CELPIP Listening Part 4 Practice Test: A Piano Under the Floor

NARRATOR: A piano that spent more than a century hidden beneath a floor in Dawson City will be played in public this weekend for the first time in generations. Last spring, carpenter Lena Whitford was replacing rotten boards in a house from the gold rush era when she noticed something large and dark in the crawl space below. It turned out to be an upright piano, its keys yellowed and its wooden case badly cracked. Local historians believe an earlier owner left it there while the house was being enlarged, perhaps because it was simply too heavy to haul up the hill. Rather than throw it away, the homeowners contacted Marcel Dupuis, a retired piano technician in Whitehorse, who agreed to restore it without charging a cent. The work took nearly eight months. Dupuis replaced every string and most of the small hammers inside, but he deliberately kept the original keys, saying their worn surfaces tell the story of the people who once played them. The piano will now be loaned to the town's community hall, where a free concert is planned for Saturday evening. Organizers say donations collected at the door will go toward fixing the hall's leaking roof.