IELTS Practice Test 1: Listening

Read at a natural pace. Pause for 20 seconds where marked.

Narrator: You will hear a woman telephoning a community centre about hiring a room. First, you have some time to look at Questions 1 to 10. [Pause 20 seconds.]

Tom: Good morning, Ashworth Community Centre, Tom speaking.

Priya: Oh, good morning. I'm hoping to hire a room for an event, and I wondered whether you had anything free in the spring.

Tom: We probably do. Let me take a few details. Can I start with your name?

Priya: Yes, it's Priya - and the surname is Bramley. B-R-A-M-L-E-Y.

Tom: Bramley, lovely. And what sort of event is it? A birthday, a wedding reception...?

Priya: No, nothing like that. It's a retirement party, actually - for my mother. She's finishing after thirty-one years at the same school.

Tom: How nice. And do you have a date in mind?

Priya: We were thinking of Saturday the seventh of March, but my brother can't travel that weekend, so we've moved it to the fourteenth.

Tom: The fourteenth of March. And roughly how many guests?

Priya: It's hard to say exactly. We invited about a hundred, but I'd be surprised if more than eighty-five actually came.

Tom: I'll put eighty-five down, and you can adjust it later. Now, for that number I'd normally suggest the Oak Room, but it's being redecorated in March, so the Willow Room would be the one - it's slightly smaller but it opens onto the garden.

Priya: The Willow Room sounds better anyway. What does it cost?

Tom: It's thirty-two pounds fifty an hour at weekends. Weekdays it's twenty-eight, but you said Saturday.

Priya: Thirty-two fifty. And is there anything to pay up front?

Tom: There's a deposit, yes. It used to be a hundred pounds but the committee raised it in January - it's a hundred and fifty now. You get it back a week after the event, assuming there's no damage.

Priya: That's fine. Does the room come with everything, or...?

Tom: Tables and chairs are included, and there's a small kitchen with a kettle and an urn. The one thing we don't provide is tablecloths - people either bring their own or hire them. Everything else you'll find in the cupboards.

Priya: Right, tablecloths. I'll make a note. What about parking? Some of my mother's colleagues are driving a long way.

Tom: There's a car park at the front. There are forty spaces, and the church next door usually lets our visitors use their overflow on a Saturday, so you shouldn't have trouble.

Priya: That's a relief. So what do I do next?

Tom: I'll email you the booking form today. Fill it in and send it back - and please do that before Friday, because we're taking spring bookings in the order they arrive and March is filling up.

Priya: Before Friday. I'll do it this evening. Thank you very much.

Tom: You're welcome. Goodbye.

[Pause 20 seconds. That is the end of Part 1.]

Narrator: You will hear a warden giving a talk to new volunteers at a nature reserve. First, you have some time to look at Questions 11 to 20. [Pause 30 seconds.]

Warden: Morning, everyone, and welcome to Fenwick. I'm Diane, I've been warden here for nine years, and I'm going to spend about ten minutes telling you what you've let yourselves in for.

First, a bit of history, because people always assume this was farmland - it looks like farmland from the road. It wasn't. All of this was a quarry until 1968. They took gravel out of here for forty years, and when the company left, the pits flooded, and what you see now is essentially an industrial accident that turned into one of the best wetland sites in the county. There is a farm on the far side, but that's not ours.

Now, if you'd asked me ten years ago what would change most, I'd have said visitor numbers - and they have gone up, from about nine thousand a year to nearly thirty thousand. But honestly, the thing that has transformed this place is the otters. We had none in 2014. We have at least three family groups now, and everything from the fish stocks to where we can put paths has had to be rethought around them. The reed beds, I'm glad to say, are doing better than ever.

So, practicalities. I know some reserves ask you to commit to a fixed day, and there's a training weekend in April that I'd encourage you to come to, but neither of those is compulsory. The one thing I do insist on - and I mean this - is that you sign in at the office every single time you arrive, and sign out when you leave. If there's a fire or someone goes into the water, that book is how we know who's on site.

Which brings me to safety. People worry about the marsh, and yes, you can get very wet, but the paths are well marked and nobody has ever been seriously lost here. Nesting birds we manage by closing areas off. The thing that genuinely keeps me awake is gates. We have cattle on three compartments, and a gate left open means livestock on the road within the hour. Please, close every gate behind you.

[Pause 20 seconds.]

Right, let me take you round the six areas you'll be working in, so you know what's where.

Kestrel Field is the big open area to your left as you came in. We cut it late every summer and it's now the best wildflower meadow on the reserve - about ninety species at the last count.

The Old Quarry is the deep water at the north end. There's no access to the water itself, but we've built a viewing tower on the rim - three storeys, and on a clear day you can see the whole reserve from the top.

Fenwick Marsh is the wettest ground we have, and you obviously can't walk on it, so there's a boardwalk right across it. It needs re-planking every few years, which is a job several of you will come to know well.

Alder Wood, behind the office, is where we keep the bat roost - it's an old pump house we've converted, and it's out of bounds between May and September.

The Long Bank is the raised path along the eastern edge. Halfway along it there's a bird hide, the timber one with the sliding shutters. That's the busiest spot on the reserve on a winter weekend.

And finally Mill Corner, down by the entrance, is where we take school groups. There's a pond there we dug specially for pond-dipping - it's shallow, it's safe, and it has more newts in it than the rest of the reserve put together.

The car park and the tool store are both by the office, but you'll find those soon enough.

[Pause 20 seconds. That is the end of Part 2.]

Narrator: You will hear two students, Leo and Anya, discussing a research project with their tutor. First, you have some time to look at Questions 21 to 30. [Pause 30 seconds.]

Tutor: Come in, both of you. So - urban bees. Leo, this was your idea originally, wasn't it?

Leo: It was. I know there was that big paper last year on pollinator decline, and I have read it, but honestly that wasn't where it started. I cycle past the same three streets every morning, and last summer one of them was suddenly full of bees and the other two weren't. I couldn't work out why, and it bothered me for about four months.

Tutor: That's a much better reason than the paper, for what it's worth. Anya, you look less enthusiastic.

Anya: No, I'm keen. It's just - I've been reading about identification, and there are around two hundred and seventy species of bee in this country, and a lot of them look almost identical in the field. I'm not worried about the walking or the hours. I'm worried we'll produce a dataset that's confidently wrong.

Tutor: That is exactly the right thing to worry about. What are you proposing to do about it?

Anya: Group them. Bumblebees to species where we're sure, everything else to genus, and be honest about it in the write-up.

Tutor: Good. Now, sample size. You've got twelve sites and you're proposing forty-eight surveys in total. I want to be clear about what that gets you. It is not enough for a journal article - a referee would want three years, not one summer. But for a third-year project it's more than adequate, and I'd rather you did twelve sites well than thirty badly.

Leo: That's reassuring, actually. We were worried it was too thin.

Tutor: It isn't. Now, your method. You had them netting and keeping specimens?

Anya: That was the original plan, but we've changed our minds. Partly ethics, partly time - and we'd need a licence for two of the sites. So we're photographing everything instead and identifying from the images afterwards.

Tutor: Sensible. You lose a little accuracy and gain a great deal of goodwill. And it means you can go back to the same flower head twice.

Leo: We did think about asking volunteers, but we decided consistency mattered more than numbers.

Tutor: Agreed. So how often will you visit each site?

Anya: Once a fortnight, from May to September. Same route, same time of day, same order.

Tutor: Good. And who's doing what?

Leo: I'm doing the fieldwork timetable and the site permissions. Anya's taking the photography.

Tutor: Right. Two warnings. First, the weather. Bee activity is enormously sensitive to temperature and wind, and if your May surveys happen to fall on cold days and your July ones on warm days, you will find a seasonal pattern that is really just the weather. Record conditions every single visit.

Anya: We'll add a column for it.

Tutor: Second - Leo, you mentioned the cemetery site. That's consecrated ground and it's managed by the diocese, not the council. You'll need written permission, and it takes about six weeks, so start now.

Leo: I'll write this week.

Tutor: Now, the first draft is due in November. I don't need polished prose, but I do need a timeline - a proper one, week by week, showing what you'll have done by when. Half the projects that fail, fail because nobody wrote one.

Anya: Understood.

Tutor: And before you start, read Hendry - chapter four, on sampling bias. It's twenty pages and it will save you a term of regret.

Leo: Chapter four. Thank you.

[Pause 20 seconds. That is the end of Part 3.]

Narrator: You will hear part of a lecture about the history of window glass. First, you have some time to look at Questions 31 to 40. [Pause 30 seconds.]

Lecturer: Today I want to talk about something you have all looked through this morning without once looking at it: window glass.

The Romans were the first people to put glass in windows on any scale, and it is worth being clear about why. It was not to let light in - they had shutters and they had oiled cloth for that. It was to keep out the cold while still admitting some light, and in a bath house, which is where most Roman window glass has been found, that mattered a great deal. What they produced was thick, uneven, and usually green, because of iron impurities in the sand. You could see light through it. You could not see a view through it. It was translucent rather than transparent, and nobody at the time seems to have minded.

After the western Empire broke up, glazing effectively vanished from ordinary buildings for something like eight hundred years. If you saw a glazed window in eleventh-century Europe, you were almost certainly standing in a church. Glass was expensive, fragile, and required a skill base that only religious institutions could sustain, and so the technology survived as stained glass while domestic windows went back to shutters.

Now, the method that dominated from the medieval period until the nineteenth century is called crown glass, and it is worth describing because it explains a great deal about old buildings. The glassmaker gathered a blob of molten glass, blew it into a sphere, opened the sphere at one end, and then spun it - fast, on the end of an iron rod. Centrifugal force flung the glass outwards until the sphere flattened into a disc, sometimes five feet across. The glass produced this way was beautifully smooth on both faces, because nothing had touched it, and it was therefore the best glass available.

But it had two problems. The centre of the disc, where the rod had been attached, stayed thick and lumpy. That piece was called the bullion, and it was cut out and sold cheaply to people who could not afford better - which is why the bullseye pane, today a mark of picturesque good taste, was originally the cheapest glass in the shop. And more importantly, a disc puts a hard limit on the size of any single pane you can cut from it. If you have ever wondered why Georgian windows are made of many small panes in a grid rather than one sheet, that is the reason. It was not a style. It was a constraint that people then made into a style.

The nineteenth century attacked the problem from two directions. Cylinder glass - blowing a long cylinder, cutting it lengthways and flattening it in a kiln - gave much larger sheets, and made the great glasshouses possible. But because the glass had to be laid on a surface to flatten it, one face was always slightly rough, and the view through it was faintly distorted. Plate glass solved that by casting the glass thick and then grinding and polishing both faces flat, which gave a perfect result and was ruinously expensive, because the polishing was done largely by hand and wasted most of the material.

And that is where things stood until 1959, when Pilkington in England commercialised the float process, which is how essentially all flat glass has been made ever since. The idea is simple enough to describe in a sentence and took seven years and a great deal of money to make work: you pour molten glass continuously onto a bath of molten tin. Glass floats on tin. Because the tin is perfectly level, the underside of the glass is perfectly flat, and because the top surface is left alone in a controlled atmosphere, it is perfectly flat too. No grinding, no polishing, no waste.

The consequence is the thing I want you to take away. Before 1959, a large sheet of flawless glass was a luxury. After it, it was a commodity - and within about fifteen years the entire visual character of city buildings had changed, because architects could suddenly afford to make walls out of it. The glass tower is not an aesthetic movement. It is a manufacturing process with a facade attached.

[That is the end of Part 4.]