Mock 2 — 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 guided walking tour she went on.

WOMAN: Honestly, by the end my head was full. Three hours, and I don't think he stopped once — every college, every window, which architect, which century. He'd clearly worked for it, and he had a good strong voice, you could hear him from the back even on the main road, and he never hurried anyone; if somebody wanted a photograph, we waited. But I came out remembering almost nothing, because there was nothing to hold on to. One story would have been worth forty dates.

MAN: So you wouldn't do it again?

WOMAN: Oh, I would. I'd just ask him to tell me less.

Two. You hear part of a radio programme about the weather forecast.

PRESENTER: We like to say the forecast is always wrong. It's practically a national hobby, and I've said it myself, standing in rain that was supposed to be a light shower. But the figures don't support us. A one-day forecast today is right about ninety-two per cent of the time; in nineteen eighty it was closer to sixty. What has changed isn't the weather — it's the computing. Which leaves us in the slightly odd position of complaining about a service that has quietly become one of the best in the world.

Three. You hear a man talking about a job he started recently.

MAN: The training was fine — three weeks, more than I've ever had anywhere. And the work itself is hard, harder than the last place, so I can't pretend I'm coasting. What I wasn't ready for is being asked what I think. At my old job somebody told you and you did it. Here, on day nine, my manager said “your call” and walked off. I stood there for about a minute. I'm getting used to it. But nobody warned me.

Four. You hear two students talking about a podcast.

WOMAN: I've started listening to that debate one — Britain, Arguably.

MAN: The two who never agree? I tried it. Both of them clearly know their subject, I'll give them that.

WOMAN: They do.

MAN: But you can't learn English from it. Half the sentences never finish.

WOMAN: That's exactly why I can learn from it. Finished sentences are what the textbook gives you. I want the other kind.

MAN: Hmm.

WOMAN: And half an hour is the right length. Any longer and I'd stop.

MAN: No — that bit's fine.

Five. You hear a woman leaving a voicemail message about a booking.

WOMAN: Hi, it's Priya Nair, about the school group on the fourteenth. I emailed on Monday to say we're now twenty-six rather than twenty, and I sent the new list, but I haven't had anything back and the office phone just rings. So this isn't a change — the date's still the fourteenth, that's all fine — I just need somebody to tell me the email arrived and that the extra six are on it. If you could ring me back before Thursday. Thank you.

Six. You hear a chef talking about restaurant kitchens.

CHEF: People think it's the speed. The speed you get used to in a month — your hands learn it. And staff coming and going, yes, that's tiring, but you plan for it. No. The hard thing is Tuesday. Anyone can cook a beautiful plate on a Saturday when they're awake and the room is full. Doing the same plate, exactly the same, on a wet Tuesday in February at nine o'clock when you're on your eleventh hour — that's the job. That's the only bit that's actually difficult.

Seven. You hear part of a talk about volunteering.

SPEAKER: The commonest mistake isn't doing too much. An hour a week is fine, ten hours a week is fine — people know their own lives. The mistake is signing up to something with no end in it. “Help out at the centre” goes on for ever, and when you stop, you feel you've let somebody down. So: say yes to the six-week project, the one Saturday, the thing with a date on it. You can always sign up again. And don't avoid the public-facing jobs, whatever you've been told — they're the ones people stay in.

Eight. You hear a man talking about a delayed train journey.

MAN: Ninety minutes standing outside Peterborough. And I'd normally be furious — but they told us. Every ten minutes somebody came on and said what was actually happening: a fault on the line ahead, here's what we're doing about it, here's when we'll know more. They said ninety and it was ninety. I had nothing to get to, so I read. What makes people angry on a train isn't the waiting; it's being told nothing and then being told a lie.

That is the end of Part 1.

Part 2. You will hear a woman called Ruth Feeney giving a talk about Britain's disused telephone boxes. 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.

RUTH: Good evening. I grew up in Manchester, and if you had told me then that I would spend my forties thinking about telephone boxes, I would have laughed. What changed it was moving. Fifteen years ago my husband got a job in Shropshire, and the first thing I noticed in the village — before the church, before the pub — was a red kiosk on the green with a hole in the roof and a fern growing out of it.

RUTH: The box was a K6. That's the classic one, the one everybody photographs, and it was designed in nineteen thirty-five for the silver jubilee of King George the Fifth. Eight thousand went up for the jubilee itself and around sixty thousand altogether. There is an earlier design, the K2, which is rarer and taller, but it is the K6 you will find on a village green.

RUTH: Then came the mobile phone. By two thousand and eight, the average kiosk in Britain was being used fewer than twelve times a month — some of them not at all — and BT began taking them out at a rate of several thousand a year. There was, understandably, a fuss. And out of that fuss came the scheme I work with: a village, or a parish council, can adopt its kiosk for a payment of one pound. One pound, and it is yours, minus the telephone.

RUTH: So what do people do with them? By a long way the most popular use is a book exchange — you take one, you leave one, nobody keeps a record, and it works perfectly. After that come the odder ones. I have seen a kiosk that is a very small art gallery, one that is a museum of the village's own history, and one, in Devon, containing a single espresso machine. But the use that matters most is none of those. Roughly a third of adopted boxes now hold a defibrillator, and those machines have been used, and there are people alive because a village decided to keep its telephone box.

RUTH: Now, the practical side, because this is where enthusiasm meets reality. Everyone worries about vandalism. Vandalism is rare. The real enemy is damp. A K6 is a cast-iron box with eight panes of glass and no heating, and if you put books in it without dealing with the damp, in eighteen months you will have a box of ruined books. Seal the floor, drill the drainage holes, and go and look at it in November.

RUTH: Painting. The colour is not simply red. It has a name — currant red — and the paint code is published, and I would ask you please to use it, because a kiosk painted in ordinary gloss looks wrong in a way people notice without knowing why.

RUTH: One last thing, and it surprised me. I assumed this would be a young person's project. It isn't. Most adoptions are proposed by people aged over sixty, and I have stopped being surprised by that: they are the ones who remember queuing outside it in the rain to ring somebody.

RUTH: So if your village is thinking about it, my advice is simple. Don't start with the paint, and don't start with a grant application. Start with a public meeting. Ten people in a hall on a Tuesday evening will tell you in one evening whether this is going to work.

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 a class or course they took as adults. For questions 19 to 23, choose from the list A to H what each speaker says was the main benefit. 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: I did a pottery evening class. I was hopeless — genuinely, six weeks in I was the worst in the room and everybody could see it. And somewhere around week seven, I stopped minding. That's the thing I took away, not the bowls. I'd spent twenty years only doing things I was already good at, which sounds like confidence and is actually the opposite. Now I sign up for things I'll be bad at. The people were lovely, by the way, but I haven't seen any of them since.

Speaker 2: Spanish, Tuesday nights, and I have to be honest — my Spanish is not much better. I can order a coffee. What happened instead was the group. A retired policeman, two nurses, a boy of nineteen who works in a warehouse: in ordinary life our paths would simply never have crossed, not once. We still meet, four years on, and mostly we speak English. So as a language course it was a failure, and as anything else it was the best thing I have done.

Speaker 3: I started a maths A-level at seventeen and walked out in the March. It sat there for thirty years, the one thing I hadn't finished. So last year I did the evening course, and in June I sat the exam in a hall full of teenagers, and I passed. Not brilliantly. Do I need it? No — nobody at work has asked, and I don't use any of it. But there is a thing in the back of my head that has gone quiet now.

Speaker 4: My daughter is a nurse, and for years she'd come home and talk, and I'd nod, and I understood roughly none of it. So I did a first-aid instructor course — twelve weeks. I'm not going to work in a hospital at sixty-three. But now when she tells me about her shift, I know what she is describing, and she has noticed, and she tells me more. That's it. That is the whole return on twelve Saturdays.

Speaker 5: Drawing. I'd told myself my whole life that I couldn't draw — my brother could, so obviously I couldn't; that's how families work. Three months in, the tutor held up my sketchbook to the room and I nearly denied it was mine. I'm not gifted. But I'm not the person I'd been telling everyone I was, either, and finding that out at fifty-one was a strange, good week. I go on Wednesdays and I'd go if it cost twice as much.

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 Kate Brennan, who works as a lock keeper on a British canal. For questions 24 to 30, choose the best answer, A, B or C. You now have one minute to look at Part 4.

MAYA: Kate Brennan has spent eleven years as a lock keeper on the Kennet and Avon. Kate, people assume this is a job you dream about as a child. Was it?

KATE: Not remotely. I'd been made redundant from a printing firm, I was forty-four, and there was a card in the window of the canal office. I applied because it was two miles from my house and I needed something by September. If I'm honest, I thought I'd do one season.

MAYA: And what did you find you had walked into?

KATE: Paperwork and plumbing. Everyone pictures you standing in the sun opening a gate — and you do that too. But a lock is a machine two hundred years old, and mostly what I do is notice things. A leak that wasn't there on Tuesday. A gate that has dropped four millimetres. The skill isn't strength, it's noticing.

MAYA: You once said the boaters are the easy part.

KATE: Did I? That's about right, though. Most people on the water are careful, because their house is floating. It's the two weeks in August, when the hire boats come out — and even then, they're not difficult, they're just frightened, and frightened people do odd things quickly. My job in August is mostly to talk slowly.

MAYA: Is there anything you would change about the way the canals are run?

KATE: I'd stop pretending they're a heritage attraction. They're infrastructure. A canal holds back a very great deal of water, and when a bank goes in a wet winter, it takes a road with it. The money follows the word you use, and while the word is “heritage”, the money is for painting signs.

MAYA: You had one serious incident, I think.

KATE: In two thousand and nineteen, yes. A boat came into the lock with its fenders down and caught on the cill — that can turn a boat over in seconds. I got the paddles shut. Afterwards everyone was very kind, and I found the kindness harder than the incident, oddly. What actually helped was that we changed the sign that week. That's the only thing I wanted.

MAYA: And what do you say to people who think it must be a lonely job?

KATE: I say they haven't tried it. I speak to sixty people on a Saturday. It's the winter that's quiet, and that's the part I'd miss. November on the cut, nobody about, the water absolutely still — I'd do the whole job again for those eight weeks.

MAYA: Will you retire?

KATE: They'll have to ask me to. Although — and this has changed in eleven years — I'd want to hand it over properly. When I started, the man before me left a folder with fourteen pages of handwriting in it, and it was worth more than the training. I'm on page ninety.

MAYA: Kate Brennan, thank you.

Now listen again. [the whole interview is repeated]

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