CELPIP Listening Part 4 Practice Test: Thirty Years at the Crosswalk

NARRATOR: When Doreen Pelletier agreed to cover a neighbour's shift at a Kamloops crosswalk in the autumn of 1996, she assumed the arrangement would last a couple of weeks. This week, the seventy-one-year-old celebrated three decades in her bright orange vest outside an elementary school on the city's North Shore. Pupils marked the anniversary with a surprise assembly, presenting her with a quilt stitched from squares that each class had decorated. Pelletier estimates she has escorted children across the street roughly two hundred thousand times, in conditions ranging from sweltering September afternoons to bitter January mornings. Remarkably, she has missed only four days, all of them during one bad case of the flu. Several parents who now wait at her corner once crossed the street with her as children, and one, a teacher at the school, recalls being scolded for dashing across before the whistle. Principal Alan Brandt calls her a part of the neighbourhood, adding that she notices which youngsters arrive without mittens and quietly keeps a spare supply in her pockets. Asked about retirement, Pelletier laughed, insisting that she will hang up her stop sign only when her knees file a formal complaint.