🎧📖 IELTS Listening & Reading – Test 3
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
RIVERSIDE COMMUNITY SPORTS CENTRE – MEMBERSHIP ENQUIRY
Example – Reason for calling: membership
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
ICE CORES AS CLIMATE ARCHIVES
📖 READING – Passage 1 Questions 1–13 · 20 minutes
A traveller in a small white body
On a beach in the far north in June, an Arctic tern colony announces itself long before you reach it. The birds themselves are slight – a hundred grams or so, about the weight of a bar of soap – and neatly made: white beneath, pale grey above, with a black cap pulled down over the eyes, a bill and legs of startling blood red, and a deeply forked tail that earned the family its old country name of sea swallow. Nothing about the bird announces a record holder. Yet no animal on Earth travels as far in a year, and none sees as much daylight.
Arctic terns breed right around the top of the globe: in Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Arctic Canada and Siberia, and, in scattered colonies, a good deal further south, on the coasts of Britain, the Baltic and the American state of Maine. The nest is hardly a nest at all – a shallow scrape pressed into sand or shingle, sometimes lined with a few dry stems, holding one to three eggs. What the birds lack in construction they make up in defence. A colony under threat rises as one and dives at the intruder, whether fox, gull or biologist, striking at the highest point it can find. Wardens on tern islands hand visitors a stick to hold above their heads, because a tern will hit a raised hand rather than a scalp, and it hits hard enough to draw blood.
Feeding is done in the top metre of the sea. The bird works into the wind on flickering wings, hangs for a moment, then folds and drops, taking sand eels, capelin and other small fish, along with krill and floating crustaceans. It is a shallow, delicate way of fishing, and it ties the tern absolutely to the health of the surface water.
Then, in late summer, the colonies empty. The tern's winter is the Antarctic summer, spent at the edge of the pack ice at the other end of the world, and the scale of that journey was argued over for a century before anyone could measure it. The obstacle was weight: any device heavy enough to record a position was too heavy for the bird to carry. The answer arrived in 2007, when a team fitted terns from Greenland and Iceland with geolocators weighing 1.4 grams, light enough to ride on a leg ring, and waited for the survivors to come home. The tracks recovered the following summer showed an average round trip of about 70,900 kilometres, longer than any migration previously recorded for any animal. Birds tracked a few years later from a colony in the Netherlands did better still, covering more than 90,000 kilometres in a single year.
The bigger surprise was the shape of the route. The terns do not fly south in a straight line. Having left the breeding grounds they stop, for about 25 days, in open water roughly a thousand kilometres north of the Azores, where two current systems meet and plankton gathers, and there they feed heavily before committing themselves to the crossing. They then follow an S-shaped course down the Atlantic, swinging first towards Brazil and afterwards back towards Africa, a detour that adds thousands of kilometres to the shortest possible path. It is not a mistake. The curve keeps the birds inside following winds for most of the journey, and in migration the currency is not distance but energy. The return is more dramatic still: riding the westerlies in one great arc, the terns come north in about 40 days, a journey that had taken them nearly three months in the other direction.
Because terns are long lived – twenty to thirty years is ordinary, and one bird ringed as a chick was found breeding 34 years later – the arithmetic becomes absurd. A tern of average length of life will have flown something like 2.4 million kilometres, about the same as three return trips to the Moon. It collects a stranger distinction along the way. Breeding under the midnight sun of the Arctic and wintering under the midnight sun of the Antarctic, the tern spends its year moving between two summers, and so sees more daylight than any other creature alive.
That double life makes the bird a useful instrument and a vulnerable one. Terns feed on a narrow band of small fish, and when those fish move or fail the colonies fail with them: in warm years off Shetland and Orkney, sand eels have retreated north or grown scarce, and whole colonies have raised no chicks at all. Storms drown nests; rats and mink brought ashore by people empty entire islands. The species itself is in no immediate danger, since the world population is still counted in millions, but its breeding success is now watched closely, because a bird that touches both poles every year reports on the state of two oceans at once.
It is worth remembering what that record costs the individual bird. There is no support crew, no map and no second attempt: a hundred grams of feather and bone leaves a gravel beach in Greenland, flies to the ice at the bottom of the world, and comes back – and does it again the next year, and the next, for thirty years.
Questions 1–6 – True / False / Not Given
Questions 7–13 – Note completion
THE ARCTIC TERN – FACT FILE
📖 READING – Passage 2 Questions 14–26 · 20 minutes
Should schools still teach handwriting?
AThe retreat began quietly. In 2016 Finland stopped requiring its schools to teach joined-up writing, offering lessons in keyboard skills in its place; in the United States, the standards adopted by most states in 2010 required handwriting only in the first year of school, after which typing took over. The reasoning was practical rather than hostile. Curriculum time is finite; almost nothing that adults write is now written by hand; and the hours spent drilling loops and joins could be spent on reading, or coding, or anything else at all. Handwriting, on this view, is simply a technology that has been superseded, and a school that goes on teaching it is training children for a world that has closed.
BThen the research began to complicate the story. The most cited experiment is deceptively simple. In 2014 two American psychologists, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, asked students to watch lectures and take notes, some with laptops and some with pen and paper. The typists wrote more, considerably more, and did no worse on questions about plain facts. On questions that asked them to explain or apply an idea, they did clearly worse. The explanation the authors offered was that typing is fast enough to allow word-for-word transcription while a pen is not: forced to fall behind, the writer has to decide what matters, compress it, and put it into their own words – and that compression is where the learning happens. The slower tool wins precisely because it is slower.
COther laboratories went looking inside the head. Norwegian researchers recording electrical activity in the brain found broader and more richly connected patterns while participants wrote words by hand than while they typed the same words, patterns of the kind associated with the laying down of memory. Working with young children, an American neuroscientist compared printing letters freehand with tracing them and with selecting them on a screen, and found that only freehand printing produced activity in the network that adults use when they read. Forming a letter, it appears, is not the same operation as choosing one.
DThat finding points at something the keyboard debate often misses: for a beginner, writing is not merely a way of recording language but a way of learning to see it. A child who has drawn a letter thirty times has thirty slightly different versions of it, no two alike, and out of that mess builds a category robust enough to survive other people's handwriting, strange fonts and hand-painted shop signs. A key press delivers the same perfect glyph every time and teaches nothing whatever about the shape. In several classroom studies, children taught to print letters afterwards recognised them faster than children taught to pick them out on a screen.
ENone of which makes the case for handwriting cost free. Teaching it properly takes hundreds of hours spread over several years, and those hours come from somewhere. For a child with dysgraphia or a motor impairment, handwriting is not a gentle discipline but a daily humiliation, and for that child a keyboard is not a shortcut but an entry ticket; much the same is true of anyone whose thoughts run faster than their fingers. There is also an old injustice buried in the evidence: give teachers two identical essays, one in neat script and one in poor script, and the neat one comes back with the higher mark. A skill that quietly changes how work is judged deserves scrutiny rather than sentiment.
FAnd the research is not as settled as its admirers suggest. The note-taking finding has had a difficult decade: a large replication published in 2021, with many more students than the original, found no reliable advantage for longhand at all, and several smaller attempts have gone the same way. Critics point out that the variable being tested may not be the pen but the copying: students told explicitly not to type word for word perform much as longhand writers do. Effect sizes elsewhere are modest, samples are often small, and activity in the brain is not the same thing as learning. The honest summary is that the pen probably helps a little, in some tasks, for some learners.
GWhich points towards a settlement rather than a victory. Almost nobody now argues that children should be taught to write by hand instead of learning to type, and the countries that dropped cursive have not, on the whole, gone back to it. What is emerging instead is a division of labour: teach legible handwriting early, quickly and without ceremony, because it is part of the scaffolding on which reading and spelling are built; keep the pen for thinking, which is to say for notes, for drafts and for working a problem out; and hand the keyboard everything that has to be produced, shared and revised. The question was never whether children should learn to type. It is what we lose if the pen is the one tool they never pick up.
Questions 14–20 – Matching headings
ii Why the subject began to disappear from timetables
iii The costs, and the children the skill leaves out
iv Questions about how strong the evidence is
v How writing helps a beginner learn to read
vi A proposal to remove keyboards from classrooms
vii An experiment comparing pen with laptop
viii A division of labour between pen and keyboard
ix Differences in handwriting styles between countries
Questions 21–26 – Summary completion
📖 READING – Passage 3 Questions 27–40 · 20 minutes
The cost of building big
When a government announces that a new railway will cost twelve billion, what are the chances that it will? The answer, drawn from the largest databases we have – hundreds of schemes across dozens of countries – is close to one in ten. Roughly nine out of ten megaprojects, meaning projects costing more than a billion dollars, come in over budget, and the average overrun, measured against the figure that won approval, sits near thirty per cent. What is remarkable is not the number but its stubbornness: project management has acquired software, certification and a literature of its own, and the overrun rate has barely moved in seventy years.
The famous cases are famous for a reason. Sydney's Opera House opened in 1973, ten years behind schedule, at roughly fourteen times the cost first put before the public. The Channel Tunnel was finished eighty per cent over its construction budget and then, in its early years, carried barely half the passengers forecast: a double failure, on the bill and on the income meant to pay it. Berlin's new airport opened nine years late. Each case has its own excuse, and it is because every case has one that the pattern is so easy to ignore.
The standard explanation is psychological. Planners, like the rest of us, take what psychologists call the inside view: they picture their own project going step by step as intended and estimate accordingly. What they do not do is take the outside view and ask how projects of this kind actually turned out – a question that would produce a gloomier and far more accurate number. The remedy has a name: reference-class forecasting, which compares a proposal with the record of similar projects and adjusts the estimate to fit. Several treasuries now require it. It is a genuine advance, and in my view only half the story.
Here is the difficulty. If the trouble were simply optimism, the errors ought to scatter: some projects under budget, some over, the average drifting high. That is not what the record shows. Overruns almost never run the other way, and errors that all point in one direction are not really errors at all. A cost estimate for a public project is not an innocent guess but a bid in a competition, won by the proposal that looks cheapest. The forecaster who is candid about risk watches the money go elsewhere; the one who is not is rewarded with a project. And once the first concrete has been poured, the sums already committed make cancellation politically almost impossible, so a low number does its work whether or not anybody believed it.
There is a third explanation, less often discussed and, to my mind, the most useful. Projects differ enormously in how repetitive they are. A solar farm is one panel installed a hundred thousand times; a pipeline is one length of pipe laid again and again. Each unit is small, quick and very nearly identical, and every repetition hands the builders a lesson they can apply to the next one. Compare a nuclear station, an Olympic park or a bespoke concert hall: each is a prototype, built once, by a team that will never build it again. Sort the data this way and the repetitive projects cluster close to their budgets while the one-off ones supply almost all the disasters. The first move, then, is not better forecasting but a preference, where the engineering allows, for building small things many times.
Against all of this stands an argument that deserves a proper hearing. Cost, its defenders say, is only one side of the ledger. The Opera House cost fourteen times its estimate and has repaid Sydney many times over in visitors, in identity, and in the fact that people worldwide can draw the city's outline from memory. Benefits arrive slowly, over sixty or eighty years, and are systematically undercounted; costs arrive at once and are loudly reported. Judge every scheme by its budget alone, the argument runs, and nothing ambitious will be attempted again.
I accept part of this. The ledger really is one-sided, and in the case of the Opera House the defenders are plainly right: that building was worth every dollar it took. But the argument has two weaknesses. The first is that it is a lottery defence – for every building that becomes a national emblem there are a dozen stadiums standing empty eleven months a year, and the emblem is visible only in hindsight. The second is a matter of timing: the claim that an overrun was worth it is almost always made after the event, and usually by the very people whose figures were wrong. If a railway is worth building at four times the announced price, say so at the beginning and let the public decide with the real number.
None of this is an argument against building big; the world needs tunnels, grids and hospitals, and needs them soon. It is an argument against deciding big with numbers nobody defends afterwards. Ask for forecasts from people with no stake in approval; publish the past accuracy of whoever produced them; prefer the modular design wherever one exists; and learn to read a suspiciously low estimate for what it usually is – not a bargain, but a warning.
Questions 27–31 – Yes / No / Not Given
Questions 32–36 – Multiple choice
Questions 37–40 – Matching sentence endings
B makes it almost impossible to cancel a project.
C is rewarded by the competition for funding.
D gives builders lessons they can apply to the next one.
E has become cheaper as technology has improved.
F proves that large projects should never be attempted.
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 |
|---|
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 sports centre to ask about becoming a member.
Louise: Good afternoon, Riverside Community Sports Centre, Louise speaking.
Martin: Oh, hello. I’ve just moved into the area, and I’d like to ask about joining, if that’s all right.
Louise: Of course. Let me open a new enquiry form for you. Can I take your name first?
Martin: Yes, it’s Martin Sedgwick.
Louise: Sedgwick. Is that S, E, D, G, E, W, I, C, K? [trap: the wrong spelling is offered first]
Martin: Almost. There’s no E in the middle. It’s S, E, D, G, W, I, C, K. [Q1 = Sedgwick]
Louise: S, E, D, G, W, I, C, K. Thank you, I’ll get that right on the card. And a phone number, in case the membership manager needs to ring you back?
Martin: I’d normally give you my work number, but I finished that job on Friday, so it’s no use to anybody now. [trap: the work number is rejected] Take my mobile instead. It’s oh seven eight one one, four two oh, three nine six. [Q2 = 07811 420 396]
Louise: Oh seven eight one one, four two oh, three nine six. Lovely. Now, what sort of membership were you thinking of?
Martin: I don’t know yet. What are the choices?
Louise: There are three. Full membership lets you use the centre at any time we’re open, including evenings and weekends. Student membership is the cheapest, but you’d have to show me a college card. And daytime membership runs from opening until four o’clock, Monday to Friday.
Martin: Well, I’m certainly not a student, sadly. [trap: student membership rejected] The full one sounds better value, [trap: full membership considered] but I’ve just started working nights, so my evenings are gone and my afternoons are free. Put me down for the daytime one. [Q3 = daytime]
Louise: Daytime. That’s the one I’d have suggested, and it’s the one nobody ever asks about.
Martin: And what does that come to?
Louise: Full membership is forty one pounds a month. [trap: the full-membership price] Daytime works out at thirty two, and there’s no joining fee at all this month. [Q4 = 32]
Martin: Thirty two. That’s very reasonable. When can I start?
Louise: You could start on the first of September, which is a week on Monday… oh, no, hang on. The pool is closed for its annual clean during that first week, and it seems unfair to charge you for a week without a pool. Let’s make it the eighth of September instead. [Q5 = 8 September; the 1st is corrected]
Martin: The eighth suits me better anyway.
Narrator: Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions six to ten.
Martin: Is there anything else I should know about?
Louise: There is one thing people often miss. Everyone who joins gets an hour with a personal trainer, free, during their first month. [Q6 = trainer] It’s a proper session: they take you round the machines and write you a programme to follow. Swimming lessons are extra, I’m afraid, those are twelve pounds each. [trap: the lessons are not free]
Martin: I’ll definitely take the hour. My wife will want to come with me, too. She keeps talking about spinning.
Louise: Ah. Spinning is our most popular class by miles, and I’ll be honest with you, the waiting list is about eleven weeks long at the moment. [trap: spinning is full] What she might enjoy instead is the Pilates class. [Q7 = Pilates] There’s plenty of room in that one, and the teacher is the best we’ve got.
Martin: Pilates. I’ll suggest it. When does it run?
Louise: It used to be on Tuesday evenings, which suited nobody, so from this month it’s moved to Thursday, ten till eleven in the morning. [Q8 = Thursday; Tuesday is the changed-mind trap]
Martin: Thursday morning. She’s free then, she works from home. Is there anything we need to bring with us?
Louise: Towels are provided, and so are the hair dryers and the shampoo. [trap: towels are NOT the answer] The one thing you do have to bring is a padlock, for the lockers. [Q9 = padlock] We sell them at reception for three pounds if you forget, but people would rather not pay twice.
Martin: A padlock. I’m writing this down. Oh, and can I check I’ve got the right building? You’re the one behind the shopping centre, aren’t you?
Louise: That’s the swimming pool, which belongs to the school. [trap: wrong building rejected] Everybody makes that mistake. We’re five minutes further on, past the church. The address is Millgate Road. That’s M, I, L, L, G, A, T, E. [Q10 = Millgate]
Martin: M, I, L, L, G, A, T, E, Road. I’ll find it.
Louise: Bring something with your address on it when you come on the eighth, and we’ll take your photograph for the card while you wait. And use the car park at the back. The front one fills up by half past nine, and there is nowhere else to leave a car.
Martin: That’s really helpful. Thank you very much.
Louise: You’re welcome, Mr Sedgwick. We’ll see you on the eighth.
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 community librarian introducing the new Hillcrest Community Library to a group of visitors.
Rachel: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Hillcrest Community Library. I’m Rachel, and I’ve been the community librarian here for eleven years, nine of them in the old building across the road. I’ll tell you why we moved, who paid for all this, and what is genuinely new, and then I’ll walk you round the plan.
Rachel: Why we moved. Most people assume it was the heating. The old library did cost a fortune to heat, and the boiler broke down twice in my last winter there. [Q11 trap: heating cost admitted, then rejected] But that was not the reason. Others tell me it was too far out of town, which is untrue: it was two streets closer to the market than we are now. [Q11 trap: distance rejected] The real problem was that the reading room, the reference collection and the whole local history archive were on the first floor, up a stone staircase, and the building was too narrow for a lift. [Q11 = B] If you used a wheelchair, or had a pushchair with you, half of your library was out of reach.
Rachel: Now, the money. It was not the lottery, although a lottery grant did pay for every computer and every metre of shelving. [Q12 trap: lottery grant limited] And it was not the town’s businesses, although they raised enough between them to plant the garden. [Q12 trap: businesses limited] Nearly three quarters of the cost of this building came from one person: a retired teacher, Dorothy Ellis, who borrowed from us every week for sixty years and left us her entire estate in her will. [Q12 = A] She asked for no plaque and no ceremony, but I think you should know her name.
Rachel: What is new. People ask us constantly to open on Sundays, and I would love to, but there is no money for extra staff, so the answer is no. [Q13 trap: Sunday opening refused] E-books are not new either. We have lent those for years. [Q13 trap: e-books are old news] The new thing is what we call the library of things. Beside the books you can now borrow tools and equipment: a carpet cleaner, a drill, a sewing machine, a projector, a tent. [Q13 = B] You borrow them exactly as you borrow a novel, for three weeks, free.
Rachel: One request before we set off, and only one. The quiet study room has no booking system, so please stop emailing me to reserve a desk. [Q14 trap: booking rejected] And you do not need to bring headphones for the computers, there is a box of them at the issue desk. [Q14 trap: headphones provided] What I must ask is this: please finish your tea or coffee before you go into the local history room. [Q14 = C] Some of those documents are three hundred years old.
Narrator: You now have some time to look at questions fifteen to twenty. Rachel now describes the plan of the library.
Rachel: Right, the plan, printed on the back of your leaflet. The building is a simple rectangle, all on one level. The main doors are at the front, at the bottom of your plan. A wide corridor runs from those doors straight through the building to the glass doors at the back, and a second corridor crosses it from side to side, so the floor is divided into four quarters, with the issue desk exactly where the two corridors meet. Each quarter holds two rooms, and the garden runs along the whole back of the building.
Rachel: Let’s start with the cafe. In the old library it was hidden at the back and half our readers never found it, and several of you have asked whether it is out by the garden. It is not. [trap: garden end rejected] It is the very first room you meet. Come through the main doors, turn left, and it fills the front left-hand corner, with the big street windows. [Q15 = E]
Rachel: The children’s library. This time it has a room of its own: the whole of the back left-hand corner, the last room on the left at the back, with its own glass door into the garden, so story time can move outside in summer. [Q16 = A]
Rachel: The computers next. If you are holding one of the old leaflets, it shows them in the small room beside the entrance corridor on the right, and that is where they were until the spring. [trap: G is the old position] They have moved across into the far corner, the corner room on the right at the front, because that side has the power and the cabling. [Q17 = H]
Rachel: The quiet study room. Everyone expects it to be as far from the children as possible, but we did the opposite. It is next to the children’s library, between the children and the central corridor, at the back on the left. [Q18 = B] The wall between them is the thickest in the building, so it is genuinely silent. Do not confuse it with the meeting room, directly across the central corridor, [trap: C is the meeting room] which you can hire by the hour. The only door I would ask you not to open is the one next to the cafe at the front, [trap: F is the staff room] which is the staff room.
Rachel: The local history room, the one with the no-drinks rule, is at the other end of the back wall from the children, in the back right-hand corner. [Q19 = D] The parish records and the old maps are in there, and it is the only room with a lock.
Rachel: And finally, my own favourite. Walk to the far end of the main corridor, out through the glass doors, and behind the building you will find the reading terrace, the paved area that runs the whole width of the garden. [Q20 = I] There are twenty chairs out there from April to October and, unlike anywhere else in this building, you may talk as loudly as you like.
Narrator: That is the end of Part two. You now have half a minute to check your answers.
📜 Part 3 transcript (open after you check your answers)
Narrator: Part three. You will hear two students, Nadia and Tom, discussing their project on supermarket food waste with their tutor, Doctor Reid.
Dr Reid: Come in, both of you. Supermarket food waste. You’ve had three weeks with the plan, so talk me through it.
Nadia: There are six pieces of work in it, and we’ve been too ambitious with nearly all of them.
Tom: Start with the shopper questionnaire. We’ve written it, and we want to hand it to two hundred people outside the store on a Saturday.
Dr Reid: Two hundred is a fine ambition. But has anybody outside this room read those questions?
Tom: No, nobody.
Dr Reid: Then before you print two hundred copies, find ten people, sit next to them while they fill it in, and watch where they hesitate. [Q21 = B, tested on a small group first]
Nadia: A pilot. I’ll do that with my flatmates this weekend.
Dr Reid: Good. The interviews with the store managers.
Nadia: We’ve got three managers who have said yes, but only verbally. Do we have to take it to the ethics committee? [trap: option H is raised…]
Dr Reid: No, you don’t. The committee is there for research on people as private individuals. Interviewing an employee about how his shop is run does not need ethics approval. […and rejected] What it does need is a letter from the company’s head office saying that you may do it, signed, on paper, before you record a single word. [Q22 = F, written permission] The managers cannot give you that themselves.
Tom: I’ll write to head office tonight.
Dr Reid: Next, the photographs. Your plan says you will photograph the bins behind the store.
Tom: We thought pictures of the waste itself would be powerful.
Dr Reid: They would be. They would also be taken on private property, belonging to a company that has just given you written permission to interview its staff. The first photograph that appears in your report will be the last time anybody there answers your email. Take the photographs out of the project altogether. [Q23 = E, left out completely] Your tables will do the arguing for you.
Nadia: That’s a relief, honestly.
Dr Reid: Now, the literature review. It is the strongest thing you have written, and it is three thousand words long.
Nadia: We were rather proud of it.
Dr Reid: But you have six thousand words for the entire project, and a review that eats half of them leaves you no room to say anything of your own. Cut it to twelve hundred. [Q24 = A, made shorter] Keep the section on household waste, lose the history of the supermarket.
Tom: Fine. Then there’s the price reduction data, the yellow stickers.
Dr Reid: How were you planning to collect that?
Nadia: By standing in the aisle at nine in the evening and counting them.
Dr Reid: Every evening, for six weeks, in February? [trap: their original plan is dismissed] There is no need. The company publishes all of it. Its annual waste report breaks the markdowns down store by store, and it is free on their website. [Q25 = C, figures already published] Use theirs, and spend your evenings writing.
Tom: I had no idea that report existed.
Dr Reid: Now, the tables of raw data.
Nadia: We assumed those go in the main body, after each section.
Dr Reid: Six pages of numbers in the middle of an argument will lose your reader. Summarise each table in one sentence and one chart in the body, and put the tables themselves in an appendix at the end. [Q26 = D, moved into an appendix]
Tom: Should we simply move the whole project to next term and do it properly? [trap: option G is raised…]
Dr Reid: No. The submission date is fixed by the department, and your store has agreed to this term, not to next. […and rejected] You have enough time; you simply have less writing to do than you thought.
Narrator: Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions twenty seven to thirty.
Dr Reid: Tell me what surprised you in the reading.
Tom: For me it was the household figure. I came into this assuming supermarkets were the villains, and they do throw away a great deal, but in this country households throw away something like six or seven times as much as the retailers do. [Q27 = A] I had it completely the wrong way round.
Nadia: I’d read that before, so it didn’t shock me. What surprised me was how much the shops already give away to charity. [Q27 trap: this is Nadia’s surprise, not Tom’s]
Dr Reid: Which is why your recommendations matter. What will they be?
Nadia: Mine is simple. Take best before dates off fresh fruit and vegetables. They say nothing about safety, and they make people throw away food that is perfectly good.
Tom: And I disagree, which we should probably admit in the report. [Q28 = C, they disagree about date labels] Take the dates away and people simply guess, and the ones who guess wrongly can least afford to be ill. I would keep the date and print storage advice next to it.
Dr Reid: Then write both positions, and say who argued which.
Nadia: Should we worry that February isn’t typical? People do buy differently after Christmas. [Q29 trap: time of year raised…]
Dr Reid: A little, but it is the same shoppers in the same shop. […and downgraded] What worries me is not how many people answer you, or when. It is which people answer you. The shopper with three children and a bus to catch will walk straight past you. The one who stops for eight minutes on a Saturday morning is retired, or unhurried, or already interested in food waste. [Q29 = B] Your two hundred answers will be two hundred answers from people with time.
Tom: I’d been more worried that the manager would only tell us what makes the store look good. [Q29 trap: option C raised…]
Dr Reid: He will, a little, and you can check his claims against the published figures. That is the smaller problem. […and rejected]
Dr Reid: One last thing. If you want this to move from good to very good, add a comparison. Find a small independent grocer, a corner shop half a mile from the supermarket, and ask the owner the same questions. [Q30 = A] Two hundred square metres against twenty thousand: that contrast will teach you more than another questionnaire.
Nadia: We could talk to the food bank as well. [Q30 trap: option C raised…]
Dr Reid: Interesting, but no. That is a different project, and you have six thousand words. […and rejected]
Tom: And there’s no point asking about the photographs again, is there?
Dr Reid: None whatsoever. Pilot the questionnaire, write to head office, cut the review.
Narrator: That is the end of Part three. You now have half a minute to check your answers.
📜 Part 4 transcript (open after you check your answers)
Narrator: Part four. You will hear part of a university lecture about ice cores and what they record about past climates.
Lecturer: Good morning. For the last two weeks we have been dealing with climate records that are, frankly, indirect: tree rings, corals, the mud at the bottom of lakes. Today I want to look at the best archive we have, and one of the strangest, which is ice.
Lecturer: Start with how the archive is made, because it is beautifully simple. In the centre of Antarctica, or on the summit of Greenland, snow falls and the summer is never warm enough to melt it. Next winter’s snow buries last winter’s snow, and the weight squeezes the crystals until, forty or fifty metres down, the snow has become solid ice. Because the snow of one year is never quite like the snow of the next, coarser in summer, finer in winter, each year leaves its own layer, and near the surface you can count those layers by eye, one for every year, exactly as you would count the rings of a tree. [Q31 = layer] [trap: rings is the comparison, not the answer] So the first thing an ice core hands you is a calendar.
Lecturer: The second thing is the reason ice beats every other archive we have. As the snow is compressed, air is caught between the crystals, and at the moment the ice closes it seals that air in. These are not chemical traces. They are not a proxy of any kind. [trap: proxy rejected] When you crush a piece of two thousand year old ice in the laboratory, the gas that hisses out of the bubbles is two thousand year old air. [Q32 = bubbles] There is no other way of putting a sample of the ancient atmosphere under an instrument.
Lecturer: So what can we actually measure? Temperature first. Nobody was holding a thermometer over Greenland in the Bronze Age, so this has to be indirect. Water molecules come in slightly different weights, and the heavier ones fall out of a cloud more readily when the air is warm. So the ratio of the oxygen isotopes in the ice tells you, once it has been calibrated, how cold it was on the day that snow fell. [Q33 = isotopes]
Lecturer: Second, dust. Even in the middle of an ice sheet a little material arrives from thousands of kilometres away, blown off the world’s deserts. When the ice age layers were first analysed the amount of it startled everybody. There is up to twenty times more dust in an ice age layer than in a layer from a warm period, and a dusty layer is telling you that the world of that year was drier, windier, and had less vegetation holding the soil down. [Q34 = dust]
Lecturer: Third, eruptions. A large volcano throws material high into the stratosphere, and within a year or two some of it comes down on the ice sheet. It arrives as a thin, dark band of ash. [Q35 = ash] Those bands are invaluable for dating, because for the last few thousand years we know from written records exactly when many of those eruptions happened, so each band is a fixed point tying the ice calendar to the human one.
Lecturer: And fourth, the gases in those bubbles. Carbon dioxide is the famous one, and yes, we measure it directly, part per million by part per million. [trap: carbon dioxide is given in the notes] But the same air also gives us methane, which comes very largely from wetlands, so the methane curve is really a map of how wet the tropics were. [Q36 = methane]
Lecturer: Now, the findings, and there are two that changed the subject. For years the Antarctic record reached back four hundred thousand years, which was already remarkable; the deeper core at Dome C doubled that, to eight hundred thousand. [trap: the first figure is corrected] And across that entire span the two most important curves, carbon dioxide and temperature, rise and fall together. [Q37 = together] Neither of them ever moves far without the other.
Lecturer: The second finding overturned something that was believed for most of the twentieth century, which is that climate changes gently, over thousands of years. The Greenland cores say otherwise. At the end of the last ice age the temperature over Greenland rose by about ten degrees, not over thousands of years but within a few decades, comfortably inside one human lifetime. [Q38 = decades] [trap: thousands of years said first, then corrected] Some of those shifts were faster still.
Lecturer: Ice also records us, which students always enjoy. In Greenland ice from the Roman period there is a clear signal of lead, and it comes from Roman silver mining, because the ore they smelted for silver was rich in lead. [Q39 = mining] The signal climbs as the empire grows, collapses during the plague years, and does not return to Roman levels for well over a thousand years.
Lecturer: I’ll finish with a problem and a response. The problem is that mountain glaciers, the ones holding the local records for the Andes or the Alps, are melting, and meltwater trickling down through the layers smears the calendar we have just spent an hour learning to read. Those archives are being erased before anyone has read them. The response is a rescue project. Teams are drilling the most threatened glaciers now and shipping the cores to Antarctica, where they are being buried in a vault dug into the snow. [Q40 = vault] Freezers in Europe were the obvious answer, [trap: freezers rejected] but a freezer needs electricity for the next three hundred years, and a hole in the Antarctic snow does not.
Lecturer: Next week we will look at what ice cores cannot tell us, which is a shorter lecture, but a more argumentative one.
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.