CELPIP Listening Part 4 Practice Test: A Classroom Birthday

NARRATOR: A tortoise named Gus has reached a milestone few classroom pets ever see. The reptile, who lives in a Grade 4 classroom in Steinbach, Manitoba, turned fifty this week, and students celebrated with a lettuce cake and a handmade banner. Gus belongs to teacher Marlene Friesen, who inherited him from her father in 1998. Her father had bought the tortoise as a tiny hatchling from a travelling pet dealer decades earlier. Friesen originally intended to keep Gus at home, but her own children quickly lost interest, so she began bringing him to school. That arrangement has now lasted twenty-seven years, and several former students have since watched their own sons and daughters meet him. During the school year, Gus roams a large enclosure at the back of the room, and students take turns weighing him every Monday and recording the results on a chart. Friesen says the routine teaches responsibility and patience, two qualities she believes are difficult to learn from a screen. Summers are spent in her backyard garden, where Gus has developed a reputation for flattening her strawberry plants. Friesen plans to retire in three years, and parents frequently ask what will become of him. Her answer, she says, is simple: he is retiring too.