CELPIP Listening Part 4 Practice Test: A Mural on a Grain Elevator

NARRATOR: An old grain elevator near Yorkton, Saskatchewan, has become an unlikely tourist attraction, thanks to twenty-three high school art students and roughly four hundred litres of paint. The abandoned building, empty for more than twenty years, now displays a huge mural of four generations of a Prairie farming family at harvest. The project began last autumn, when owner Walter Kowalchuk announced that he planned to demolish the aging building, and art teacher Renee Fontaine asked whether her students might borrow it first. Because safety rules kept teenagers off the high lifts, the students painted only the lower section themselves; the upper portion, based on their sketches, was completed by a retired sign painter. Residents chose the final design from three proposals in a community vote in February. Since the unveiling in June, travellers have been pulling off the highway in surprising numbers, and a nearby café reports that weekend business has nearly doubled. Kowalchuk, who once dismissed the idea as a waste of good paint, now says he is proud of the mural and has put off demolition for now, although he warns that the roof will eventually need expensive repairs. Fontaine, meanwhile, will not accept the praise. The credit, she says, belongs entirely to the teenagers who gave up their weekends.