CELPIP Listening Samples

Transcript

Man: You look pleased with yourself. Good weekend?

Woman: I finally did the cycling trip I've been talking about since March. Out along the coast road and back.

Man: The whole way? That must be seventy kilometres.

Woman: Sixty-four. It took me most of Saturday, and I was slower on the way back because the wind turned.

Man: I'd have given up at the halfway point.

Woman: I nearly did, honestly. There's a long climb about forty kilometres in and I stopped twice on it. But there's a bakery at the top of it, which helps.

Man: Now that sounds like a reason to cycle. Would you do it again?

Woman: Next month, if the weather holds. Although next time I'll start earlier — I got home in the dark and the last stretch has no lighting at all.

Transcript

Woman: I wanted to ask about the community garden plots. My neighbour said registration opens soon.

Man: It opens on the first of March, and the plots usually go within about two weeks.

Woman: How much does a plot cost?

Man: Forty dollars for the season for a standard plot, which is three metres by six. There's a larger size at sixty-five, but there are only eight of those and they tend to go to returning gardeners first.

Woman: Is the forty dollars for the whole year?

Man: For the growing season, so April through October. The fee includes water and the use of the shared tools in the shed. It doesn't include compost, though most people bring their own.

Woman: And is there anything I have to do besides pay?

Man: Every plot holder does four hours of shared maintenance over the season — paths, the shed, the common beds. You sign up for slots online, and if you miss them you're not offered a plot the following year.

Transcript

Transit officials confirmed this morning that the Riverside line will close for six weeks beginning the tenth of July. The closure will allow crews to replace track that has been in place since nineteen eighty-two and to rebuild two platforms at Wellington Station. A replacement bus service will run every eight minutes during peak hours and every fifteen minutes at other times, following the same route with two additional stops. The transit authority estimates that thirty-one thousand daily riders will be affected and has asked passengers to allow an extra twenty minutes for journeys through the corridor. Work is scheduled to finish before the start of the school year, and officials said the line would reopen on the twenty-first of August.

Transcript

Thank you for coming. I want to talk this evening about what we get wrong when we talk about remote work, and in particular about the word productivity. Most of the studies you will have read measure output per worker per hour, and on that measure remote work performs well, sometimes strikingly well. But output per hour is a narrow instrument. It captures the work that was already scheduled, and it is almost blind to the work that nobody scheduled — the question asked across a desk, the correction offered before a mistake is expensive, the junior colleague who learns by overhearing. Those exchanges are difficult to count, and what is difficult to count tends to be treated as though it were not there. My own view, after four years of this research, is that the productivity debate has been settled on the wrong terms. The interesting question is not whether people work harder at home. It is which kinds of knowledge move well through a screen and which do not. Routine knowledge travels almost perfectly. Judgement, the sort that is acquired by watching someone exercise it, travels very poorly indeed. That distinction, rather than any overall figure, is what organisations should be planning around.