IELTS Listening practice test

Clerk: Good morning, Gullhaven Cycle Hire, Owen speaking. How can I help?

Nadia: Oh, hello. I'd like to book some bikes for a group, please. It's for a day out with some people from work.

Clerk: Of course. Let me just open a booking form. Can I take your name first?

Nadia: Yes, it's Nadia Ferriby.

Clerk: Could you spell the surname for me?

Nadia: Sure. It's F, E, double R, I, B, Y. People often write it with an A in the middle, or with E, B, Y at the end, but it's definitely I, B, Y.

Clerk: F, E, double R, I, B, Y. Got it. And how many bikes will you need?

Nadia: Well, when I first looked at your website there were going to be six of us, but one of my colleagues has just told me she's away that weekend. So it'll be five bikes.

Clerk: Five, lovely. Five's actually a useful number, but I'll come back to that. Which day were you thinking of?

Nadia: We were hoping for Saturday the fourteenth.

Clerk: Let me check. Ah, I'm sorry, Saturday the fourteenth is fully booked. There's a charity ride along the coast that day and they've taken nearly all our bikes. What about the following day, Sunday the fifteenth?

Nadia: Hmm. The other option would be the Saturday after, the twenty-first, but a few people are away then. I suppose Sunday would work. Let's go for Sunday the fifteenth.

Clerk: Sunday the fifteenth it is. Now, what kind of bikes would you like? We have mountain bikes, hybrids and electric bikes.

Nadia: Well, we're planning to do the coastal path to the lighthouse. Is that very hilly?

Clerk: There are one or two steep bits near the end, but it's mostly flat and the surface is good. You certainly don't need mountain bikes for it.

Nadia: What about electric ones? A couple of people in the group haven't cycled for years.

Clerk: They're very popular, but they're thirty-five pounds a day, and honestly, on that route most people manage fine on a hybrid.

Nadia: Then I think hybrids would be best. How much are they?

Clerk: Hybrids are normally twenty-two pounds a day. But this is why I said five was a useful number. For groups of five or more, the price drops to eighteen pounds per bike.

Nadia: Oh, that's good news. And does that include helmets?

Clerk: Yes, helmets are included, and so are locks. The only thing that costs extra is panniers, the bags that fit on the back of the bike. They're three pounds each for the day.

Nadia: I think we'll just bring rucksacks. What time do you open on a Sunday?

Clerk: We open at nine on Sundays.

Nadia: Could we collect the bikes at half past nine?

Clerk: You could, but on Sunday mornings our mechanic does his safety checks first, and with a group booking that can take a while. Quarter to ten would be safer.

Nadia: That's fine. Quarter to ten, then. Do we come to your shop on Mill Lane?

Clerk: No, the shop's quite small, so for groups we bring the bikes down to our kiosk at the harbour car park. If anyone's coming by train, the station's only a ten-minute walk from the harbour.

Nadia: Perfect. Is there a deposit?

Clerk: Yes, it's fifteen pounds per bike, so for five bikes that's seventy-five pounds altogether. If there had still been six of you, it would have been ninety. You get it all back when the bikes are returned.

Nadia: OK. Shall I pay that now?

Clerk: You can pay it on the day. I'll just need a contact number in case anything changes.

Nadia: Of course. It's oh seven seven oh nine, four three two, six one eight.

Clerk: Oh seven seven oh nine, four two three...

Nadia: No, sorry, four three two. Then six one eight.

Clerk: Four three two, six one eight. Thanks. I'll send you a confirmation by text this afternoon.

Nadia: Great. Thanks very much for your help.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Brackenmoor Wetland Centre. My name's Grace Ellery and I'm the volunteer manager here. Thank you all for giving up your Saturday morning to come to this induction. First, a little history. The centre opened eighteen months later than planned. A lot of people assume the problem was money, but in fact the grants were all in place before building started. The winter that year was very wet, which slowed things down a little, but the builders coped with that. What really stopped the work was a pair of marsh harriers, a protected species, which decided to nest in the reeds right next to the building site. By law, we couldn't make any noise near them until the young birds had left, so everything stopped for a whole season. Since we opened, visitor numbers have been far higher than we expected. We'd planned mainly for keen birdwatchers, and they do come, especially in winter, and we see plenty of families at weekends. But the largest single group by far has been school parties, so you'll be seeing a lot of children during the week. Now, a practical point. You'll all be given a green fleece with the centre's logo on it, but it's really only needed if you're working outside in cold weather. And you don't need walking boots, as all the main paths are boarded. The one thing you must wear at all times, inside and out, is your name badge. Visitors need to know who to ask, and our insurance requires it. There's also something you might be asked about. We'd hoped to start guided boat trips on the lagoon this spring, but the new jetty won't be finished until the autumn, so please don't promise those to anyone yet. The children's nature trail has been running since we opened. What is new is our programme of bat walks on Friday evenings, and they're already very popular. Right, let me explain what volunteers do in each area of the site. We're in the Visitor Hall now. You might think the main job here would be selling memberships, but that's done by paid staff at the front desk. Volunteers in the hall mainly help visitors to use the telescopes and the live camera screens. Next, the Reed Hide, the wooden shelter at the end of the north path. People often expect volunteers to be counting the birds in there, but the official counts are done by our ecologists. In the hide, your job is to keep a record of how many visitors come in each hour, using the counter on the wall. Then there's Willow Meadow, where the school groups have their activities. A lot of litter-picking needs doing there after lunch, but our grounds team handles that. Volunteers in the meadow lead the minibeast hunts, helping children find and identify insects in the long grass. The Pond Zone is next to the meadow. Volunteers used to run pond-dipping there, but since last year that's been led by our education officers, who are trained teachers. What we need volunteers for in the Pond Zone is checking the water quality each morning, which just means taking a sample and recording the temperature on a sheet. And finally, the Workshop, behind the car park. Some of our volunteers repair the boardwalk, but that's done out on the reserve, not in the workshop. In the workshop itself, volunteers build the nest boxes that we sell in the shop. So, how do you sign up for shifts? Please don't use the paper sheet in the staff room, as we've stopped using it, and only phone the office in an emergency. Everything now goes through the volunteer app, which you'll have received a link to by email this morning. Just choose the area and the day, and you'll get a reminder the evening before.

Dr Pryce: Come in, both of you. So, this is our last meeting before you write up the food waste project. How's it going?

Leah: Pretty well, I think. All the data's in now. We had forty-two students in four halls of residence keeping records for two weeks.

Dr Pryce: Good. And was there anything in the results that surprised you?

Marcus: Well, we'd expected people to throw away a lot of fresh vegetables, and they did, but that wasn't the surprise. And bread came out about where we'd predicted, too.

Leah: What really struck us was the questionnaire we gave everyone at the start. We asked them to estimate how much food they threw away each week, and almost everyone guessed far less than they actually recorded. Some people were wasting three times what they'd estimated.

Dr Pryce: That's a nice finding. Now, in your proposal you said you'd use written food diaries. Did you stick with that?

Marcus: No, we changed after the first two days. It wasn't that people refused to do it. The diaries just kept getting lost, and then the entries were filled in from memory days later, so we couldn't really trust them.

Leah: So we switched to asking people to photograph anything they threw away and upload it to a shared folder. Neither method cost anything, so the budget wasn't an issue.

Dr Pryce: And the photos are time-stamped, so you know when things were thrown away. Sensible. Now, your sample. Forty-two is perfectly acceptable for a project of this size, so I'm not worried about the numbers. What does concern me a little is that they were all first-year students, which you'll need to acknowledge.

Marcus: Yes, because older students often live in private flats and cook more.

Dr Pryce: Exactly. You can't claim the results apply to all students, so make that clear in your limitations section. What about the literature review?

Leah: We've got plenty on household food waste in general. We were thinking of adding something on supermarket packaging, but there's so much of it we'd never get through it.

Marcus: I think what's missing is anything on shared kitchens, since that's what makes student halls different from ordinary homes.

Dr Pryce: I agree. There are a couple of studies on shared housing that would be really relevant. Put those in rather than the packaging material. Now, shall we go through the sections of the report one by one? What are you doing with the introduction?

Leah: At the moment it's nearly two pages long. We've got a whole history of food waste campaigns in there.

Dr Pryce: That's far too much. The reader just needs to know why the topic matters and what your questions are. I'd cut it to about half a page.

Leah: OK, we'll shorten it.

Dr Pryce: And the method section?

Marcus: We were going to include all the instructions we gave the participants, and the photo guidelines.

Dr Pryce: Those are useful, but they'll interrupt the flow. Put them in an appendix and just refer to them in the method.

Marcus: Right. An appendix for those.

Dr Pryce: Results?

Leah: We've written them up as paragraphs, but there are a lot of numbers.

Dr Pryce: Then a table would make them much easier to follow. Did you think about adding some of the photos?

Leah: We did, but some of them show people's rooms, so we decided not to, for privacy reasons.

Dr Pryce: Fair enough. So a table it is. And the recommendations?

Marcus: We were worried they're too short, actually. There are only five bullet points.

Dr Pryce: I read the draft you sent, and to be honest I wouldn't change them. They're clear and they follow directly from your data. Five is plenty.

Marcus: Oh, good.

Dr Pryce: Which of them do you think is the most important?

Leah: We talked about that. Smaller portions in the canteen was one idea, but most of the halls don't have a canteen any more. Labelled shelves in the fridges came up a lot as well.

Marcus: But we both agreed the main one is getting students to plan their meals for the week before they go shopping, because most of the waste came from food bought on impulse.

Dr Pryce: I think that's right. Make that your headline recommendation. So, when can I see a full draft?

Leah: We were hoping to send it on Friday.

Dr Pryce: I'm away at a conference on Friday and Monday. Could you send it on Tuesday instead? Then I'll have time to read it properly before we meet on Thursday.

Marcus: Tuesday's fine. We'll have it to you by then.

Good morning. In today's lecture, which is part of our module on animal behaviour, I'm going to look at how birds have adapted their songs to life in towns and cities. I'll start with some general background, then describe a study carried out in the city of Harbridge, and finish with some questions that are still open. First, why do birds sing at all? There are two main reasons. One is to attract a mate, and the other is to defend a territory. That's not, as people often think, the nest itself, but the whole area around it, which a male needs to keep other males away from. In both cases, the song only works if it can be heard. And that is the central problem for urban birds, because towns are noisy places, and most of that noise comes from road traffic. Traffic noise is mainly low in frequency. It's a deep rumble rather than a high whine. Many bird songs contain both low and high notes, and it's the low notes that get lost, or masked, as we say, by the traffic. Researchers in many countries have noticed that birds living in noisy areas tend to sing at a higher pitch than birds of the same species living in quiet woodland. In effect, they move their songs out of the way of the noise. A second strategy is simply to sing more loudly. Humans do this too. If you've ever had a conversation in a busy restaurant, you'll know that you raise your voice without thinking about it. This automatic response is known as the Lombard effect. The third strategy is about timing. Some urban birds have been found singing earlier in the morning, before the rush hour, or even at night. It was once assumed that street lighting was the main cause of night singing, and light may play a part, but in some studies noise turned out to be a better predictor. The birds seem to choose the quietest part of the day. Now let's turn to the study in Harbridge, a medium-sized port city. The research team focused on blackbirds, partly because they're common both in the city and in the surrounding countryside, which makes comparison easy. Their original plan was to work with robins, but robins sing for much of the year, including winter, and the team wanted a species with a clear breeding season. The team made recordings at forty sites, twenty in the city centre and twenty in woodland outside the city. To avoid differences caused by equipment, every recording was made with the same type of microphone. They also measured the noise level at each site, so that they could compare the songs with the amount of traffic. So what did they find? As expected, city blackbirds sang at a higher pitch. But the difference that interested the team most was in the length of the songs. City birds sang noticeably shorter phrases, with more repetition. The researchers suggest that a short, repeated phrase has a better chance of being heard in the gaps between vehicles. There was one more unexpected result. At a few city sites close to the ring road, the team recorded blackbirds copying sounds from their surroundings. Not car alarms, as you might guess, but the warning beeps of reversing lorries. So, does any of this matter for the birds? This is where the research gets more difficult. A higher song may be easier to hear, but there's some evidence that females prefer lower songs, because a deep song may signal a larger, healthier male. If that's true, urban males may be paying a price for being heard. The Harbridge team are now planning a second stage, in which they will measure breeding success, in other words, how many young birds each pair actually raises in the city compared with the woodland. Finally, what does this mean in practice? Some cities have started to use quieter road surfaces, and others have planted thick hedges along busy roads to absorb some of the noise. But the measure the Harbridge researchers recommend most strongly is lower speed limits near parks, because the noise from tyres falls sharply as vehicles slow down. That's all for today. Next week, we'll look at how insects respond to artificial light.