CELPIP Listening Practice Test 34

MAN: My key's snapped off in the lock. Half of it's still in there and the door won't lock.

WOMAN: Ouch. Have you got the other half?

MAN: In my pocket. I was going to borrow pliers from the super.

WOMAN: You'd be knocking a while — he goes home at four. And don't, anyway. Pliers push the broken piece deeper nine times out of ten.

MAN: I nearly forced the handle around.

WOMAN: Leave the handle alone too. You want a locksmith, and the landlord has to approve one before anybody touches that lock.

MAN: The locksmith emailed him the authorization form an hour ago. Nothing back.

WOMAN: And nothing will come back. Emails sit unopened in that office. His cell number's on the lease — use it.

MAN: Anything I should ask while I've got him?

WOMAN: Get the yes in writing — ask him to text it, so the locksmith has something to show. And the yes doesn't cover the money. Six o'clock is the line; after that it's the emergency rate.

MAN: So he approves it and I still pay more.

WOMAN: Only if you're still out here at six. I'm in twelve if he doesn't pick up.

MAN: He texted back. But the approval names their own locksmith, Delane's. Mine can be here by quarter to six for seventy dollars. Delane's can't get here till eight, and after six it's the emergency rate.

WOMAN: Which is what, closer to two hundred? Hang on — if it's their locksmith, doesn't the landlord pay?

MAN: It's billed to the building, he says. A hundred and eighty.

WOMAN: Billed to the building isn't paid by the building. A key you snapped is on the tenant. It'll come back to you on next month's rent.

MAN: So the expensive one is just expensive later.

WOMAN: And you'd be sitting out here till eight for the privilege.

MAN: Then mine comes at quarter to six.

WOMAN: You'll have to get the approval changed first. It's got Delane's name on it, and no locksmith drills a lock with somebody else's name on the paperwork.

MAN: One more call, then.

WOMAN: Two minutes of his time and it saves you a hundred and ten. Ask him to text the same thing with the right name on it. And be at the door when your guy shows up — they don't wait around.

MAN: All done. He drilled the old cylinder out and put a new one in. It locks. He gave me two keys. Turns out the landlord keeps a key to every lock in the building.

WOMAN: Mine's hanging on a board in his office.

MAN: So I hand him one of these, I suppose.

WOMAN: And be back down to one key? You saw where that got you. Get a third cut.

MAN: The hardware shop on the corner cuts keys.

WOMAN: Not this one. The new cylinder's restricted — the blanks only come from the locksmith.

MAN: He's still at the van, loading up.

WOMAN: Then catch him now and have it put on tonight's invoice. Bring him back out in the morning and you're paying a service-call fee for a five-dollar key.

MAN: And then straight down to the office.

WOMAN: The office shut at six. Take it down in the morning and put it in his hand — not the mailbox.

MAN: Fine by me, it's on my way out.

WOMAN: And don't keep both of yours in the apartment.

MAN: Ha — no. Thanks for earlier.

WOMAN: Glad I caught you in time.

WOMAN: Hi, I mailed a package to my sister in Halifax exactly a week ago, and she still hasn't received it. Here's the tracking number.

MAN: Let me check... it left our Kitchener facility Tuesday morning and reached the Mississauga sorting centre Wednesday. It was scanned in Wednesday afternoon, but there's been no movement since — about four days now.

WOMAN: Four days? Is that normal for a sorting facility?

MAN: Longer than I'd like. There was a long weekend, so volume was up about thirty percent, and packages can get mis-sorted during a rush like that. But four days with no scan at all is more than I'd expect.

WOMAN: So what are my options? I paid for tracked parcel service, not regular mail.

MAN: Right, and that matters. Because it's tracked, you can file a trace request today, which sends our team to physically search for it in Mississauga. That typically takes five to seven business days, and if they find it, it goes straight to your sister at no extra cost.

WOMAN: And if it's still missing after that?

MAN: Then you'd be eligible for a compensation claim instead. Compensation on tracked parcel is capped at a hundred dollars unless you bought extra insurance, so your declared value of eighty dollars would be fully covered. Claims usually process within ten business days.

WOMAN: I'd rather it just arrive — it's a birthday gift, and gift cards aren't the same.

MAN: I understand completely. Let's start that trace request now, and I'll give you a reference number to check on it or call back with.

WOMAN: That would be great. Glad you're actually looking into it instead of just telling me to wait.

MAN: Of course. I'll have that number ready in a minute — check back Wednesday if you haven't heard anything.

WOMAN: Maple Street Boarding, this is Dana — how can I help you today?

MAN: Hi Dana, it's Reuben Cole. I'm looking to book my dog Baxter in for eight nights next month, but he's on daily medication, so I wanted to check how you handle that before I confirm anything.

WOMAN: Sure, we board plenty of dogs on medication. What's he taking, and how is it given — pills, or something else?

MAN: He's on a heart medication, twice a day. It comes as tablets — actually, no, sorry, the vet switched him to a liquid compound a few months back because he kept spitting the pills out. So it's a syringe now, straight into his cheek.

WOMAN: Good to know — that's actually simpler for us in some ways. For anything given orally like that, we just need the medication in its original pharmacy bottle with his name and the dosage on the label, plus a written instruction sheet from your vet. If we don't have that sheet, our staff will only give doses that are already drawn up and measured for us; we won't calculate anything ourselves.

MAN: That's fine, the clinic already sends us pre-filled syringes for the week. Is there an extra charge for administering it?

WOMAN: There's a small daily fee, five dollars, but that covers up to two medications given at set times each day. If he needed a third one, or anything given more than twice daily, the fee would rise to eight dollars.

MAN: Just the one medication, twice a day, so five dollars works for us. Does it need to be kept cold? The pharmacy mentioned refrigeration.

WOMAN: It does need to stay cold, so we'd keep it in our staff fridge in the medical room, separate from the other dogs' medications, rather than in his kennel with his food and bowls.

MAN: One more thing — Baxter hasn't stayed with you before, but he actually had his annual vet exam about three weeks ago. Does that change anything?

WOMAN: It does — normally a first-time stay means a quick health check with our vet tech on arrival morning before we start any medication routine, but since his exam is recent, if your clinic faxes that record over beforehand, we can skip straight to check-in. I'd still like to set up a short meet-and-greet before drop-off, maybe next Thursday, so our medication team can practice the syringe with him once before his first night.

MAN: A two-day yard sale outside the Alvarez family's home in Ferris Corner, held to clear a garage before a move, ended with the family raising more money than the town's scholarship fund had collected in four previous years combined. Rosa Alvarez says she and her husband priced most items at a dollar or two, expecting only enough to cover moving costs. That expectation changed when a buyer, later identified only as a retired librarian from a neighbouring town, paid six hundred dollars for a crate of paperback novels the family had planned to leave at the curb for free. News of the purchase spread within an hour, and by Sunday a line of buyers stretched past the driveway. By closing time, the family had collected just over eleven thousand dollars, an amount Rosa says the couple decided to give away almost as soon as they finished counting it. The family approached the town's education committee the following week, offering the full sum toward a new scholarship for a graduating student headed to college. Committee chair Yusuf Nair welcomed the gift, though he noted the committee had turned down two similar offers from local businesses last year for carrying unreasonable conditions. Nair says the Alvarez gift came with only one request attached: that the scholarship carry the name of the family's late daughter. The first award will be announced at graduation next spring, a date the committee has not yet confirmed.

man1: Aria, the patient comments this month are scathing. More magazines and a second screen would help noticeably.

woman1: Theo, magazines are a surface fix. The deeper issue is our appointment system overbooking past two o'clock daily.

man2: That's where I land too. Although Theo, what patients keep flagging is being left in the dark, not just waiting longer.

woman1: Yusuf, communication matters, but if you fix scheduling, the communication problem partly resolves itself within weeks.

man1: Granted, although scheduling overhauls take months. Magazines and screens cost almost nothing and improve immediate experience.

man2: Theo's point holds, although distractions don't reduce anxiety the way knowing your wait time does.

woman1: That's why I'd push for posted real-time delays. Patients tolerate forty minutes if they know it's forty.

man1: A live screen is fine, on condition we have someone updating it accurately. Stale numbers are worse than no numbers.

man2: Aria's right. Inaccurate updates kill trust faster than the wait itself ever does.

woman1: Staffing is the catch. Front desk is already stretched thin during the afternoon overbook window.

man1: Could we automate the screen from the appointment software, provided IT confirms the integration is even possible this quarter?

man2: Automation removes the human bottleneck, although someone still needs to verify the system isn't quietly broken each morning.

woman1: Verification could fold into the front-desk opening checklist. It adds maybe ninety seconds to the routine.

man1: I'll grant that. The harder question is whether we ever fix the overbooking, or just dress up the symptom.

woman1: That's the real fight, Theo. Yusuf, would you raise the overbook pattern with the clinic manager directly?

man2: Sure. Aria, can you map a sample week of delay data so the conversation has teeth?

MAN: Good evening. Tonight we look at a classroom idea that keeps being used long after the evidence turned against it, the practice of teaching students according to their so-called learning style. A new survey from the Fairwood school district found that more than eight in ten teachers now build lessons around the belief that pupils learn best when material is shown, heard, or done, depending on the type of learner each child is thought to be. Researchers were not surprised by that number, because studies testing the approach directly have failed again and again to find any real benefit from it. Xenia Ruiz, a professor of educational psychology at Camden University, has spent several years reviewing that research. She does not dispute that students have genuine preferences about how they like to receive information. What the studies cannot confirm, she explains, is that building lessons around a preferred style actually raises test results. In controlled comparisons where the same lesson was taught two different ways, students performed about the same regardless of which style they had originally reported. For Ruiz, the gap between so many teachers using the method and so little supporting research is itself the real story. She adds that her concern is not with teachers who mention the term casually to pupils, but specifically with the money school districts keep spending on formal style inventories and related training sessions. Ruiz puts the district's spending on those inventories at about forty thousand dollars last year, roughly the cost of a part-time reading tutor. Declan Delaney, who teaches fifth grade at Willowbrook Elementary, reads the same numbers differently. He has heard the approach questioned throughout his entire career, yet in his classroom the label still gives children an easy way to describe how they concentrate and what makes them feel capable. He readily admits the underlying science does not hold up, and he is not asking anyone to keep sorting pupils into fixed categories. What he values is the conversation the label makes possible, not any claim about matching instruction to a type. He no longer sends style results home, after several parents asked that their child be taught one way only. District officials expect newer training programs to gradually replace today's workshops. Even so, most observers on both sides agree that the everyday wording of learning styles, unlike the funding behind it, is likely to remain part of how teachers and parents talk about children for a good while yet.