CELPIP Speaking Mock Test 3

There is a difference between practising a task and sitting a mock. Practising, you stop the clock when a sentence goes wrong and start again. In a mock, the sentence stays wrong and you keep talking, because that is what test day is. Speaking Mock Test 3 is the second kind: eight tasks, one attempt each, in exam order, on the official clock.

It is rated Medium. The tasks are not harder to understand than the Easy tests; they are harder to answer well, because every one of them has a genuine trade-off in it and none of them has a comfortable answer waiting.

What a CELPIP speaking mock test has to get right

Plenty of free material calls itself a mock and then hands you a topic list. A mock has to reproduce the constraints, because the constraints are what your score is made of:

• The clock resets every task. Finishing Task 2 in 40 seconds does not lend you 20 seconds anywhere. Eight separate sprints, not one 15-minute run.
• Preparation is not skippable. If you try to jump it, you are warned, and confirming forfeits the whole task: no recording, scored as no response.
• No pause, no retake, no going back. Recording starts when preparation ends and stops at zero.
• Task 4 gives you no new picture. It is Task 3's picture again, so whatever you failed to notice the first time is still the only evidence you have.
• Task 5 is three screens. Sixty seconds to choose in silence, then 60 to prepare and 60 to speak. The option you rejected disappears and is never mentioned again.

The eight tasks on this mock

Task 1 gives you a cousin who has been offered a job in another city and wants to know what you think. Task 2 asks for a time you changed your mind: a plan you cancelled, an opinion you dropped, a person you judged too quickly.

Tasks 3 and 4 share one picture of a family restaurant at dinner time. A host with a clipboard points toward the back while a woman in a green coat waits and her small boy tugs her sleeve. A server balances three plates on one arm and leans down to set one in front of a grey-haired woman who is reaching up to help. At the same booth a little girl stretches across the table toward a red squeeze bottle while her mother slides it away. At the till a customer holds out a bank card. A cook passes a plate through the kitchen window, and a teenaged busser pushes a cart of dirty dishes past it all. Task 3 asks you to describe it to someone who cannot see it; Task 4 asks what happens next.

Task 5 is a used car for the family. A silver compact hatchback: $12,400 at a dealership, 96,000 km, six-month warranty, seats five, small trunk, very good on fuel. Or a dark blue station wagon: $15,900 private sale, sold as is, 142,000 km, new brakes, all wheel drive and a roof rack, and a seller three hours away. You choose, and then your partner counters with a car that was never on the table: his uncle's two-seat convertible, payable slowly, garage kept, 74,000 km, and no back seat at all.

Task 6 is the one with no right answer. You keep the booking calendar at a community hall. A group of seniors has played cards there every Thursday for eleven years and never filled in a form. A new youth soccer club filled in the form and paid. Tonight both have arrived and the room fits one. You explain the decision to whichever group loses.

Task 7 asks whether a city should close some downtown streets to cars. Task 8 puts you at a garage sale in front of a thing a neighbour built himself: a green step ladder on its side, four cut bottles screwed upside down along the rail, a bicycle wheel mounted flat above it with clothes pegs round the rim, a hair dryer bungee-corded to the frame pointing up at the bottles, a cake pan underneath and a door handle bolted on as a crank. You call your roommate Dana, describe it, and ask whether to buy it.

Timing on the day

What the report tells you

Each of the eight recordings is transcribed and scored on the four official criteria: Content and Coherence, Vocabulary, Listenability, and Task Fulfillment. Your level is a product of all eight, not an average of your favourites. The report comes back with expert feedback per criterion and an estimated CLB level on the 1 to 12 scale, and it is worth reading the Task Fulfillment notes first: tone is scored there, and Task 6 on this mock is precisely where tone goes wrong.

Sitting it properly

• Do the whole thing in one sitting, in a quiet room, with the microphone you would actually use. A mock you stopped halfway is practice with extra steps.
• Do not look up the tasks first. On this test, unlike the question list on Test 2, the point is the ambush.
• On Task 5, commit inside the first 20 seconds of the choosing screen and spend the other 40 building your case. Undecided candidates arrive at the speaking screen with nothing.
• On Task 6, whichever group you pick, acknowledge what the other group loses before you explain the decision. That single move is most of the tone mark.
• When you fluff a sentence, carry on. Restarting costs you more than the error did.