Audioscripts IELTS Practice 11 Listening Test 01

Part 1

You will hear a telephone conversation between an administrator at a community centre and a man who wants to book a room for an event. First, you have some time to look at questions 1 to 5.

[Pause]

Now listen carefully and answer questions 1 to 5.

Administrator: Good afternoon.

Man: Oh, hi. I wanted to ask about renting a space in the community centre for the afternoon of December the 10th.

Administrator: Let me check the diary. Yes, we have both halls free that afternoon. There's our Assembly Hall. That's got capacity for 300 people. Or there's the Wilson Suite.

Man: Sorry?

Administrator: The Wilson Suite. W-I-L-S-O-N. That's got room for up to 80.

Man: Well, we're organising a party to celebrate a retirement. And we're expecting around 120 guests. So... I think we'll need the Assembly Hall. How much is the fee?

Administrator: Let's see. You wanted it for the afternoon of December 10th?

Man: Yes, that's a Sunday.

Administrator: So from 1pm to 5pm, that'd be £140. That's the weekend rate. It's £90 on weekdays.

Man: That's reasonable.

Administrator: And I must inform you there's also a security bond of £300, which is refundable of course, provided there's no breakage. But we do require that this is paid by cheque. We don't accept transfers for that. You can settle the hire cost however you prefer though. Cash, card, or online.

Man: Oh, well I guess that's fine. So... Does the price cover use of the sound system and projector and so on?

Administrator: Oh, yes.

Man: And what about Wi-Fi?

Administrator: Yeah, that's all included. The only thing that isn't included is... You said you were hosting a party?

Man: Yeah.

Administrator: Well, you'll have to pay extra for the cleaners if you don't want to do it yourself. It's £40. They do a thorough job, floors and windows and so on.

Man: OK. Well, I suppose that's worth it. We can split the cost among the organisers.

Administrator: Right. So I'll put that down. Now, there are just one or two points you need to consider before the day. For example, you'll have to arrange getting insurance if you're planning to serve any alcohol during the event.

Man: Oh, is that necessary?

Administrator: It's mandatory policy. I'll email you the forms later on. And about two or three days before your booking, you'll need to phone the manager, that's Mrs Green, to confirm the access times. She'll coordinate that with you.

Man: And do I send her the deposit as well?

Administrator: No, you handle that directly with the office.

Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions 6 to 10.

[Pause]

Now listen and answer questions 6 to 10.

Man: Now is there anything else I need to know about the rules during the party?

Administrator: Well as you'll know of course the premises are pet-free throughout.

Man: Of course.

Administrator: Now are you hiring a DJ?

Man: Yes.

Administrator: Well they'll have a fair bit of kit so rather than using the main entrance they should park their car in the side alley and use the service door there. You can unlock that with a key, but remember to shut it when they leave.

Man: OK.

Administrator: And speaking of DJs, I'm sure it goes without saying, but you must ensure that no-one tampers with the thermostat on the wall. That's a unit that controls the heating automatically. It's a complex system.

Man: Sure. Anyway, we want people to be comfortable, so we don't want it too hot. Oh, that reminds me. We'll be showing a video. Are there any screens available?

Administrator: Yep, just ask the manager. She'll set those up for you. Right, now, when the party is finished, we do request that the rooms are left in a tidy state. So there's a supply closet and you'll be given the number you need to unlock that. It's got all the necessary items, cloths and sprays and so on.

Man: Right. So what's required after the guests have departed? Vacuum the carpets, I imagine?

Administrator: Well, actually, the tables have to be wiped, not just cleared. Then you'll be given blue recycling bins, so all the glass bottles must be separated out and placed in the yard.

Man: Of course. We'll ensure everything's sorted properly. Oh, and I meant to check. I assume we can put up banners in the hall?

Administrator: Yes, but you must remove them afterwards.

Man: Sure. And the chairs should be stacked up securely in the corner of the room. I'll make sure I've got a couple of friends to assist me.

That is the end of Part 1. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

Part 2

You will hear a ranger talking to a group of visitors at a national park.

First, you have some time to look at questions 11 to 14.

[Pause]

Now listen carefully and answer questions 11 to 14.

Ranger: Welcome to the Green Valley National Park. This protected area gives you the experience of wildlife and woodland life in the heart of the forest. So you'll see a typical ecosystem of this region, and like me, all the rangers have received training in conservation.

I must give you some warnings and safety tips before we start our hike. As it's a wild reserve, please don't feed or approach the animals. We have a lot here, and many of them are species that are now quite shy. And do stay on the marked trails. You must keep away from the cliffs. Some of them have unstable edges which can be pretty hazardous, so please don't climb them. We don't want any injuries, do we?

The terrain is very rocky, and you might trip if you're wearing flip-flops, so I'm glad to see you're all wearing boots. We always recommend people to do that as it provides ankle support. Now visitors of all fitness levels are very welcome here, and usually even elderly visitors enjoy the birds and flowers, so do bring your grandparents along next time you come. I don't think any of you have brought drones with you, but in case you have, I'm afraid they'll have to stay in your vehicle unless you have a permit. I'm sure you'll appreciate that they could cause a lot of disturbance in a sanctuary.

Before you hear the rest of the talk, you have some time to look at questions 15 to 20.

[Pause]

Now listen and answer questions 15 to 20.

Ranger: Now let me give you some idea of the geography of the park. The building where you registered is the visitor centre immediately to your left. And we're now at the start of the main track to the forest. And of course, the bus stop is on your right.

The totem pole you can see in the bus stop area in the corner beside the main track is a cultural symbol for marking the territory. But our totem pole is a modern replica. It's wider than a tree trunk, so you can see it from the road.

If you look ahead of you, you'll see a pond. It's opposite the visitor centre, on the right-hand side of the main track, just over there. The pond is surrounded by reeds which are too dense for ducks to nest in, but it's quite deep so you can't wade in it.

Now, can you see the gate crossing the stream further up the main track? If you want to go to the gift shop, go towards the gate and turn left just before it. Walk along the path and the gift shop is on the first curve you come to. The building was originally the ranger station and it's well over fifty years old.

As you may know, we run nature workshops here, where you can learn outdoor skills like tracking and shelter building. You can see demonstrations of the skills and talk to someone about the sessions in the Log Cabin. If you take the side trail to the left, here, just by the visitor centre, you'll come to the Log Cabin, just where the trail first turns.

Now, I mustn't forget to tell you about camping, as I can see some of you have brought your tents with you. You can camp in the meadow, though do take your rubbish with you, of course. Or if you'd prefer a sheltered camping area, there's one near the waterfall. Just after you cross the gate, there's a sheltered camping spot on the left.

And the last thing to mention is the Observation Tower itself. From here you can cross the gate, then walk along the hiking path through the meadow to the right of the waterfall. That goes to the tower, and it'll give you a panoramic view of the valley. It's certainly worth a climb, but as it's a safety structure, I'm afraid you can't stay overnight.

Right. Well, if you're all set, we'll head off on our walk through the park.

That is the end of Part 2. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

Part 3

You will hear two sociology students called Anna and Tom discussing a research proposal they have to submit.

First, you have some time to look at questions 21 to 27.

[Pause]

Now listen carefully and answer questions 21 to 27.

Anna: OK, Tom. So I finally managed to scan the paper you suggested, the one about the study on age and technology. About the survey of office workers done by Sarah Johnson and her group.

Tom: Yeah, I was intrigued that the researchers were actually a blend of sociologists and computer scientists. That's a rare collaboration.

Anna: Yeah, I got a little puzzled at first about which employees the study was targeting. They weren't actually working in IT. They were working in what's known as the service sector. That's retail, hospitality, administration and...

Tom: And finance.

Anna: Yes, but they were all using digital platforms as part of their jobs.

Tom: That's accurate. So, as I grasped it, Johnson and co. started from the premise that older workers are slower in adopting new software systems at work. And also, that on average, the older staff who do engage with these systems report more stress than the younger ones. No one really understands why this is the reality.

Anna: Yeah, but what the researchers aimed to discover was fundamentally what they could do about the relatively high level of the older workers' anxiety. But in order to design a training program, they needed to uncover more about the root of the issue.

Tom: Right. Now, let's see if I can recall. It was that in the training session, the older employees believed the younger employees all took it for granted that older people weren't any good at tech. Was that it? And they assumed that the managers expected them to make mistakes in their tasks.

Anna: That's what the older staff perceived, and that made them hesitant. So they did make mistakes. But actually, they were mistaken. No one was forming any judgements about the older staff at all. Anyway, what Johnson's team did was quite straightforward, getting the staff to complete a questionnaire before they started the training module.

Tom: What did they label it? Skills affirmation. They had to fill out a form highlighting skills that were valuable to them, not specifically to do with the software they were learning, but more broad skills like communication or leadership that they excelled in.

Anna: Right. So the theory behind doing the questionnaire is that this gets the employees feeling in a confident mood. And validating these strengths on paper can calm them and help them bypass the emotional barriers that cause poor adoption, yeah. But what the researchers in the study hadn't predicted was that this single task boosted the older workers' efficiency scores from the average to the high bracket. A massive improvement.

Tom: Shame it wasn't to the top tier. But still.

Anna: No, but it does indicate that the older staff were significantly underachieving previously in comparison with the younger ones. Yes. Mind you, Johnson's paper omitted a lot of variables. Like, did the staff complete the form just once or regularly? And had they been informed why they were filling out the form? That might have skewed the outcome.

Tom: You mean, if they suspect the researchers hoped it might help them to learn? Then they just attempt to meet that prediction?

Anna: Precisely.

Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions 28 to 30.

[Pause]

Now listen and answer questions 28 to 30.

Tom: So anyway, I thought for our proposal we could replicate a similar experiment, but examine whether it really was the questionnaire activity that caused that effect.

Anna: OK. So... We could ask them to complete a reading task about something totally unrelated, something more recreational, like a fiction story.

Tom: Possibly. Or we could have half the participants doing a reading task and half doing something different, like a listening exercise. Or even half do the same questionnaire as in the initial study and half do a neutral reading task. Then we'd determine if it truly is the content that made the impact or something else.

Anna: That's the plan. Excellent. So, at our tutorial with the professor on Friday, we can announce we've finalised our proposal. We should have our hypothesis drafted by then.

Tom: I guess we need to consult the full report. The paper's just an abstract. And there was another paper I skimmed by Davis. It was about his investigation on how introverts and extroverts perform in open-plan offices, compared with private cubicles and at home.

Anna: Let me predict, the extroverts were better at collaboration.

Tom: That's what I assumed. But surprisingly, the extroverts and the introverts achieved the same productivity, whether they were working in open spaces or in isolation. But I suppose it's not that applicable to us.

Anna: What concerns me anyway is how we're going to recruit enough volunteers in the timeframe.

Tom: We'll be fine now we have a clear direction, though I'm not sure how we measure whether the participants in our trial actually gain any confidence or not.

Anna: No, we might need some guidance on that. The priority is to ensure we have the correct demographic mix, not too young or too old. That shouldn't be hard.

Tom: Right. What do we need to action next? We could have a browse of the directory for the local businesses. Or maybe we should just schedule a meeting to interview one of the HR managers.

Anna: That'd be preferable.

Tom: Perfect. And we could even ask to shadow one of the training days.

Anna: Maybe later. For now, let's just proceed with arranging the meeting.

Tom: Right. Well, I reckon that's all for today.

That is the end of Part 3. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

Part 4

You will hear part of a student presentation about the diversity of languages spoken in the world's cities.

First, you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40.

[Pause]

Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40.

Student: I've been looking at urban linguistics, that's the diversity of languages that are spoken in the world's metropolitan areas. About 30 years ago, sociolinguists developed the idea of what they called linguistic hotspots. These are the cities which have the greatest mixture of mother tongues. A prime example of this is New York. These hotspots are significant because they allow us to locate key areas for focusing efforts on translation services.

Linguists can identify hotspots in rural areas fairly easily, but until recently, very little was known about language distribution and diversity in the mega-cities, and no one even knew if hotspots existed in the same way there. Then a German linguist called Peter Meyer did some research in 2010 on data on city demographics that he got from the census bureau. Meyer located six hotspots for minority languages, like Gujarati, and looked at what they had in common.

The main thing he'd expected to find was that they had very high levels of immigration, but to his surprise, that was only true for five of the hotspots. The remaining hotspot was quite stable in that regard. But what he did find was that in all cases, the rents in the district were relatively low, even when it was expensive in neighbouring suburbs. So this seemed to be a factor in supporting a diverse range of these community languages. However, this wasn't enough on its own, because he also found that the area needed to have enough public transport links in it. So these two factors seemed necessary to support the high social interaction of these language groups.

A couple of years later, in 2012, a researcher called Sarah Jenkins, who was working in London, also started looking for urban hotspots, but not for spoken languages. What she was interested in was written scripts, things like shop signs. And she found four places in the capital which were hotspots, and what these had in common was that these hotspots were all located at junctions between major roads. And this seems to be the sort of place that has lots of the foot traffic that some of these businesses rely on.

So now people who want to protect the languages that are disappearing need to get as much information as possible. For example, there's an international project called the Atlas of Urban Tongues. They've been surveying cities all over the world, including the tropics. One thing they found there which amazed other researchers was that there were large numbers of dialects which survive below the surface, sometimes spoken only by a group of up to 50 people. Some of these dialects had never been recorded before. They've even found varieties of Creole surviving in these conditions. And other scientists working on the same project, but researching very different communities in the city centre, have found large numbers of speakers congregating around markets, attracted to them by the trade and goods there.

However, linguists still don't know how serious the threat to their survival is for each individual dialect. So a body called the Global Language Assessment is now creating a list of endangered languages in cities. So they consider things like the age of the speakers, how many members of one generation there are in a particular family, and then they look at their usage in educational terms, although this is quite difficult when you're looking at speech because it's so informal, and then thirdly they calculate the speed at which the loss of the language is happening. So far only 2,000 languages have been assessed, but they want to increase this figure to 5,000. For each one they assess, they use the data they collect on that language to produce a chart showing its vitality. Ultimately, they will be able to use these to figure out not only where most languages are spoken, but also where they are most vulnerable.

So, finally, what can be done to retain the diversity of languages in the world's cities? Firstly, we need to set up more centres in our neighbourhoods, places where minority languages are taught. We have some, but not enough. In addition, to preserve languages such as Welsh, which exist out in the wider world but have their cultural roots on the British coast, we need to create opportunities for broadcasting, so they can be heard from one home to another easily. As well as this, action needs to be taken to increase the levels of funding grants to support the publishing of local literature. And finally, there's the problem of standardisation. This refers to the dominance of major languages by state schools. They are taught in the classroom, but minor tongues are often ignored or banned. If these public schools used a curriculum which was more inclusive so that not only the language wanted for exams was taught, this problem could be overcome.

That is the end of Part 4. You now have half a minute to check your answers.