Adding a pause to audio track in Adobe Premier I'm working on my first video, which is about seven minutes long. One thing I need to fix is several breaks between paragraphs in the audio file which are too short.

For example, imagine a paragraph or sequence ending with the words, "we'll take a closer look at the polar bear."

There's a natural pause of two seconds before the next paragraph begins...

"This is the world of the polar bear."

How can I increase that two second pause to five seconds?
You can split audio tracks (and video tracks) by selecting them and pressing Ctrl + K. If your audio and video tracks are linked, holding "Alt" and selecting just the audio track will select only the audio track (and not the linked video track). After you have split the audio track between paragraphs, you can move the latter audio track out 3 seconds (or however long you want the pause) by dragging it along the timeline.

If you had any sort of "natural sound" in the audio track (static, hum from an air conditioner, etc.) it will be obvious that there is a 3-second break in-between the two audio segments. To fix this, use that "natural pause" of 2 seconds you mentioned, cut it to make it its own segment, and copy/paste it several times to fill the audio void, shrinking the last segment as necessary to make it fit perfectly.

Hope this helps!