CELPIP Listening, Part 6 of 6

Listening to Viewpoints

Listen to a report that presents several viewpoints on an issue, then complete 6 statements.

Questions: 6
About: 8 min

Part 6Instructions

You will hear a news report on a proposal concerning voting in municipal elections.

The clip plays once and you cannot pause or replay it.
When it ends, all 6 questions appear together. You have 4 minutes and 20 seconds to answer from the drop-down menus.
When you finish, you get your score, the answers with explanations, and the transcript.

The audio starts as soon as you press start. Use headphones if you can.

You got 0 of 6 right

Each question below shows the answer and the line in the audio that gives it. You can now replay every clip and read the transcript.

See my total score

Recording

You will hear a news report on a proposal concerning voting in municipal elections.

Transcript

Reporter: Councillor Vivian Ostrowski spent the spring knocking on doors in her ward, and the proposal now in front of a Wexbridge subcommittee came out of it.

Turnout in the last municipal election was the lowest on record here, just under three in ten registered voters.

The subcommittee reports back next month and has settled nothing so far.

Under the proposal, every registered voter would sign in at a polling station on municipal election day, and anyone missing from that record would be mailed a small administrative penalty some weeks later.

The recipient could answer it by proving attendance, giving a reason, or simply paying.

Illness, absence from the city and a religious objection are listed as reasons, and the ballot may be handed in blank.

Ostrowski says the penalty is there to make showing up ordinary on election day, not to raise money.

She raised Australia herself, where the requirement has been law for roughly a century.

Notices went out there in the hundreds of thousands after the last national election, and a court fined only a handful of people.

That is the outcome she wants, although she accepts it makes the word compulsory a poor description of her proposal.

Desmond Kilbride, a political scientist who studies voter participation, does not accept the premise.

Low turnout, in his reading of the research, is not in itself a problem the city needs to correct, and staying home is a legitimate message.

He points to studies in which voters pushed to the polls by a requirement marked ballots that fit their stated preferences poorly, and to Australia's spoiled ballots, climbing for decades.

Some members of the subcommittee ask what the notices would cost to print and process, and whether the penalties would ever be collected.

Others are thinking about how a resident feels on opening one.

Poll clerks who have worked municipal elections for years mention something simpler, that for much of election day nobody comes in.

Residents who wrote to the subcommittee mostly wrote about parking and library hours.

Lorraine Dufresne, the elections coordinator in the city clerk's office, was asked what her staff would have to do.

A substantial part of the voters list turns over every year as people move, die or register, and some addresses on file match nobody.

Voters without a fixed address rely on a letter from a shelter, and those without identification need someone to vouch for them.

Asked whether the proposal is a good idea, Dufresne said that question belongs to the subcommittee.

What she can say is that her office cannot produce a clean list of who did not vote, and the notices would go out against the list she has.

Questions 1 to 6

1. The proposal described here now sits with

a researcher hired to study turnout.
a subcommittee still short of a decision.
the clerk's office that keeps the voters list.
the council members who will vote next month.

2. Ostrowski's Australian example suggests she expects

the city to collect most of the fines.
notices to reach just a handful of homes.
few residents to be punished in the end.
courts here to hear the same cases.

3. Kilbride differs from Ostrowski because he believes

a low turnout is not a fault in itself.
the notices would cost more than they collect.
the rule works better where it is enforced.
the city should follow Australia's lead.

4. In the studies Kilbride cites, reluctant voters

marked ballots at odds with their views.
left the ballot blank instead of choosing.
were fined more often than the rest.
spoiled their ballots on purpose.

5. Ostrowski and Dufresne would agree that

the plan's merits are for others to settle.
some notices would land on people who voted.
the list should be rebuilt before any vote.
a fine makes turning out feel ordinary.

6. Dufresne's last word is that the notices would

wait until the list has been rebuilt.
be checked by the subcommittee first.
rest on a list she knows is flawed.
reach only those the courts had fined.

How CELPIP Listening Part 6 works

You hear the longest clip of the test, a report of about 3 minutes in which one speaker describes a community issue and relays the views of several named people. 6 incomplete statements follow, each finished from a drop-down menu. Most of them ask what a named person believes, or where two people agree or differ.

Write each name with a short note on their position. There are usually three or four voices.
Separate what a person wants from what they admit. Questions often turn on a concession.
Options are long and close in meaning. Rule out the ones that give a view to the wrong person first.