🎧📖 IELTS Listening & Reading – Test 4
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
FAIRHAVEN REMOVALS AND STORAGE – BOOKING FORM
Example – Reason for calling: quote
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
URBAN HEAT ISLANDS
📖 READING – Passage 1 Questions 1–13 · 20 minutes
A history of salt
Nothing on a modern table is cheaper than salt, and most of us notice it only when a dish needs more. For almost all of recorded history the position was reversed: salt was a strategic commodity, the object of state monopolies, smuggling rings and long-distance caravans, and the reason is physiological rather than culinary. Human beings cannot survive without sodium and lose it steadily in sweat. A hunter who eats meat takes in as much as he needs without noticing; a farmer living on grain and vegetables does not. Agriculture created the first populations that had to go looking for salt, and people have been digging, boiling and taxing it ever since.
It reaches the table by three routes. It can be dug as rock, the residue of seas that dried out millions of years ago: the mine at Wieliczka in southern Poland was worked from the thirteenth century until the late twentieth, and its emptied galleries now draw more visitors than most cathedrals. It can be taken from the sea, in shallow clay pans where sun and wind do all the work and no fuel is burned at all, a method still practised at Guerande in France and at Trapani in Sicily. Or it can be pumped up as brine and boiled dry, as in Sichuan, where by the eleventh century Chinese engineers were sinking wells hundreds of metres deep using bamboo cables and burning the natural gas that rose with the brine to evaporate it.
What made salt worth this effort was not flavour but time. Before refrigeration, salting was the only reliable way of carrying food across a season or an ocean. Salt draws the water out of the bacteria that would otherwise spoil food, so a barrel of fish leaving a northern port in autumn could still be eaten in spring. Salted herring from the Baltic and the North Sea fed the ports of the Hanseatic League and the fast days of Catholic Europe; salted cod crossed the Atlantic in both directions; butter, cheese, olives and pork all depended on it. Navies and armies ran on salted provisions, which is one reason governments took such an interest in who controlled the supply.
Where salt was scarce, it moved. The clearest case is the Sahara. In the deep desert it lies in seams close enough to the surface to be cut into slabs, at Taghaza and later at Taoudenni, and those slabs were roped onto camels and carried south by caravans to Timbuktu and the markets of the West African empires beyond it. In the forest belt salt was rare and gold was not, and the exchange favoured the desert. Travellers reported that the two were swapped weight for weight; historians treat that as a good story rather than an accounting record, though nobody disputes that a slab could be worth a small fortune once it had crossed the sand. Ibn Battuta, who stopped at Taghaza in 1352, described a settlement without vegetation where the houses and even the mosque were built out of blocks of salt.
In Europe salt first made roads and then made revenue. One of the oldest Roman roads, the Via Salaria, ran inland from the pans at the mouth of the Tiber. A commodity that everyone must buy and cannot be produced quietly at home is close to a tax collector's ideal. The French gabelle was the most notorious result: from the fourteenth century salt was a royal monopoly, its price fixed by the crown and varying so wildly between provinces that carrying a sack across the wrong boundary became a criminal profession with its own smugglers and its own sentences to the galleys. The tax appears again and again in the lists of grievances drawn up in 1789, and it was swept away in 1790, though a version of it returned under Napoleon.
Elsewhere the same logic produced the same institutions. China placed salt under a state monopoly in 119 BC to pay for its frontier wars, and the arguments for and against the policy were set down in a court debate of 81 BC that is still read. The monopoly outlived every dynasty that operated it and was dismantled only by reforms which took effect in 2017. In India the tax was British, and it was salt that Gandhi chose in 1930 when he wanted an injustice everybody could see and anybody could break: he walked some 385 kilometres to the sea at Dandi and picked up a lump of natural salt from the shore, an act that was illegal, harmless and photographed.
Salt stopped being precious in the nineteenth century, when deep mining, steam pumps and vacuum evaporation turned a scarce good into a bulk chemical. The world now produces something like three hundred million tonnes a year, and only a small fraction of it is eaten. Most goes to the chemical industry, which splits it into chlorine and caustic soda for plastics, paper and disinfectant, and much of the rest is spread on winter roads. The one modern use that still touches health directly is iodised salt, adopted from the 1920s as a cheap way of preventing goitre. Only the language remembers what salt was once worth: the Latin salarium, from which salary descends, was a payment made to Roman soldiers, though most historians doubt the popular claim that it was handed over in salt itself.
Questions 1–6 – True / False / Not Given
Questions 7–13 – Note completion
SALT – FACT FILE
📖 READING – Passage 2 Questions 14–26 · 20 minutes
The four-day week
AThe idea is older than the campaign. Henry Ford moved his factories to five days in 1926, arguing that rested workers made fewer mistakes and bought more cars. In 1930 W. K. Kellogg replaced three eight-hour shifts with four six-hour ones at his cereal plant in Battle Creek, and reported that output per hour rose enough to absorb most of the cost. In the same year John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would work about fifteen hours a week. For a century the forecast looked conservative: hours in the industrial countries fell decade after decade. Then, around 1980, the fall stopped. Productivity carried on rising; the calendar did not move. What was taken in place of time was income.
BThe experiment that revived the argument was run by a country rather than a company. Between 2015 and 2019 the city of Reykjavik and then the Icelandic government cut the working week for about 2,500 public employees, roughly one worker in a hundred, from forty hours to thirty-five or thirty-six, with no reduction in pay. What makes the trial unusual is who took part: not only offices but hospital wards, police stations and preschools. When the results were analysed, service levels had held steady or improved in most workplaces studied, while measured stress and burnout fell. Strictly speaking this was a shorter week rather than a four-day one. Even so, the unions carried the findings into national bargaining, and most Icelandic workers ended the process with a right to shorter hours.
CThe trial most often quoted in Britain came next. Between June and December 2022, sixty-one companies employing around 2,900 people ran a six-month pilot coordinated by the campaign group 4 Day Week Global with researchers from Cambridge and Boston College. The rule was easy to state and became known as 100:80:100: full pay, eighty per cent of the time, an undertaking to hold output steady. Revenue across the participating firms was broadly flat, and slightly up against the same months a year earlier. Resignations fell sharply, days lost to sickness fell, and firms found recruitment easier at a moment when hiring was hard. When the pilot ended, fifty-six of the sixty-one companies carried on with the arrangement and eighteen adopted it permanently on the spot.
DWhy should output survive the loss of a day? The explanation offered by the firms themselves is unflattering to the way offices normally operate. Given a fifth less time, managers finally cut the things they had privately considered worthless for years. Standing meetings were shortened, halved in number or abolished outright, and the ones that survived acquired agendas and finishing times. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion, as C. Northcote Parkinson observed in 1955, and the reverse turns out to hold as well. There is also presenteeism, the hours spent visibly at a desk producing very little, which a long week quietly rewards. None of this creates new capacity; it removes waste that a forty-hour habit had made invisible.
EThe evidence is nevertheless thinner than the headlines suggest. Firms volunteered for these pilots, and the firms that volunteer are the ones that already expect the arrangement to suit them; those for which it fails can withdraw quietly and are seldom counted. That is textbook selection bias, and no trial so far has run a control group of comparable companies keeping the old week. Most participants were small firms selling professional services, software or marketing, where output is measured by the firm producing it. Six months is also short enough for novelty to flatter a result. None of that makes the findings false, but the strongest claims made for them are not yet earned.
FSome work cannot be compressed at all. A hospital ward, a bus route, a hotel reception and a production line all require somebody physically present for a fixed number of hours, so cutting the week means hiring more people rather than working differently. A Swedish experiment at a care home in Gothenburg moved nurses to six-hour days in 2015 and found genuine improvements in staff health and in the quality of care, at the cost of employing seventeen extra staff, which is the arithmetic that makes finance departments uneasy. Several governments have taken the cheaper road instead: Belgium in 2022 gave employees the right to fold a full week into four longer days. Compression of that kind is not reduction, and workers who have tried a ten-hour day with young children at home are rarely enthusiastic about it.
GWhat is likely, then, is neither a revolution nor a return to the old timetable, but a widening gap. Expect the four-day week to spread through professional services, software and parts of public administration, where work is measured in results, and to stall in health, retail, hospitality and manufacturing, where hours and output are the same thing. That is an uncomfortable outcome, because it hands more time to the people who already hold the better jobs. The honest position is that the case is promising and unproven, and that the useful next step is not another pilot among enthusiasts but a controlled trial in the workplaces where the answer is genuinely in doubt.
Questions 14–20 – Matching headings
ii A partial settlement rather than a revolution
iii Laws that would force every employer to change
iv A trial that covered a whole country
v Problems with the way the evidence was gathered
vi An old idea whose progress came to a halt
vii How customers reacted to shorter opening times
viii Kinds of work the model does not suit
ix A coordinated pilot and what the firms did next
Questions 21–26 – Summary completion
📖 READING – Passage 3 Questions 27–40 · 20 minutes
Why languages disappear
Between six and seven thousand languages are being spoken in the world this morning; Ethnologue, the standard catalogue, lists a little over seven thousand. Deciding where one language ends and another begins means judging mutual intelligibility, and that is a matter of degree, of attitude and, in the end, of politics. Norwegian and Danish speakers understand one another better than speakers at opposite ends of the Chinese-speaking world, yet the first pair count as two languages and the second as one. No test settles it, and none can. Every figure in this argument rests on a line somebody drew.
The distribution is extreme: two dozen languages account for more than half the human race, while over half of all languages have fewer than about ten thousand speakers each. UNESCO's atlas of languages in danger puts something like two in five at some level of risk. Out of that arithmetic comes the statistic that has publicised the subject more than any other: a language dies every two weeks. It is a serviceable estimate rather than a measurement, got by dividing a shrinking total by the years available, and it is repeated far more often than it is examined. That does not make it wrong, but it is worth knowing before the number is quoted at you.
How languages die is less dramatic than that phrase suggests. In earlier centuries the mechanism was direct: children were punished for speaking Welsh at school, and Indigenous children in Canada and Australia were sent to institutions where their languages were forbidden. Today open prohibition is rare. What replaces it is a decision taken in millions of kitchens by parents who love their children. The parent speaks both, and chooses to raise the child in the large one, because that is the language of the school, the clinic, the job advertisement and the phone. Each decision is rational, and each is a response to pressures the family did not create. Their sum is a language that stops acquiring new speakers, which is the only death a language can suffer.
This is why the measure that matters is narrow. A language with a dictionary, a reference grammar, a literature and a thousand hours of recordings may be dead; a language with none of those, but with six-year-olds arguing in it in a playground, is alive. Joshua Fishman said it plainly forty years ago: the decisive variable is whether the language is handed on at home. Documentation is valuable, but an archive is not a speaker, and recording a language while doing nothing about transmission is a form of taxidermy.
The case against spending public money here is usually made quietly and deserves an answer. Languages have always died, it runs; the money could go to a clinic instead; and there is something uncomfortable about affluent outsiders asking a poor community to carry a heritage on behalf of human diversity. The first point is true and beside the point: the present rate of loss has no precedent. The choice between a language and a clinic is false, because the sums are trivial beside either budget. The last objection is the serious one, and it points towards the answer: the programmes that work are those the community itself designs and runs.
There is also a practical argument, stronger to my mind than the sentimental one usually offered. Languages carry information written down nowhere else: uses for plants that appear in no pharmacopoeia, the navigational vocabulary of Pacific islanders, distinctions between kinds of ice and weather that matter to those living among them. When such a language goes, that knowledge does not migrate into the national language. It is never translated, and it disappears with the last speaker who held it.
Revival is possible, though the famous case is very unusual. Hebrew is the example everyone reaches for and the least useful. It was revived by a population that arrived speaking dozens of languages and needed a common one, in a new state that made it official and taught it in every school. No other movement has had those conditions. The instructive examples are quieter: Maori language nests, where preschool children spend the day with fluent elders, began in New Zealand in 1982 and were copied in Hawaii a year later. What these share is not enthusiasm but structure: hours, institutions, and a reason to use the language after the lesson ends.
Technology is offered as a rescue and is genuinely double-edged. The web began as an overwhelmingly English space and much of it still is, and a teenager with a phone is immersed in a large language for hours a day. Against that, recording equipment costs almost nothing, and keyboards and fonts exist for scripts that had none. Te Hiku Media in New Zealand built speech recognition for Maori from recordings donated by speakers. Machine translation is harder, because it feeds on quantity: such a system needs far more recorded text than most small languages possess, and the languages with least text are those in most need of help.
So the honest position is neither the museum-keeper's nor the accountant's. A language is not a specimen and not a line in a budget; it is something people do together, daily, or stop doing. If a small language survives the century it will be because a family decided it was worth the extra effort, and because somebody had built the playgroup, the school and the job that made that decision easy.
Questions 27–31 – Yes / No / Not Given
Questions 32–36 – Multiple choice
Questions 37–40 – Matching sentence endings
B is generally responding to pressures it did not create.
C depends on a line that no test can settle.
D is more likely to produce new speakers than one designed elsewhere.
E has been shown to lower the cost of running a government.
F proves that small languages cannot be saved at all.
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)
The narrator's timing instructions ("you now have some time to look at…") are on the recording but are not printed below.
Narrator: Part one. You will hear a woman telephoning a removals and storage company to arrange a house move.
Gavin: Good morning, Fairhaven Removals and Storage, Gavin speaking.
Helen: Oh, hello. I’m moving house next month, and I’d like a quote. I think I’ll need to put some of it into storage as well.
Gavin: You’ve come to the right place, we do both. I’ll fill in a booking form as we talk and post the written quote to you this afternoon. Can I start with your surname?
Helen: It’s Kirkbride.
Gavin: Kirkbridge, with a G? [trap: the wrong spelling is offered first]
Helen: No, there’s no G in it. It’s K, I, R, K, B, R, I, D, E. [Q1 = Kirkbride]
Gavin: K, I, R, K, B, R, I, D, E. Thank you. And the best number to get hold of you on?
Helen: Well, the landline here is being disconnected on Friday, so there’s no point at all in giving you that. [trap: the landline is rejected] Take my mobile. It’s oh seven nine five four, three six one, two oh eight. [Q2 = 07954 361 208]
Gavin: Oh seven nine five four, three six one, two oh eight. Lovely. And when is the move?
Helen: We exchanged contracts yesterday, so it’s the tenth of October… no, sorry, that’s the day we collect the keys. The removal itself is a week after that. Put me down for the seventeenth of October. [Q3 = 17 October; the 10th is the changed-mind trap]
Gavin: The seventeenth. That’s a Friday, our busiest day, but we do have one van free. How big is the house you’re leaving?
Helen: There are three bedrooms upstairs, and there’s a study on the ground floor which we’ve slept in for the last two years and which is full of furniture, so it would be silly not to count it. Say four. [Q4 = 4]
Gavin: Four bedrooms. That tells me the size of the van and the number of men. Is there anything that needs special handling – anything unusually heavy or fragile?
Helen: There’s a grandfather clock, but my sister is collecting that on the Sunday before, so it won’t be in the house. [trap: the clock will not be there] What you will have to move is the piano. [Q5 = piano] It’s an upright, not a grand, but it was my grandmother’s and I’d rather nobody dropped it.
Gavin: A piano. I’ll note the third man and the straps for that. We can also send a team to pack for you, if you’d like.
Helen: How does that work? Is it the whole house?
Gavin: It can be. Most people choose one or two rooms and do the rest themselves.
Narrator: Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions six to ten.
Helen: We’ll do the books and the clothes ourselves, there’s no skill in that. [trap: books and clothes are NOT the answer] It’s the kitchen I’m dreading – forty years of glass and china in those cupboards. Could you do that one room for us? [Q6 = kitchen]
Gavin: The kitchen, certainly. That’s the room people ask for most. Now, the storage. How long do you think you’ll need it for?
Helen: The new house is smaller and the loft conversion isn’t done. I said two months to my husband, but the builder can’t start until December, so make it three. [Q7 = 3 months; two is corrected]
Gavin: Three months. I’ll book a container from the seventeenth. There are one or two things we aren’t allowed to keep in the store, though.
Helen: Such as?
Gavin: Anything electrical is a myth, by the way – fridges and televisions are perfectly fine. [trap: electrical items ARE allowed] The one that catches everybody out is paint. Anything that can catch fire has to stay out of the building, and half the garages in this country have a shelf of half-used tins on them. [Q8 = paint]
Helen: Paint. I’ll take it to the tip. And what do I pay, and when?
Gavin: The full quote – four bedrooms, one room packed, three months of storage – comes to six hundred and ninety pounds. [trap: 690 is the total, not the deposit] You don’t pay that today. We ask for a deposit of seventy five pounds to hold the date, and the balance on the morning of the move. [Q9 = 75]
Helen: Seventy five. That’s fine.
Gavin: And finally, where are we delivering to?
Helen: Number twelve, Larkfield Road, in Denbury.
Gavin: Larchfield, C, H? [trap: the wrong spelling again]
Helen: No, Larkfield, like the bird. L, A, R, K, F, I, E, L, D. [Q10 = Larkfield]
Gavin: L, A, R, K, F, I, E, L, D, Road, Denbury. Got it. One last thing, and please don’t leave this until the day: Larkfield Road is permit parking only, so ring the council now and ask them to suspend the bays outside the house. Otherwise the van stands a hundred metres away and you pay for the extra hour.
Helen: I’ll do it this week. Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.
Gavin: A pleasure, Mrs Kirkbride. The written quote will be with you this afternoon.
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 a cycling officer from the city council talking to residents about the new cycle-hire scheme in Rivergate Park.
Fiona: Good evening, everyone. I’m Fiona Brady and I look after cycling for the city council. The hire bikes went in three months ago, five hundred of them across the district. I’ll explain why we did it, what it costs, what has gone wrong, and then I’ll take you round the plan of the park.
Fiona: Why we did it. Almost everybody assumes this is about traffic in the city centre. The centre is congested, and if the scheme takes a few hundred cars off the road we shall all be delighted, but that was never the case we put to the councillors. [Q11 trap: traffic admitted, then rejected] Nor was it air quality, whatever the newspaper said last week; the monitoring station in this park has been inside the legal limits for six years. [Q11 trap: air quality rejected] The reason is simpler and duller than either. Four large housing developments have gone up on the north side of the river in the last ten years, and not one of them is within walking distance of the railway station. The bikes exist to join those new estates to the station. [Q11 = C]
Fiona: Now the cost, because the leaflet confuses people. There is an annual membership, thirty pounds a year, but members still pay for each journey, so it is not a season ticket. [Q12 trap: membership is not the whole story] And no, weekends are not dearer; the price is the same every day of the year. [Q12 trap: weekend pricing rejected] What matters is this: the first half hour of every journey costs you nothing at all. [Q12 = A] Nine journeys out of ten in this city take less than half an hour, so for most riders, most of the time, the bike is free. After thirty minutes it is a pound an hour.
Fiona: What has gone wrong. I’ll be honest with you. We expected damage, and we have had some, although a good deal less than the scheme in Bristol had at the same stage. [Q13 trap: damage admitted but minor] And we have certainly not had a shortage of riders: we budgeted for four hundred journeys a day and we are averaging nine hundred and fifty. [Q13 trap: low usage rejected] Our problem is where the bikes finish up. [Q13 = B] Everyone rides downhill in the morning and takes the bus home, so by ten o’clock every bike in the district is standing at the station and the racks up on the hill are empty. We now run a van at night carrying them back up, which is expensive and, frankly, faintly ridiculous.
Fiona: And one request before we look at the plan. Please report a fault the moment you notice it. [Q14 = A] There is a button in the app; a bike reported on Monday is mended on Tuesday, and a bike nobody reports stands there for a fortnight. What you do not have to do is bring the bike back to the rack you took it from – that is the whole point of the scheme, leave it at whichever rack suits you. [Q14 trap: returning to the same rack rejected] And please don’t put your own chain and padlock on one; every bike has a lock built into the frame, and your padlock only means that the next person can’t use it. [Q14 trap: own lock rejected]
Narrator: You now have some time to look at questions fifteen to twenty. Fiona now describes the plan of the park.
Fiona: Right, the plan on the back of your leaflet. Rivergate Park is a rectangle, with the river along the top and Station Road along the bottom. The main entrance is in the middle of Station Road, and a straight path runs from it up to the lake in the centre and on past the lake to the footbridge over the river. Two more paths come in from the side: one from the west gate, which is the gate nearest the railway station, and one from the east gate. A loop path runs right round the lake.
Fiona: The main hire station first, the big one with forty docks. A number of you have told me you expected it at the west gate, because that is the station end of the park. It is not there. [trap: H, the west gate, rejected] It is straight in front of you as you come through the main entrance, on the path between the gates and the lake. [Q15 = F]
Fiona: The repair workshop. If you are holding one of the leaflets we printed in the spring, it shows the workshop at the top of the park beside the ranger’s hut, in the north-west corner, and that is where we meant to put it. [trap: A is the old plan] In the end it went into the corner behind the old depot – the south-west corner, nearest Station Road, on your left as you walk in. [Q16 = G]
Fiona: The children’s training track, which is new this month. Most people guess that it is beside the playground in the south-east corner. It isn’t; the playground is far too small to share. [trap: E, the playground corner, rejected] The track is at the opposite end of the park, in the north-east corner, up beside the river. [Q17 = C]
Fiona: The charging point for the electric bikes. You would expect it at the main hire station, and so did we, but the three-phase supply comes into the park from the east side. So the charging point sits on the east path, between the lake and the east gate. [Q18 = D]
Fiona: The information kiosk, which is staffed at weekends. Do not confuse it with the ranger’s hut at the top on the left, which is nothing to do with us. [trap: A is the ranger’s hut] The kiosk is on the north side of the lake, on the path that runs up towards the footbridge. [Q19 = B]
Fiona: And last, the one I’m proudest of. Follow the main path past the lake, go over the footbridge, and on the far bank of the river you will find the cycle cafe, which opened in June. [Q20 = I] There is a free repair stand outside it, and the best coffee in this half of the city.
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, Priya and Daniel, discussing their research project on urban noise pollution with their supervisor, Doctor Okafor.
Dr Okafor: Come in, both of you. Urban noise. Six weeks, six pieces of work – let us see how much survives.
Dr Okafor: Start with the night-time measurements.
Daniel: Readings from the ring road, midnight to five in the morning, for a week. The difficulty is that neither of us fancies sitting on a wall at three o’clock in the morning holding a meter.
Dr Okafor: Nor should you. What you need is a logging meter, one that records by itself and stores the readings.
Priya: We priced them. They’re eight hundred pounds. [trap: buying one is dismissed] Daniel wanted to use a phone app instead.
Dr Okafor: The apps are not reliable below about forty decibels. [trap: the phone app is rejected] Engineering keeps four logging meters and lends them out to anyone who fills in the form. Go and borrow one. [Q21 = C, equipment borrowed]
Dr Okafor: Good. The interviews with residents.
Priya: We have a list of sixty households along the ring road and we want to interview all of them.
Dr Okafor: How long is each interview?
Priya: About forty minutes.
Dr Okafor: Forty minutes times sixty is forty hours of recording, and every hour of recording is four hours of typing. You would still be transcribing in March. Now, I am not going to tell you to drop the interviews – they are the best thing in this project. [trap: option H is raised and rejected here] Cut the list to twenty five, and choose those twenty five properly rather than taking the first who answer the door. [Q22 = B, number reduced]
Dr Okafor: Next, the sleep diaries.
Daniel: Fourteen consecutive nights, we thought, with the same households.
Dr Okafor: Fourteen consecutive nights in the middle of a teaching term, when you have four other modules and they have work in the morning? Wait for the vacation. Start the diaries on the first day of the holiday and you will have the whole fortnight clear. [Q23 = D, during the holiday]
Dr Okafor: The noise map.
Priya: Twenty measurement points along the ring road. It will show a beautiful red line through the middle of the city.
Dr Okafor: And what will it prove?
Daniel: That the ring road is loud. Which everybody already knows.
Dr Okafor: Precisely. A map with nothing to compare it against is a picture, not a result. Take the same twenty readings in a quiet residential area a mile away, on the same days of the week, and do the whole exercise a second time there. [Q24 = A, repeated at a second site]
Priya: Then the difference between the two is the finding. Could the map be the centrepiece of the presentation? [trap: option F is raised…]
Dr Okafor: Possibly, but the presentation is not marked and I am not planning it in August. Leave that alone for now. […and refused] The analysis.
Priya: We were going to compare the means and put in a couple of graphs.
Dr Okafor: You will have repeated measurements from the same households over fourteen nights. That is not a simple comparison of means, and if you treat it as one your marker will say so. Go and see Doctor Bassey in the mathematics department before you collect a single reading. [Q25 = E, a statistician consulted] Ten minutes with her now saves you a fortnight in April.
Dr Okafor: And the recordings in the primary school playground?
Priya: We wanted to record a lunch break, to show how loud it gets.
Dr Okafor: Recording children requires written consent from every parent in that playground, and the school will need a term to organise it. You do not have a term. Take it out of the project. [Q26 = H, dropped]
Priya: Should we pay the households something, to keep them filling in the diary for fourteen nights? [trap: option G is raised…]
Dr Okafor: There is no money, and even if there were I would say no: people who are paid to fill in a diary fill it in whether or not they slept badly. […and refused] A thank-you letter and a copy of the results.
Narrator: Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions twenty seven to thirty.
Dr Okafor: Tell me what struck you in the reading.
Daniel: The health evidence. I had assumed that if you live beside a motorway you get used to it and that is the end of the matter. But the studies measure people while they are asleep, and the heart rate and the blood pressure still jump at every lorry – in people who say the noise no longer bothers them at all. You never really adapt; you only stop noticing. [Q27 = A]
Priya: What surprised me was the complaints data. Far more complaints are about neighbours than about traffic. [Q27 trap: this is Priya’s surprise, not Daniel’s]
Dr Okafor: Which brings us neatly to the thing you two do not agree about.
Priya: It isn’t a quarrel. I want to ask people to rate how annoying the noise is, one to ten, and set that beside the decibel readings.
Daniel: And I think those ratings are worthless. Two people in the same street give the same noise a two and a nine, because one of them likes the neighbour and the other is in dispute with him. Measure the decibels; decibels have no opinions. [Q28 = C, they disagree about people’s own ratings]
Priya: Which is exactly why the ratings matter. Annoyance is what the policy is actually about.
Dr Okafor: Put both in, and write that paragraph as a disagreement. It will read better than a false agreement. Now, a warning. I am not very worried about the time of year – January or June, the ring road is the ring road. [Q29 trap: time of year raised and downgraded] And your residents knowing what you are studying is a small problem you can manage. [Q29 trap: option C rejected] What will bite you is the weather. A wet road surface raises tyre noise by several decibels, and any wind above about five metres a second puts noise into the microphone that has nothing to do with the traffic. Write down the weather every single night, and be ready to throw nights away. [Q29 = B]
Dr Okafor: One last thing, if you want a good project rather than an adequate one. The council measures this road as well, twice a year, and publishes the figures. Get hold of them and put your numbers beside theirs. [Q30 = A] If you agree with the council, your method is sound; if you disagree, you have something genuinely interesting to explain.
Priya: Should I interview the environmental health officer too? [Q30 trap: option C raised…]
Dr Okafor: No. That is a different project, and you have six weeks. […and refused]
Daniel: More sites, then? Forty points instead of twenty? [Q30 trap: option B raised…]
Dr Okafor: No. Twenty points measured carefully beat forty measured in a hurry. […and refused] Borrow the meter, cut the list, see Doctor Bassey.
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 urban heat islands.
Lecturer: Good morning. Last week we dealt with the way a city changes what happens to rainwater. This week, heat: why a city is warmer than the fields around it, who that harms, and what a planning department can actually do about it.
Lecturer: The observation itself is two hundred years old. In eighteen eighteen a London chemist named Luke Howard set thermometer readings taken in the city against readings from the countryside outside it, and found the city consistently warmer. A large city typically runs two to five degrees above its surroundings, and in extreme conditions the gap reaches ten.
Lecturer: The first thing to fix in your minds is when that gap appears, because almost every student writes this down wrongly. You would expect the difference to be greatest in the middle of the afternoon, with the sun beating down on the concrete. It is not. At midday the city and the countryside are usually within a degree of one another. [trap: midday is offered and rejected] The gap opens in the evening and reaches its maximum a few hours after dark, at night. [Q31 = night] The countryside cools quickly once the sun has gone; the city does not.
Lecturer: Why not? Four reasons, and they add to one another.
Lecturer: First, the surfaces. Every material reflects a certain proportion of the sunlight that falls on it, and the technical term for that proportion is the albedo. A grass field or a pale soil sends a good deal of it straight back into the sky. Asphalt and dark brick have a very low albedo: they reflect almost nothing and absorb almost everything, storing heat all day and giving it back slowly all night. [Q32 = albedo]
Lecturer: Second, the shape of the place. This is the reason students find least obvious. A street with tall buildings down both sides behaves quite differently from open ground, and the standard term for such a street is a canyon. [Q33 = canyons] Heat radiating from a wall does not escape upwards; it crosses the street, is absorbed by the wall opposite, and then by the road. The narrower the canyon, the longer the heat takes to get out, and the same geometry shelters the street from the wind that would carry the warm air away.
Lecturer: Third, what is missing – and what is missing is plants. A tree does far more than shade the pavement, although the shade matters. Water is drawn up through the roots and released as vapour from the leaves; the process is called transpiration, and turning liquid water into vapour absorbs a great deal of energy, energy which is taken out of the surrounding air as heat. [Q34 = transpiration] A mature street tree can move several hundred litres of water on a hot day – a considerable air conditioner running for nothing. Pave over the soil and you switch it off.
Lecturer: Fourth, the heat we make ourselves, which the literature calls anthropogenic heat. Every vehicle engine, every factory, every kitchen and every data centre turns energy into warmth in the street. And there is one particularly perverse contributor: air conditioning. [Q35 = air conditioning] The machine cools the room by moving that heat outside, together with the waste heat of its own motor, so the hotter the city gets the harder the units work and the more heat they push into the streets, which makes the city hotter still. In a dense district on a hot evening this alone can add a degree or two.
Lecturer: So much for the causes. Now the consequences. The one that matters most is health, and the pattern is remarkably consistent across every heatwave that has been studied. Deaths rise, they rise fastest in the hottest districts, and the people who die are overwhelmingly the elderly. [Q36 = elderly] Small children are the group students always expect me to name, and heat certainly is dangerous to them, [trap: children mentioned but rejected] but the mortality figures point squarely at people over seventy five, living alone, in a flat under a flat roof, who do not go out and are not visited. Warm nights are what kills; the body needs the temperature to fall in order to recover, and in a heat island it does not.
Lecturer: The second consequence is money, and it is more or less what you would predict. Winter heating bills in a city are slightly lower, which is the only cheerful sentence in this lecture. [trap: winter heating is not the answer] Summer bills are far higher, because of all the electricity that goes on cooling. [Q37 = cooling]
Lecturer: The third consequence is fairness, and this is where the subject stops being meteorology. Map surface temperature across any large city, then map household income, and the two maps line up. The hot districts are the poor districts. The reason is not complicated: those are the districts with the least green space and the fewest trees, the most asphalt, the smallest gardens and the least money for air conditioning. [Q38 = trees] The same neighbourhood is both hotter and less able to do anything about it.
Lecturer: Finally the remedies, in ascending order of cost. The cheapest thing a city can do is paint. Coat a flat roof in white and its surface temperature on a hot afternoon falls by thirty degrees or more, and the room beneath it by three or four. [Q39 = white] It costs a few pounds a square metre; the difficulty is persuading owners to bother. Green roofs work at least as well and give you transpiration into the bargain, [trap: green roofs are not the cheapest] but they cost many times as much and the roof must carry the weight of wet soil. Then there is planting: street trees, and several small parks spread through a district rather than one large one, because the cooling from a park reaches out only about as far as the park is wide.
Lecturer: And the measure that costs nothing at all, provided somebody thinks of it early enough, is to protect the corridors along which the wind comes into the city – the river valleys, the wide avenues, the open ground – and to refuse permission for anything that blocks them. [Q40 = wind] It is a great deal cheaper than cooling a city that has already been built badly.
Lecturer: Next week: what happens when the heat island meets the flood plain.
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.