What is Mr. Barrera's talk mostly about?
Basic Understanding of Spoken English · TELPAS Grades 4–5 listening. The correct answer, and the reasoning behind it.
Reporting category 2: understand the main points and important details of spoken stories and informational passages, about everyday life and school subjects.
Listen to the teacher talk about honeybees. Then answer the questions.
How Bees Make Honey
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Mr. Barrera: Yesterday, some of you asked me where honey comes from. The answer is a busy team of honeybees, and making honey takes a lot of work.
Mr. Barrera: First, worker bees fly from flower to flower and sip a sweet liquid called nectar. They store it in a special part of their body called a honey stomach. When a bee's honey stomach is full, it flies back to the hive.
Mr. Barrera: Inside the hive, the bee passes the nectar to other bees. They put it into tiny wax cells, the little six-sided rooms of the honeycomb. At first, the nectar is thin and watery. So the bees fan their wings over it, again and again, to dry it out. Slowly, the nectar turns thick and sticky. Now it is honey.
Mr. Barrera: Last, the bees cover each cell with a lid of wax to keep the honey fresh. They will eat it in the winter, when there are no flowers.
Mr. Barrera: Here is a surprising fact. In its whole life, one honeybee makes only about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. So the next time you eat honey, think about how many bees it took!
The question
Choose the best answer.
What is Mr. Barrera's talk mostly about?
- Why honeybees do not like cold weather
- The steps honeybees follow to make honeyCorrect answer
- How people take honey out of a hive
- Which flowers have the most nectar
Why “The steps honeybees follow to make honey” is correct
This asks for the main idea of a short classroom talk. Mr. Barrera moves through the process in order, using signal words such as "first" and "last," from sipping nectar to sealing the honey in wax. Noticing those order words helps a listener see that the whole talk is about the steps.
Why the other answers are wrong
- Why honeybees do not like cold weather — Winter is mentioned once, as the time bees eat the honey; it is not the topic of the talk.
- How people take honey out of a hive — The talk is about what bees do, not about people collecting honey.
- Which flowers have the most nectar — Bees visit flowers for nectar, but the talk never compares flowers.
Practice more of this
More listening practice for Grades 4–5, or see the TELPAS practice test for 4th and 5th grade.
This is an independent study resource. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Texas Education Agency or the official TELPAS program. All questions here are original practice material written to match the published test design.