CELPIP Speaking Samples

Sample answer — about 90 seconds

Honestly, I'd take it, and I'll tell you why. You've been saying for about two years now that there's nowhere left for you to go at the current place, and that hasn't changed — it's the same complaint every time we talk. A better salary is nice, but the thing I'd actually go for is the fact that it's a bigger team, so there are people there who can teach you something. What I would do is set a rule before you leave: one weekend home a month for the first six months, booked in advance so it actually happens. The people who struggle with a move are usually the ones who leave it vague and then look up in March and realise they haven't been back. Six months in, if you hate it, you'll have a better CV and you can come back. That's not a big risk.

Sample answer — about 60 seconds

Two summers ago I agreed to cover a colleague's presentation with about a day's notice. She'd been taken ill, and the client was flying in, so there wasn't really an option to postpone. The material was hers, on a product I'd never worked on, and I had maybe eight hours with it. What I did was stop trying to learn all of it and instead learn the five questions I thought they'd ask — price, timeline, who else uses it, what happens if it breaks, and how it fits what they already own. I wrote answers to those, out loud, in the car. The presentation itself was fine. They asked four of the five, and the fifth one I said I'd check and send on, which was the right answer anyway. I remember it because it changed how I prepare for everything now.

Sample answer — about 60 seconds

This is an outdoor market, and from the light it looks like early morning, because the shadows are long and stretching across the whole scene from the right. In the foreground on the left there's a stall under a green awning with vegetables laid out in shallow wooden boxes — tomatoes at the front, then leafy things behind. A woman in an apron is standing behind it, leaning forward and handing a paper bag to a customer. The customer has a small child with her; the child is holding onto the handle of a shopping trolley and looking off to the right, not at his mother. Behind them the aisle runs back through the middle of the picture, and there are maybe eight or nine other stalls along it, though they get hard to make out towards the back. On the right, just at the edge of the frame, a man is unloading crates from a van with the doors open.

Sample answer — about 60 seconds

I think the woman is going to finish the sale in the next few seconds, because she's already handing over the bag, so the customer will probably pay and move further down the aisle. The child is the interesting one — he's looking off to the right and not holding on properly, so I'd say he's about to let go of the trolley and go towards whatever he's spotted, and his mother is going to have to turn round and call him back. Further back, the man with the van is likely to be setting up rather than packing away, given how early it looks, so that stall will be open within about twenty minutes. And if it's a Saturday morning, the aisle that's fairly empty now will be crowded in an hour, which is probably why everyone in the picture looks so unhurried at the moment.

Sample answer — about 60 seconds on the second screen

I'd go with the training, and I know that's the less obvious one, so let me give you the case for it. The laptops are slow, nobody's arguing with that, but they're slow in a way that costs us a few minutes a day. The gap in what the team can actually do with the reporting tools costs us far more than that — last quarter we outsourced two pieces of analysis that we should have been able to do ourselves, and that was about four thousand dollars for work we'll need again every quarter. The training pays for itself inside two of those. The other thing is timing: the laptops will be replaced on the normal refresh cycle next year anyway, whether we spend this money or not, so buying them now really just moves that forward by a few months. I'd rather use money that we only get once on something the cycle won't give us for free.

Sample answer — about 60 seconds

Hey, I need to tell you something and I feel bad about it. Saturday — I'm not going to be able to help with the move after all. Work's asked me to come in for the deadline on the Kowalski project, and because I've already had two days off this month for the wedding, I'm really not in a position to say no to this one. I know that's exactly the wrong week to be telling you this. Here's what I can do, though. I'm free all day Sunday, so if there's anything that can wait — the garage, the bigger furniture — I'll come and do that, and I'll bring my brother's van so we can do it in one trip instead of three. I can also come over Friday evening and help you get the boxes packed and labelled so Saturday is just carrying. I'm sorry. I'd rather be helping you than sitting in the office.

Sample answer — about 90 seconds

I'm in favour of it, though not for the reason people usually give. The main argument I'd make is about what fares cost to collect. Once you've built the gates, the card readers, the inspection staff and the system that handles all the little transactions, a surprising share of the money comes back out again before it reaches the buses. In smaller cities the collection cost can eat a third of the revenue, and at that point you're running an expensive machine mostly to keep people out. On top of that, free transport changes who travels. The people who currently ration their trips are the ones on the lowest incomes, and those are exactly the trips — a job interview, a clinic appointment — that are worth the most to everyone. Admittedly, "free" is never really free: somebody pays through taxes, and if the service gets worse because there's no fare income, you've made things worse for the people who depend on it most. So my position is free fares, but only where the funding is guaranteed first. Do that, and it's one of the better things a city can buy.

Sample answer — about 60 seconds

So it's an ordinary living room — sofa against the far wall, a rug, a television on a low unit, a window with the curtains half open. Completely normal, except that lying along the sofa, and sticking out well past both ends of it, is a canoe. A full-size one, wooden, the kind you'd see on a lake, maybe four metres long. It's resting on the cushions with the nose pointing towards the window and the back end out over the arm of the sofa, and it's actually too long for the room, because the tip is nearly touching the far wall. There's a paddle leaning against the television unit as well, so whoever brought it in brought everything. My guess is that somebody's just bought it and the garage is full, or they're storing it over the winter and this was the only space long enough. Either way, nobody's sitting on that sofa tonight.