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CELPIP Listening Part 4: Listening to a News Item

CELPIP Listening Part 4 Practice Test: A Bottle Crosses the Atlantic

By Iris

A free Listening Part 4 practice test in the CELPIP format: 5 questions with the answer key. Play each recording once, as in the real test, answer, then check your answers at the bottom of the page. The transcript is under each recording.

Questions
5
Format
1 news report, questions after it
Question style
Multiple choice, 4 options
Play like the real test
Each recording plays once, then each question with 30 seconds to answer (Parts 4–6: one timer for the part). No pausing to replay, like test day.

  1. Wade Arsenault's original note was

  2. Fiona Campbell found the bottle while

  3. Lena Fraser suggests that the bottle's voyage was

  4. The envelope reached Arsenault thanks to

  5. We can infer that Arsenault

Transcript (read it after you answer)

NARRATOR: A retired fisher from Summerside, Prince Edward Island, has received an astonishing reply to a message he threw overboard nearly seven years ago. Wade Arsenault, sixty-eight, tossed a sealed bottle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the final day of lobster season, having scribbled a note challenging whoever found it to mail him a postcard of their local weather. He thought no more about it. Last month, however, an envelope arrived from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, where schoolteacher Fiona Campbell had spotted the bottle among tangled seaweed while exercising her terrier along the shoreline. Remarkably, the reply almost went astray. Arsenault sold the house listed on his note in 2021, but its current owners recognized the name and hand-delivered the envelope to his retirement apartment. Oceanographer Lena Fraser, of Halifax, cautions against reading anything miraculous into the journey. Currents routinely carry debris eastward across the Atlantic, she explains, and the genuinely surprising element isn't the crossing but that somebody bothered to respond. Campbell's pupils have since begun exchanging letters with a Summerside classroom, and Arsenault, delighted but unrepentant, insists his next bottle will request a cheque.

0 of 5 answered

Answer key

Show all 5 answers
  1. Wade Arsenault's original note was B. a playful dare.
  2. Fiona Campbell found the bottle while D. out with her pet.
  3. Lena Fraser suggests that the bottle's voyage was C. fairly ordinary.
  4. The envelope reached Arsenault thanks to C. the buyers of his home.
  5. We can infer that Arsenault A. had not expected an answer.

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