery on Norfolk Street in Guelph. Part 2, Reading to Apply a Diagram compares four small business chequing accounts at Aspen Ridge Credit Union: Starter Chequing at $6.95 a month with 15 transactions, Everyday Business at $24.50 with 60, Growth Plus at $59.00 with 200 and a US dollar sub-account, and a Non-Profit Community Account at $4.00 with 40. Part 3, Reading for Information is a passage on the monarch butterfly and the generation that makes the whole migration south.

CELPIP Reading format: where Part 4 sits

Part 4 is last, longest and worth the most marks of any single part. It is also the part you reach with the least time and attention left, which is the argument for practising it inside a full test rather than on its own.

How Part 4 is scored

Ten questions, one correct answer each, no deduction for a wrong one. Part 4 is auto-marked with the rest of the section the moment you submit, and your raw score out of 38 converts on the CELPIP reading score chart.