CELPIP Listening Part 4 Practice Test: Seventy Years Together

NARRATOR: A Kitchener couple marked a milestone few ever reach this weekend, celebrating seventy years of marriage at a party organized almost entirely by their neighbours. Walter and Irene Hoffmann, both ninety-one, wed in a modest church ceremony in 1956, a few months after meeting at an outdoor skating rink. The couple had planned nothing more elaborate than a quiet dinner at home, partly because their two children live overseas. That changed in August, when neighbour Danielle Okafor noticed the date circled on Irene's kitchen calendar while dropping off groceries. Okafor quietly recruited residents along the street, who contributed decorations, homemade dishes and, remarkably, a three-tier cake replicating the original, reconstructed from a faded black-and-white photograph. The celebration, held Saturday in a neighbour's backyard, attracted more than sixty guests, while the couple's son and daughter joined by video call from Germany and Australia. Asked for the secret to their enduring partnership, Walter joked that he had simply learned to say yes, dear, with conviction. Irene offered a different explanation, insisting that they had never once gone to bed angry, although she admitted that some disagreements had lasted well past midnight. Organizers say the street now intends to turn the occasion into an annual gathering.