CELPIP Listening Part 4 Practice Test: A Lighthouse Brought Back to Life

NARRATOR: After more than a decade of neglect, the lighthouse at Cape Corbin on Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore is gleaming again, thanks to a group of volunteers who refused to let it crumble. Shut down in 2009, when automated navigation beacons made its keeper redundant, the wooden tower decayed badly, as rotting shingles and broken windows left it exposed to Atlantic storms. The federal government offered the structure to any community willing to maintain it, and a local heritage society, made up largely of retired fishermen and their families, eagerly accepted. Over four summers, roughly sixty volunteers scraped, patched and repainted the tower, salvaging original timber wherever possible. Funding came primarily from a community cookbook, which unexpectedly sold more than eight thousand copies, supplemented by a modest provincial grant. Society president Marion Doucette admits the project nearly collapsed in its second year, when engineers discovered that the foundation required urgent reinforcement. The lighthouse reopens to visitors on Saturday, though its lamp will now be purely decorative. Doucette concedes that the real challenge begins now: the society must attract enough tourists to cover ongoing maintenance, estimated at twenty thousand dollars a year.