CELPIP Listening Part 4 Practice Test: Fixing Things in Peterborough

NARRATOR: A monthly gathering in a Peterborough church basement is giving broken toasters, torn jackets and silent radios an unexpected second life. Organizers of the volunteer-run repair café say more than eleven hundred household items have crossed their folding tables since the project began three years ago, and roughly seven in ten have gone home working. The service is free, although visitors are invited to leave a donation and, more importantly, to stay and watch. Retired electrician Gerald Okafor launched the project after replacing a burnt-out switch on a neighbour's vacuum cleaner, a ten-minute job that had nearly sent the machine to the landfill. He insists the goal isn't really about saving money. What worries him, he says, is that many young people have never been shown how to open anything up. Manufacturers don't make it easier, he adds: more and more appliances are sealed shut, and those usually can't be accepted. Organizers now face a happier sort of problem. Lineups often stretch up the stairs, and volunteers have been forced to limit visitors to two items apiece. A second location is under consideration, if enough volunteers with repair skills can be found. Okafor, who turns seventy-six next month, claims he has no intention of slowing down, though he has reluctantly agreed to stop climbing ladders to fix the church's lights.