CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Bottled Water in Public Buildings

NARRATOR: Walk into almost any city hall, library or community centre in Canada, and you'll find a vending machine humming in a corner, stocked with bottled water. In a handful of municipalities, that machine may soon disappear. Several councils are debating whether to ban the sale of single-use plastic water bottles in public buildings, and the proposal has stirred up far more passion than one might expect from something so ordinary. Supporters call it overdue; critics call it symbolic.

NARRATOR: Among its most vocal supporters is Halifax councillor Teresa Bowman. Her argument begins with a simple observation: residents already pay for clean, safe tap water through their taxes, and then pay again, often hundreds of times more, for the same thing in a bottle. It strikes her as absurd that buildings funded by the public should profit from undermining the public water supply. Bowman also points to the waste. Despite decades of recycling campaigns, she notes, most plastic bottles still end up in landfills or, worse, in lakes and oceans. A ban, she contends, would show that governments are prepared to practise what they preach. For her, the issue is as much about principle as plastic. To ease the transition, her proposal includes modern refill stations, the kind that display how many bottles you've saved.

NARRATOR: Not everyone is persuaded. Graham Lee, who manages emergency planning for a regional health authority, worries that the measure, however well-intentioned, overlooks some uncomfortable realities. Many older public buildings, he points out, still have aging pipes, and some fountains have been shut off for years after testing revealed unacceptable levels of lead. Visitors to those buildings, often seniors or parents with small children, would simply have nothing to drink. Lee also notes that bottled water is essential during boil-water advisories and power outages, when community centres are frequently converted into emergency shelters. He doesn't oppose cutting back on plastic, he insists, but he'd rather councils fix the plumbing first and talk about bans afterwards.

NARRATOR: Bowman counters that the ban would apply only to sales, not to emergency supplies stored on site, and that losing vending revenue might finally push councils to replace those very pipes. It's a clever argument, though perhaps an optimistic one. Councils, after all, are notorious for postponing exactly that kind of unglamorous repair. What both sides seem to agree on is that a refill station is only as useful as the water flowing into it.