🎧📖 IELTS Listening & Reading – Test 2
Full-length practice test. Listening: 4 parts, 40 questions. Reading: 3 academic passages, 40 questions. One sitting, two skills, a separate band for each and an overall estimate at the end.
How this test works
This is the full format of the computer-delivered IELTS: forty Listening questions and forty Reading questions, marked together. Do it in one sitting, in order, without a dictionary. In the real test: Listening takes about 30 minutes, Reading exactly 60.
🎧 LISTENING Parts 1–4 · Questions 1–40
💡 One continuous recording, played once – the narrator tells you when to read and when to listen. Do not rewind on your first attempt; replay later with the transcripts open.
Part 1 Questions 1–10
LAKESIDE HOLIDAY COTTAGES – BOOKING FORM
Example – Length of stay: one week
Part 2 Questions 11–20
Questions 11–14: choose the correct letter, A, B or C.
Part 3 Questions 21–30
Questions 21–26: what is decided about each part of the project? Choose SIX answers from the list A–H. There are two letters you will not need.
Part 4 Questions 31–40
SEAGRASS MEADOWS
📖 READING – Passage 1 Questions 1–13 · 20 minutes
A short history of the umbrella
On any wet morning, in any city on Earth, the pavements bloom with umbrellas. The device is so familiar that nobody gives it a glance, yet the object over your head is at least four thousand years old, and its basic design – a fabric canopy stretched over ribs that pivot around a central pole – would be recognised at once by an Egyptian pharaoh. Few everyday inventions have travelled so far through time while changing so little.
The first umbrellas had nothing to do with rain. In the carvings of ancient Egypt and Assyria, servants hold broad sunshades over the heads of kings, and only over the heads of kings. In the fierce heat of those lands, shade was comfort, but it was also theatre: the canopy marked out the one person who did not have to squint in the sun, and the shade it cast was understood as a mark of power. To be invited beneath it was an honour a ruler could grant or withhold. The sunshade, in other words, began life not as a tool but as a portable throne room.
It was in China that the object became properly clever. Chinese records from about two thousand years ago describe ceremonial umbrellas with a collapsible frame, opened and closed by sliding a collar along the central stick – essentially the mechanism in your hallway today. Chinese makers also learned to coat paper canopies with wax and lacquer, producing umbrellas that could, at last, keep off water as well as sunlight. As in Egypt, the object carried social meaning: colours and sizes were regulated, and the grandest canopies were reserved for the imperial court.
The Greeks and Romans knew the parasol as a fashionable accessory for women, and it is to Rome that English owes the name: umbrella descends from umbra, the Latin word for shade, and means, literally, "little shade". And there, for more than a thousand years, the story in Europe stalled. The parasol remained an ornament for ladies; the idea that a man might carry one was regarded as ridiculous.
The man who broke the rule was Jonas Hanway, a London philanthropist, who in about 1750 began carrying an umbrella through the city streets every day, rain or shine. The reaction was savage. Street boys jeered at him; gentlemen called the habit French and unmanly; and the drivers of hackney coaches, whose trade depended on wet pedestrians paying for a dry ride home, saw the umbrella as a direct threat to their income and are said to have pelted him with rubbish as they passed. Hanway simply carried on, through roughly thirty years of mockery, until the sight became ordinary. By the time of his death in 1786 thousands of Londoners carried umbrellas, which for a generation afterwards were affectionately known as "Hanways".
What Hanway could not fix was the object itself, which remained heavy and clumsy. Ribs were made of whalebone or cane, which soaked up water, doubled in weight, and snapped in wind. The breakthrough came in 1852, when Samuel Fox, a wire manufacturer from Sheffield, introduced ribs of curved steel. A steel-ribbed umbrella was many times lighter than its whalebone ancestor and far stronger, and Fox's "Paragon" frame swept the market. The final structural change arrived in 1928, when Hans Haupt of Berlin patented a folding umbrella small enough to disappear into a bag, sold under the name "Knirps" – German for "little chap". Between them, Fox and Haupt had produced the modern umbrella; nothing fundamental has been added since.
What has changed is the price. Mass production turned a former badge of royalty into one of the most disposable objects we own. Japan, where sudden summer rain is a fact of life, has made the transparent plastic convenience-store umbrella a national institution: by one industry estimate the Japanese buy around 130 million umbrellas every year, more than one for every person in the country, and abandoned umbrellas pile up at stations after every storm. A device that once shaded emperors is now bought for the price of a sandwich and forgotten on a train.
Perhaps that is the umbrella's real lesson. Inventions do not need to keep improving to conquer the world; they need only to solve their problem completely. Four millennia after a servant first tilted a canopy against the Egyptian sun, engineers still test radical redesigns – aerodynamic canopies, air-jet "invisible" umbrellas – and the public, politely, keeps buying the pharaoh's design.
Questions 1–6 – True / False / Not Given
Questions 7–13 – Table completion
THE UMBRELLA THROUGH TIME
📖 READING – Passage 2 Questions 14–26 · 20 minutes
The open-plan experiment
AThe office without walls is not a new idea. In the early twentieth century, clerks already sat in vast supervised halls, arranged in rows like a factory floor, because paperwork was thought of as a product to be manufactured. The modern version has gentler origins: in 1950s Germany, the "office landscape" movement scattered desks in organic groups among potted plants, promising democracy and easy conversation, and in the decades that followed, American furniture makers shrank the idea into the cubicle. The great walls-down revival came from the technology firms of the 1990s and 2000s. Tearing out private offices, they argued, would dissolve hierarchies, spark chance encounters and let ideas leap from desk to desk. Collaboration became the word on every architect's drawing, and by the 2010s roughly seven out of ten American offices had adopted some open version of it.
BFor decades the theory ran ahead of the evidence, because measuring conversation was hard. Then, in 2018, two Harvard researchers, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, persuaded two multinational companies to let staff wear small sensor badges before and after their headquarters went open-plan. The badges recorded who spoke to whom, and for how long, while the companies' servers logged electronic traffic. The result reversed the sales pitch: after the walls came down, time spent in face-to-face conversation fell by around seventy per cent, while email and instant messages rose by roughly half. Far from mingling, employees put on headphones, avoided eye contact and moved their conversations onto screens. Stripped of privacy, people did not open up; they closed down.
CThe mechanism is not mysterious. The human brain gives its attention involuntarily to one thing above all others: audible speech. A colleague's phone call two desks away is almost impossible not to process, which is why researchers consistently find conversation, not machinery, to be the most disruptive office sound. Interruption carries a hidden bill: studies of office workers suggest that, once pulled away from a demanding task, a person needs on average more than twenty minutes to return to full concentration. In an open room of eighty people, such interruptions do not happen daily but hourly, and the work that suffers most is precisely the sustained, difficult thinking that organisations say they value.
DThe costs are not only mental. Large comparative studies in Scandinavia have found that staff in open-plan rooms take significantly more days of sick leave than colleagues in private or shared small offices, with shared air and shared surfaces the likely couriers of infection. Behaviour changes too. Workers under permanent observation report feeling watched and judged, and respond defensively: they rehearse their "office face", save sensitive calls for stairwells, and build barricades of screens and plants around their desks. The most visible symbol of the open office's failure is the pair of large noise-cancelling headphones – walls, rebuilt one head at a time.
EIf the research is so discouraging, why does the design persist? Because the arguments that matter are rarely about psychology. An open floor holds far more desks than a corridor of offices, and every wall removed cuts the rent per employee; in expensive cities this arithmetic is decisive. Image does quiet work as well: a floor that visibly hums with activity photographs well, impresses visiting clients, and offers managers an unbroken sightline over their teams. Collaboration may be the word in the brochure, but the spreadsheet and the showroom are usually the real authors of the layout.
FThe emerging compromise drops the one-room ideology in favour of choice. Under "activity-based working", the office becomes a landscape of different settings – silent library rooms, one-person phone booths, big tables for noisy teamwork, sofas for casual talk – and nobody owns a desk; workers move to whatever space suits the task in hand. Where it is done properly, satisfaction and measured productivity improve, though researchers note a condition: there must be enough quiet rooms, or the system quietly collapses back into an open office with extra furniture.
GThe pandemic years added the final twist: once people had worked at their kitchen tables, the office lost its monopoly over work. When a company can no longer simply assume attendance, the building has to earn its commute, and a room that offers worse concentration than a spare bedroom will not earn it. The likeliest future is an office designed less as a place where work happens than as a place where people deliberately gather – to meet, to train, to belong – with the quiet work done elsewhere. The question its designers must now answer is no longer how many desks will fit, but what the office is actually for.
Questions 14–20 – Matching headings
ii Measuring what actually happened
iii Where the idea came from
iv Effects on health and behaviour
v The concentration problem
vi Offering workers a choice of spaces
vii Why some firms are giving up offices altogether
viii A new purpose for the office
ix The ideal office layout discovered
Questions 21–26 – Summary completion
📖 READING – Passage 3 Questions 27–40 · 20 minutes
Raising the dead: the de-extinction debate
Every year or two, a headline announces that the woolly mammoth is about to walk again. Well-funded laboratories now exist whose stated business is "de-extinction": the resurrection, through biotechnology, of species that no longer exist – the mammoth, the passenger pigeon, the thylacine. The coverage is breathless, the artists' impressions magnificent, and the impression given to the public is of herds thundering back within a decade. The reality is more modest, slower and, in my view, considerably more interesting than the headlines suggest.
Three routes are on offer. The oldest, back-breeding, works with living animals: by selecting modern cattle for the size, horns and temperament of the aurochs, the wild ox that died out in 1627, breeders in Europe have produced impressive herds – but selection can only rearrange the genes that survive today, so what it yields is an animal that resembles its ancestor, not the ancestor itself. Cloning requires an intact living cell, which rules out any species that vanished before the freezer era; its one triumph over extinction, a Pyrenean ibex cloned in 2003 from preserved tissue, died within minutes of birth. The modern hope is gene editing: rewriting, letter by letter, the genome of a living relative – cold-resistant, thick-coated traits written into the Asian elephant, for instance. An elephant carrying a suite of mammoth genes may well be born within our lifetimes. But note what that would be: not a mammoth, but a new, part-engineered animal – an approximation built to play a mammoth on the ecological stage. "De-extinction" is, in this sense, a misleading name for the enterprise: extinction is not being reversed; a replacement is being manufactured.
The candidate species are chosen with care, and one history explains why. The passenger pigeon was once, by many accounts, the most numerous bird on Earth: flocks in nineteenth-century North America were reported to darken the sky for hours, and the population was measured in billions. Unregulated hunting and the felling of its forests destroyed it with astonishing speed – from those sky-darkening flocks to a single captive female, Martha, who died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914, took barely fifty years. I mention the pigeon not because it is an ideal candidate for revival, but because its story shows how fast even overwhelming abundance can be spent.
The scientific case for revival is at its strongest in the Arctic. The mammoth was an ecosystem engineer: by grazing, trampling shrubs and knocking back trees, the great herds maintained the dry grassland steppe, and in winter their trampling stripped away insulating snow, letting deep cold reach and preserve the permafrost. Restore the grazers, runs the argument, and you restore grassland that reflects more sunlight and locks carbon into frozen ground – the mammoth as climate infrastructure. It is a serious idea, backed by field experiments with living herbivores in Siberia, and it explains why the mammoth project presents itself less as spectacle than as climate repair.
My doubts begin with what economists call moral hazard. Extinction's power, as an idea, lies in its finality; it is the one word in conservation that admits no appeal. The moment the public believes extinction to be a solvable engineering problem, that finality – and the urgency it generates – begins to drain away. Why fight to the last ditch for a condor or a curlew if, someday, some laboratory can simply print another? The belief need not even be accurate to do damage; it only needs to be comfortable. And the money is real: de-extinction ventures have absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars in private funding, sums with which conventional conservation could purchase and guard habitat for hundreds of unglamorous species that are still alive to save. There is also a cost the brochures rarely mention: engineered embryos must be carried by surrogate mothers – elephants, in the mammoth's case – social, intelligent animals committed to years of experimental pregnancy. The welfare of these unwilling participants sits oddly low on the agenda of a movement that speaks so warmly of our debts to other species.
Honesty requires a concession. The tools being sharpened for resurrection are already useful to the living. In 2020, American scientists cloned a black-footed ferret – one of North America's rarest mammals – from tissue frozen in the 1980s, returning long-lost genetic diversity to a dangerously inbred population. This "genetic rescue" of endangered species is de-extinction technology doing quiet, defensible, unglamorous work, and it may prove the field's lasting justification.
Still, it is not the ferret that attracts the funding. The donors' money follows the mammoth and the thylacine for the same reason the cameras do: they are famous, they are enormous or strange, and they carry the irresistible glamour of the lost. That glamour is genuine, and I feel its pull. But wonder is a renewable resource, and it is better spent on the ten thousand remarkable species still breathing – whose continued existence, unlike the mammoth's return, is entirely within our power.
Questions 27–31 – Yes / No / Not Given
Questions 32–36 – Multiple choice
Questions 37–40 – Matching sentence endings
B owes much to the fame of the animals involved.
C can only produce an animal that resembles the lost species.
D was abandoned for lack of funding.
E has already produced a practical success.
F would need approval from several governments.
0:00
Real test timing: Listening about 30 minutes + Reading exactly 60 minutes. The clock above counts up – it is a guide, not a referee.
| # | Your answer | Correct | Why |
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Listening mistakes: open the transcripts below and find the exact sentence that beat you – every trap is marked. Reading mistakes: go back to the paragraph named in the "Why" column and find the paraphrase.
📜 Part 1 transcript (open after you check your answers)
Narrator: Part one. You will hear a man telephoning a holiday cottage company to book a cottage for his family.
Angela: Good morning, Lakeside Holiday Cottages. Angela speaking. How can I help?
Mark: Oh, hello. I’d like to book one of your cottages for a week this summer, if anything’s still free.
Angela: Let’s see what we can do. Could I take your name first?
Mark: Yes, it’s Mark Pearson.
Angela: Is that P, I, E, R, like the pier at the seaside? ← wrong spelling offered first
Mark: No, like the fruit. P, E, A, R, S, O, N. Pearson. Everyone gets it wrong. ← Q1 = Pearson
Angela: P, E, A, R, S, O, N. Got it. And the best number to catch you on?
Mark: Well, we’re moving house at the moment, so don’t use the landline, that’s about to be cut off. ← trap: landline rejected My mobile is the safe one. It’s oh seven seven two four, eight six three, nine one five. ← Q2 = 07724 863 915
Angela: Oh seven seven two four, eight six three, nine one five. Lovely. Now, when would you like to come?
Mark: We were hoping to arrive on the twelfth of June, and stay a week. ← trap: the 12th is not available
Angela: The twelfth… ah, I’m sorry, both our lakeside cottages are taken that week. There’s a changeover on the nineteenth, though, so I could give you the whole following week, if you could arrive on the nineteenth of June instead. ← Q3 = 19 June
Mark: The nineteenth. Let me think… yes, we can move things around. Let’s do that.
Angela: Wonderful. And how many people will be staying?
Mark: There are four of us, my wife and me and the two children. ← trap: four is not the final number Oh, and my mother has decided she’s coming too, so you’d better make it five. ← Q4 = 5
Angela: Five people. Then the smaller cottage is out, I’m afraid. Heron Cottage only sleeps four. ← trap: Heron rejected But Kingfisher, that’s the one right on the water, takes six comfortably, and it has the better view.
Mark: Kingfisher it is, then. ← Q5 = Kingfisher
Narrator: Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions six to ten.
Mark: And what does the week cost?
Angela: In high summer, Kingfisher is six hundred and forty pounds a week. ← trap: high-season price But June still counts as our early season, so you would pay five hundred and eighty. ← Q6 = 580
Mark: Five hundred and eighty. That’s better than I feared. Do you need a deposit?
Angela: We do. It used to be a flat hundred pounds ← trap: old system, but the owners changed the system this year. It’s now a quarter of the total, so for your week that comes to one hundred and forty five pounds. ← Q7 = 145 The rest is due a month before you arrive.
Mark: Fine. Now, the children. Is there anything for them to do on the water?
Angela: Use of the rowing boat is included. ← Q8 = boat (ONE word!) It’s tied up at the cottage’s own little jetty, and the life jackets are kept in the porch. If you’d like bikes as well, we can arrange those, but there is a charge, forty pounds for the week. ← trap: bikes are NOT free
Mark: The boat will make their holiday. Now, what should we bring? Bedding, towels?
Angela: Nothing like that, all the linen is provided. ← trap: bedding/towels not needed The one thing we always tell guests is, bring a torch. ← Q9 = torch There are no street lights on the lane, and if you walk to the pub after dark, you will certainly need it.
Mark: A torch. I’ll remember.
Angela: And for food, the nearest supermarket is a twenty minute drive away, in town. But there’s a very good village shop just a mile from the cottage, it bakes its own bread. The village is called Keldby. That’s K, E, L, D, B, Y. ← Q10 = Keldby
Mark: K, E, L, D, B, Y. We’ll find it. Oh, one last thing. What time can we get into the cottage on the nineteenth?
Angela: It’s ready from three in the afternoon. There’s parking for two cars beside the door, and I should warn you that the last stretch of the lane is unsurfaced, so do take it slowly.
Mark: We’ll creep along it. And how do we collect the keys?
Angela: They’ll be in the lockbox by the porch. We text the code to your mobile on the morning you travel, so keep your phone switched on.
Mark: Wonderful. Thank you, you’ve been really helpful.
Angela: You’re welcome, Mr Pearson. We’ll post your confirmation this afternoon, and we’ll see you on the nineteenth.
Narrator: That is the end of Part one. You now have half a minute to check your answers.
📜 Part 2 transcript (open after you check your answers)
Narrator: Part two. You will hear the manager of a city farm welcoming a group of visitors.
Kate: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Greenfield City Farm. I’m Kate, the farm manager, and before you set off to explore, I’ll give you a little history, tell you how we keep going, and then explain what’s where, so you don’t spend the whole morning walking in circles.
First, the history, because visitors always ask. People assume this land was once school playing fields, it’s so flat ← Q11 trap: sports fields rejected, and the old orchard next door makes some people imagine a grand country garden. Neither is true. ← Q11 trap: orchard rejected For most of the last century, this was the council’s rubbish dump. ← Q11 = B When it closed in 1978, the council capped it with clay, grassed it over, and forgot about it, and a group of local parents got permission to keep a few goats here. That is how the farm began.
Now, money, my favourite subject. Everyone imagines we live on donations, and we are grateful for every coin in the yellow tins, but donations would not cover a single vet’s bill. ← Q12 trap: donations rejected School visits help a little in term time. ← Q12 trap: school visits downgraded The honest answer is that it’s the cafe that keeps this farm open. ← Q12 = A Nearly half of everything we spend comes from the tea and cake you buy there, so please feel morally obliged to have a second slice.
Something new this year. For a long time people asked us to open in the evenings, and we did look at it seriously, but the animals need their quiet time, so that isn’t going to happen. ← Q13 trap: evening opening rejected We also talked about holding a farmers’ market at weekends, and perhaps one day we will. ← Q13 trap: market is only an idea What we have actually started, just this spring, is goat walking. ← Q13 = B You book a half hour walk around the meadow with one of our older goats on a lead. It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. It is also fully booked every weekend until August.
And one rule above everything else. You may photograph anything you like ← Q14 trap: photos allowed everywhere, you can stroke most of the animals, and there are hand washing stations at every gate. But please do not give the animals any food you have brought from home. ← Q14 = B Bread, crisps, the lettuce from your sandwich, human food makes them genuinely ill, and a goat will always eat first and regret it later. If you’d like to feed them safely, proper feed bags are twenty pence at the kiosk.
Narrator: You now have some time to look at questions fifteen to twenty. Kate now explains where everything is on the farm.
Kate: So, the map, which is on the back of your ticket. You came in through the entrance at the bottom, past the ticket office. The main path runs straight up the middle of the farm to the back fence, and a second path crosses it halfway up, so the site is really four big squares with a cross of paths between them. There’s also a small west gate on the left, which we only open for deliveries.
Let’s start close to where you’re standing. When we rebuilt the adventure playground, we deliberately kept it beside the entrance, so tired children can finish their day there while the grown-ups collapse on the benches. So that’s the area on your right as you come in, just across from the ticket office. ← Q19 = H
The cafe. For years it lived in the old green cabin on the left of the entrance, and some maps still show it there ← trap: old position (G) rejected, but it outgrew that cabin long ago. Last summer we moved it right into the middle of the farm, where the two paths cross ← Q16 = E, so wherever you are, you’re never more than a few minutes from coffee.
Walk on up the main path from the cafe and you reach the top of the site. Straight ahead of you, against the back fence, between the two big top fields, is the vegetable garden ← Q18 = B, where we grow feed for the animals and the salads for the cafe.
To the right of the vegetable garden, in the top corner, is the sheep paddock. ← Q15 = C Our small flock are Jacob sheep, the ones that look as if they’re wearing someone else’s horns, four each.
In the opposite top corner, on the left, there’s a big wooden building. That’s the old barn ← Q20 = A, the only building left from the original farm, more than two hundred years old, and it’s where the craft workshops happen on wet days.
And finally, the duck pond. Visitors always expect a pond in the middle of a farm ← trap: middle (E) rejected, but ours is where the ground dips. From the crossroads by the cafe, take the path towards the west gate, and the pond is halfway along, on the left hand side of the site. ← Q17 = D The ducks consider it the most important place on the farm, and at feeding time they may be right.
Narrator: That is the end of Part two.
📜 Part 3 transcript (open after you check your answers)
Narrator: Part three. You will hear two psychology students, Emma and Jack, discussing their research project with their tutor, Doctor Hughes.
Dr Hughes: Come in, both of you. So, the effect of background music on memory. Where have we got to?
Emma: We’ve drafted everything, but some of it is still too ambitious, I think.
Jack: Starting with the questionnaire. We wrote forty questions for the volunteers to fill in beforehand.
Dr Hughes: Forty? Nobody will finish forty. Think about what the answers actually need to tell you. Age, musical training, study habits, that’s all. You could get that from fifteen good questions, and people will actually complete fifteen. Cut it down. ← Q21 = B (made shorter)
Emma: Fifteen it is. I’ll do the cutting, Jack wrote most of them and he’s too fond of them.
Dr Hughes: Now, the word lists for the memory test itself. Please tell me you are not writing your own.
Jack: We were going to. I’d started, actually. ← original plan rejected
Dr Hughes: Don’t. If you invent your own lists, nobody can compare your results with anyone else’s. Peterson and Lowe published a standard set in twenty nineteen, and it’s free to use. Take your lists straight from their paper, and cite it properly. ← Q22 = C (from a published study)
Dr Hughes: Where will you run the sessions?
Jack: I thought we’d just use whichever classroom happened to be empty. ← trap: classroom rejected
Dr Hughes: Too noisy. You can’t have a corridor full of first years outside the door during a concentration task. Book the soundproof lab on the top floor. It does mean a form, I’m afraid. The lab is a controlled space, so the booking needs my signature. ← Q23 = F (tutor’s signature) Bring the form on Thursday and I’ll sign it.
Emma: Thursday, then. Next problem: finding volunteers. We need at least sixty people, and between lectures and my job I honestly don’t see when I’d do all the recruiting.
Dr Hughes: You remember Maria, my postgraduate? She recruited two hundred people for her own study last year, and claims she enjoyed it. She has offered to do the recruiting for you, the posters, the emails, the sign-up sheets. Take her up on it. ← Q24 = D (another student will help)
Jack: That’s a relief. I’d assumed Emma was going to do all of that. ← trap: easy to attribute the job to Emma
Emma: So had I, worryingly. And the consent forms? The last time I looked, the department noticeboard was buried under paper.
Dr Hughes: We’ve stopped all that. Since January, consent has been collected electronically. ← Q25 = E (done electronically) Participants tick the boxes on a tablet when they arrive, and the system files everything for you. There is nothing to print at all.
Jack: Good. One more thing, though. We’d budgeted five pounds for each participant, and the finance office turned us down flat.
Emma: I did assume the department would pay. Isn’t there a small projects fund? ← trap: option G raised…
Dr Hughes: There was. It closed last year, sadly. ← …and rejected And before you ask, no, you may not pay people out of your own pockets, the ethics committee doesn’t allow it. My advice is to drop the payment altogether and offer biscuits. ← Q26 = A (dropped completely) You would be amazed what undergraduates will do for biscuits.
Jack: Honestly, with all these changes, should we simply wait and run the whole thing next term instead? ← trap: option H raised…
Dr Hughes: No. You would lose your slot in the lab, and the deadline will not move. We go ahead this term. ← …and rejected
Narrator: Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions twenty seven to thirty.
Dr Hughes: Emma, remind me why you chose music and memory. Your application mentioned a cafe, of all things.
Emma: Everyone assumes it’s because I’m musical, and I’m not, I gave up the violin at nine. ← Q27 trap: musical training rejected And it wasn’t a lecture either, though Doctor Price’s module was good. ← Q27 trap: lecture rejected I work three evening shifts a week in a cafe where the playlist never stops. I noticed I could remember orders perfectly on quiet mornings, and kept losing them on loud evenings. ← Q27 = A (her part-time job) I wanted to know whether that was real, or just me being tired.
Dr Hughes: Genuine questions make the best projects. Now, a warning. What do you two think is the biggest danger to your results?
Jack: Not finding enough volunteers? ← Q28 trap: rejected
Dr Hughes: Maria will solve that.
Emma: The laptops crashing halfway through a session? ← Q28 trap: rejected
Dr Hughes: Machines can be replaced, and you’ll pilot everything first. No. The real danger is your participants working out what you expect to find. ← Q28 = C The moment somebody decides, ah, they want the music to make me worse, they will helpfully perform worse, and your data is worthless. Never tell them the aim of the study until afterwards.
Jack: That’s connected to what Emma and I found in the older studies, actually. About who they tested. Almost every published experiment on this topic used psychology undergraduates and nobody else. ← Q29 = B
Emma: Exactly, nineteen year olds who revise with music on anyway. Some of the samples were small too, but that’s forgivable. ← Q29 trap: small samples downgraded The student-only thing is the real weakness, and it’s the gap we want to fill, half of our sixty will be recruited off campus.
Dr Hughes: Agreed. Right, next steps. Emma?
Emma: I’ll email the lab technician about the equipment tonight. ← Q30 trap: technician postponed
Dr Hughes: Not yet. Until your ethics form is approved, you cannot book anything, test anyone, or promise Maria a start date. That form is the gate everything else waits behind. Draft it tonight, both of you, send it to me tomorrow, and then, only then, email the technician. ← Q30 = B (ethics form first)
Jack: Ethics first. Understood.
Narrator: That is the end of Part three.
📜 Part 4 transcript (open after you check your answers)
Narrator: Part four. You will hear part of a lecture about seagrass meadows.
Lecturer: Good afternoon. Last week we looked at coral reefs, which get all the photographs, and next week we’ll do mangroves. Today’s subject is a habitat most of you have swum over without ever noticing it: seagrass, and the underwater meadows it forms.
First, what seagrass is not. It is not seaweed, although nearly everyone calls it that. ← trap: seaweed rejected Seaweeds are algae: no roots, no veins, no flowers. Seagrasses are true plants. In fact, they are the only flowering plants on Earth that can spend their entire lives under the sea. ← Q31 = plants They evolved on land, and then returned to the ocean, rather as the ancestors of whales did. Because they flower, they also set seed under water, which will matter at the end of this lecture, so file that away.
Two things decide where seagrass can live. It needs light, so it grows in shallow water, rarely more than a few metres deep. And because its long ribbon leaves are delicate, it prefers sheltered water: bays, estuaries and lagoons ← Q32 = sheltered, rather than coasts that take the full force of the waves. Where the conditions are right, though, the scale is astonishing. Seagrass grows by creeping stems as well as by seed, and a single connected meadow of Posidonia off the coast of Spain is thought to be among the largest and oldest living things on the planet, possibly tens of thousands of years old.
Why should we care? Food, first. Green turtles graze seagrass directly, and so do dugongs, the ocean’s rather improbable answer to the cow, which can eat forty kilos of it in a day. And clinging to the leaves is the meadow’s most photographed resident, the seahorse, which wraps its tail around a blade of grass and simply holds on. ← Q33 = seahorse But the meadow’s greatest service is as a nursery. A remarkable share of the fish that end up on our plates, cod, plaice and herring among them, spend their vulnerable first weeks hidden among the leaves ← Q34 = fish before they move out into deeper water. No meadow, fewer fish, it is as direct as that.
Seagrass also engineers its own environment. Beneath the leaves, its roots knit together into a dense mat, and that mat holds the sediment of the seabed in place. ← Q35 = sediment Without the grass, every storm stirs the mud up into the water; with it, the water stays clear, more light reaches the leaves, and the meadow strengthens itself. Engineers now study meadows as natural sea defences, because a healthy meadow takes measurable energy out of the waves before they reach the shore.
And then there is carbon, which is why seagrass has suddenly appeared on the political agenda. Meadows pull carbon out of the water and bury it in that same sediment, where it can stay locked away for thousands of years. Early studies suggested seagrass buries carbon about thirty times faster than tropical forest. ← trap: first figure corrected More recent work puts the figure even higher, at up to thirty five times faster than a rainforest of the same area. ← Q36 = rainforest Scientists call this blue carbon, and governments have begun to write seagrass into their climate plans.
Now the uncomfortable part. The world has been losing seagrass for as long as we have been measuring it, perhaps a third of it in the last century, and the causes are depressingly familiar. The first is what runs off the land. Fertiliser from farms washes down the rivers and into exactly the sheltered bays where seagrass grows, and the nitrogen that makes wheat grow tall does the same for algae, which bloom across the surface in a green curtain and cut off the light below. ← Q37 = algae The grass, quite literally, starves in the dark.
The second threat is us at play. A boat’s anchor, dropped onto a meadow and dragged, tears a bare scar through the root mat ← Q38 = anchors, and a scar in a slow-growing meadow can take decades to close. In popular harbours the seabed is criss-crossed with them. The solution exists and is cheap: fixed moorings that float above the grass.
Third, the water itself is getting warmer. Seagrasses are sensitive to temperature, and a run of unusually hot summers, what oceanographers call a marine heatwave, can kill an entire meadow in one season. ← Q39 = temperatures Off Western Australia in twenty eleven, a single heatwave wiped out more than a thousand square kilometres of meadow within months.
I promised you some hope, and there is some. Restoration works, and it is wonderfully low-tech. Remember that seagrass flowers. In several British estuaries, teams of volunteers now collect seeds by hand from healthy meadows in late summer, pack them into small hessian bags, and anchor the bags to the bare seabed ← Q40 = seeds, where the seeds sprout through the weave the following spring. The early survival rates were poor, three seedlings in a hundred, but the technique improves every season, and the first replanted meadows are now flowering by themselves. A habitat that slipped away unnoticed may yet be brought back the same way, one small bag at a time.
Narrator: That is the end of the Listening test. Now continue with the three Reading passages.
What to do next
Add your Listening and Reading raw scores and look at the bands, not the totals – the two skills are scored on different tables. If Listening is the weaker band, replay the audio with the transcripts open and copy out every sentence that beat you: the traps here (changed minds, rejected options, paraphrase) are exactly the ones the real test reuses. If Reading is weaker, your enemy is almost always the clock – redo one passage in a strict 20 minutes.