Mock 1 — Listening

Part 1. You will hear people talking in eight different situations. For questions 1 to 8, choose the best answer, A, B or C. You will hear each extract twice.

One. You hear a woman talking about a bicycle she bought second-hand.

WOMAN: I got it from a man in the next village who was moving to a flat — eighty pounds, which is nothing for a bike that good. The brakes needed doing, and the man at the shop tutted at me and charged me forty, so that's a hundred and twenty all in. And yes, the gears still slip on the hill by the school, and I'll have to get that looked at too at some point. But I've ridden it to work every day for a month, and I've stopped noticing the hill, and there's a new one in the window at the shop for six hundred that I walk past without a second glance. It's the best thing I've bought this year. Slipping gears and all.

Two. You hear two friends discussing a television documentary about a seaside town.

MAN: Did you watch that thing about Margate last night?

WOMAN: I did. I thought the presenter was going to drive me mad — all that walking towards the camera with his hands in his pockets.

MAN: I didn't mind him, actually. He let people talk.

WOMAN: Hmm. Well, he let them talk for ninety minutes, which was about thirty too many.

MAN: I'd have watched another hour. But I'll tell you what got me — the bit in the old lido, and the ballroom. I've been going there since I was six and I had no idea any of that was behind those doors.

WOMAN: No, nor had I. That was the bit that made it. I kept thinking, we've walked past that a hundred times.

Three. You hear a man leaving a message for his neighbour about a parcel.

MAN: Hi Jean, it's Martin from number twelve. Sorry to bother you — the courier's just texted to say they're delivering my new printer tomorrow between eight and one, and I've only now remembered I'm in Leeds until Thursday. I'd rather it didn't sit on the step for three days. If they knock and you're in, would you mind taking it? It's not heavy, or so they say. I'll come round for it Thursday evening and bring a bottle of something. No need to ring back unless it's a problem. Thanks, Jean.

Four. You hear part of a radio programme about garden sheds.

PRESENTER: The shed was built for one job: keeping the lawnmower dry. And for about a hundred years that's what it did. Then something changed. A survey this spring found that one shed in three now contains no garden tools at all — it's an office, a gym, a place to paint, or, in one case I was told about in Norfolk, a very small pub. The sheds themselves have got bigger and dearer, of course, and people will grumble about that. But the interesting thing isn't what they cost. It's that a nation which never had enough room indoors has quietly built itself an extra room, and put it at the bottom of the garden.

Five. You hear a student talking about the family she stayed with in England.

STUDENT: People warned me the English would be reserved, and honestly they weren't — first evening, they'd got the neighbours in and everyone wanted to know about Brazil. And they talked all through dinner; it was me who couldn't get a word in. No, the thing I couldn't get used to was the clock. Dinner at half past five. Half past five! At home that's the middle of the afternoon. By nine I was in the kitchen making toast, and after a week they'd started leaving a plate out for me, which I thought was very kind and slightly sad.

Six. You hear a man talking about organising a village fête.

MAN: We'd planned for rain — we always plan for rain, we'd hired the big tent — and it was glorious, twenty-four degrees. And we had volunteers coming out of our ears; the WhatsApp group did that. What we hadn't planned for was three thousand people. We'd budgeted for eight hundred. The burgers were gone by half past one, the car park was a field of mud by two because someone had left the sprinkler on, and I spent the afternoon driving to the cash-and-carry. Wonderful day. Never again without a gate count.

Seven. You hear a woman talking about travelling to work by bus.

WOMAN: It's not the money, though people assume it is — by the time you've paid for a monthly pass it's not far off what the train would cost. And I know the regulars, of course — the man with the crossword, the two nurses — but we nod, we don't chat, and I like it that way. What I'd miss is the forty minutes. Nobody can reach me. The signal's terrible on that road, which is the best thing about it: I read, or I look out of the window, and by the time I get in I've had the only quiet hour of the day. My husband drives and arrives furious. I arrive halfway through a novel.

Eight. You hear a man talking about learning to swim as an adult.

MAN: Forty-three and I couldn't swim. It never mattered — you can go a long way in this country without getting into water. The doctor had mentioned exercise, but he meant walking, and my two are teenagers and past the age of caring what I can do. What did it was Portugal last summer. Everyone in the sea — my wife, the kids, the couple from the next apartment — and me on the sand holding the towels for a fortnight, pretending I preferred it. I didn't. I booked the lessons the week we got home.

That is the end of Part 1.

Part 2. You will hear a woman called Ellen Ward, who works as a ranger on a stretch of the Cornish coast, giving a talk about her job. For questions 9 to 18, complete the sentences with a word or short phrase. You now have forty-five seconds to look at Part 2.

ELLEN: Good evening. I should say straight away that I'm not a scientist. Twelve years ago I was a solicitor in Exeter, with a desk by a window I never looked out of, and I took a week off to walk the coast path, and I never really went back. I did the training the following year, and I've been a ranger ever since.

ELLEN: What I look after is fourteen miles of coast, from the lighthouse to the estuary. People imagine that means walking along it looking at the view, and there is some of that. Mostly it means the path itself — steps, drainage, signs, the bits that fall into the sea in February. If you asked me which tool I use most, you might expect binoculars. It's a chainsaw. Blackthorn grows a foot a year on that cliff, and if I don't cut it, the path closes itself.

ELLEN: Some of the closing we do on purpose. In spring we rope off the ledges where the birds nest, and in autumn — this surprises people — we close one whole beach. That's for the seals. They have their pups on the sand from September, and a pup that's disturbed can be abandoned, so for ten weeks the beach belongs to them and we stand at the top of the steps explaining why.

ELLEN: Now, when do you think the path is busiest? Everybody says August. It isn't. It's May, because of the walking festival, and because in May the weather is good and the schools are in, so the path is full of adults with proper boots who walk twenty miles a day. August is families, and families do two miles and an ice cream.

ELLEN: The visitors are, on the whole, lovely, and the problems they cause are small ones. Litter is less than it was. Dogs, mostly fine. The thing that happens most often — every single week — is gates. Somebody comes through, and the field has cows in it, and they leave the gate open, and I get a phone call from a farmer at six in the morning. Shut the gate. It's on every sign, and it's the one thing nobody reads.

ELLEN: I couldn't do the job alone and I don't. We have about sixty volunteers on this stretch, and last year between them they gave us three thousand hours — that's more than one extra ranger, all year, for nothing. They clear drains, they count birds, they carry things up hills.

ELLEN: And the job I like best, if I'm honest, is the walls. There are miles of dry-stone wall along that coast, some of it two hundred years old, and when a section comes down we rebuild it the way it was built: no cement, just the stones and your hands and a whole day. You finish, and it'll stand for another century. Not many jobs give you that.

ELLEN: What's changed in twelve years? The biggest thing isn't the weather, though the weather is changing. It's the camper vans. When I started you'd see two or three in a summer. Now there are car parks that are full of them by seven in the evening, and the villages don't have the space, and that's an argument nobody has finished having yet.

ELLEN: If you're thinking of volunteering — and I hope some of you are — my advice is this. Don't buy the boots first. Don't buy the expensive waterproof; the cheap one is fine. Buy a good flask. It's a cold coast, and a person with hot tea at eleven o'clock is a person who's still there at three.

Now listen again. [the whole talk is repeated]

That is the end of Part 2.

Part 3. You will hear five short extracts in which people talk about the high street in the town where they live. For questions 19 to 23, choose from the list A to H what each speaker says has changed. Use the letters only once. There are three extra letters which you do not need to use. You now have thirty seconds to look at Part 3.

Speaker 1: We had an ironmonger's — Pearson's — where you could buy one screw, and Mr Pearson would tell you which screw. It shut in March. The building's a nail bar now, which is fine, nail bars are busy, but I drove twelve miles on Saturday for a hinge. The parking's no worse than it was, whatever people say. It's just that the one shop I actually needed is the one that's gone.

Speaker 2: I'll be honest, I used to avoid it. Boarded-up windows, that grey pavement that was always wet. Then the council spent a fortune — new paving, trees in those big planters, the old cinema front cleaned up — and I know people moaned about the cost, but walk down it now on a sunny morning and it's a different street. Same shops, mostly. Same faces behind the counters. It just doesn't look like somewhere that's given up any more.

Speaker 3: The odd thing is that the shops are all still there — the butcher's, the paper shop, the little bakery — but the people aren't. The butcher's is the same sign and the same window and a lad from Manchester behind the counter who's very good, actually, but he doesn't know my name and Ray knew my dad's. The bakery's a couple from Poland now, and the bread's better than it was, I'll say that. It's the same street with a different cast.

Speaker 4: When I was at school there was one café — Bella's, tea in a metal pot — and that was that. I counted on Saturday: six. Six places to sit down and eat, plus the Turkish place that does breakfasts, plus the pizza van on Fridays. People say the shops all sell the same things now, and there's something in that, but you can't say the food's the same. You could eat somewhere different every day for a week, which in this town would have been science fiction.

Speaker 5: It's still busy, don't get me wrong. Saturday morning you can't move. It's just that I don't know anyone in it any more. It used to be that a trip to the chemist took an hour because you met four people. Now my friends order everything online, and the ones who don't have moved out to the retail park, and I walk down the high street on a Saturday surrounded by people and I don't see a face I recognise. Busy isn't the same as full.

Now listen again. [all five extracts are repeated]

That is the end of Part 3.

Part 4. You will hear an interview with a woman called Leah Morgan, who runs a second-hand bookshop in a small town on the Welsh border. For questions 24 to 30, choose the best answer, A, B or C. You now have one minute to look at Part 4.

JOSH: Leah Morgan has run a second-hand bookshop in a small town on the Welsh border for nine years. Leah, most people who open a bookshop have a story — a redundancy, a building left to them. What's yours?

LEAH: Neither of those, I'm afraid. I had a perfectly good job and no rich aunt. What I had was a house with books in every room and on the stairs, and a husband who said, quite reasonably, that either the books went or he did. So I found a shop with an empty room upstairs and moved the books into it, and then I needed a reason for the shop to exist. It was an excuse. I've stopped pretending otherwise.

JOSH: How do you decide what a book is worth?

LEAH: Well, the internet decides that, really. Anyone can look up a price on their phone in ten seconds, and they do, standing in my shop. I can't be cheaper than a warehouse — nobody can. So I've stopped trying. What I can be is the person who says, “if you liked that, you'll want this,” and is right. That's worth a pound or two to most people, and it's worth nothing to a website.

JOSH: Who's the difficult customer?

LEAH: Not the ones who read for an hour and buy nothing — that's what a bookshop's for. And people who ask for a discount are just being sensible. It's the sellers. Somebody comes in with three boxes from a house clearance, and they've decided the boxes are worth four hundred pounds because there's a book in there from 1910, and I have to explain that old isn't rare and rare isn't valuable and most of it will go for fifty pence. Nobody enjoys that conversation. I have it twice a week.

JOSH: And the town? Small towns are supposed to be dying.

LEAH: This one isn't, oddly. Two shops have closed on the square since I arrived and three have opened. What's changed is who's walking about. When I started, on a Tuesday in February, I'd see nobody I didn't know. Now there are people with rucksacks in February — walkers, people doing the castles, people who've read about us somewhere. Someone said the other day the town's got too many bookshops. I don't think a town can have too many bookshops.

JOSH: You had a flood, I think, two winters ago.

LEAH: A foot of water through the ground floor. I'd always assumed, if that happened, I'd be in pieces — that stock was ten years of choosing. And I stood in it in my wellies and felt… not much. They're books. There are more books. I lost about two thousand and I've replaced most of them, and what I remember about that week is being surprised at myself.

JOSH: Have people's reading habits changed?

LEAH: Everyone says young people don't read. I'll tell you what I see. My best customers under thirty buy more than my customers over sixty, and they buy odder things — poetry, old travel books, things nobody's asked for in years. It's the older customers who buy the same three novelists every time. So I've stopped believing the surveys, because my till disagrees with them.

JOSH: If somebody wanted to open a shop like yours, what would you say?

LEAH: Don't do it online first — that teaches you nothing about people. And don't wait until you've saved enough, because you never will. Do it in a town you already know. I'd lived here six years before I opened, so I knew who read, who walked past, who'd come in out of the rain. A stranger opening here would have taken three years to learn what I already had. That's the whole advice. Know the town.

JOSH: Leah Morgan, thank you.

Now listen again. [the whole interview is repeated]

That is the end of Part 4. That is the end of the test.