Tapescripts
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IELTS Listening Section 1
EMPLOYEE: This is George and Dragon, how may I help?
CUSTOMER: Hi. I’m calling to inquire about your upstairs venue. I’m interested in booking it for a private event and I was wondering if I could ask a few questions?
EMPLOYEE: Yes, of course. Just give me a second, please.[…] So, before we start, could I please get a name and a phone number?
CUSTOMER: Yes. My name is Clara Carleton.
EMPLOYEE: Carla… Umm, could you spell that for me please?
CUSTOMER: Sure, it’s C-A-R-L-E-T-O-N. [1]
EMPLOYEE: And the phone number?
CUSTOMER: Well, I’m going to give you my work number as I’m booking the venue for a work event.
EMPLOYEE: Right.
CUSTOMER:So it’s 020 8322 1479. [2]
EMPLOYEE: Great. So, what would you like to know?
CUSTOMER: Well, I saw on your website that the price can be from £20 per hour, so I would like to get an exact quote if possible.
EMPLOYEE: Well, the price depends on the type of event, the date, the number of people and whether we will be providing food as well.
CUSTOMER: Oh, it’s for a retirement party for one of my colleagues.
EMPLOYEE: OK, and for which date is that?
CUSTOMER: Well, we were thinking next Tuesday, the 31st of May?
EMPLOYEE: OK.[…] Oh, I’m sorry, but the venue’s already booked that day. We’re free on Monday and Wednesday, if that would suit you?
CUSTOMER:Well, Wednesday’s no good ’cause the gentleman who’s retiring will be gone by then, but Monday works just as fine. [3]
EMPLOYEE: Great.You’ll get a cheaper rate for Monday, too.
CUSTOMER: Excellent.
EMPLOYEE: And how many people will there be?
CUSTOMER: Well, at the moment it’s supposed to be 16, but it might go up to 17; we’re waiting for one of our co-workers to confirm whether they’ll be available that night or not.
EMPLOYEE: The boardroom in the venue only has space for 15 people, I’m afraid. We’ve got enough standing room for about 15 extra people. Is that all right? [4]
CUSTOMER: Oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine. We won’t be sitting down much anyway. Would it be possible to provide two extra chairs just in case, though?
EMPLOYEE: Yes, of course.
CUSTOMER: Great.
EMPLOYEE: And finally, will you be needing us to provide food as well?
CUSTOMER: Well, we’ll be bringing the cake, but I imagine that yes, we will be ordering some food as well. What are your options for nibblers?
EMPLOYEE: Well, we’ve got quite a vast selection depending on which type of menu you’re interested in. We’ve got meat-based tapas as well as some vegetarian and vegan options, and we’ve also got some sharers.
CUSTOMER: Well, as far as I know, none of us are vegans, so I don’t think we’ll be needing that. Some meat-based and vegetarian options would be great, though.
EMPLOYEE: Would you like me to talk you through them, or…?
CUSTOMER: Well, you do have the menu online, right?
EMPLOYEE: Yeah, you can find it on our website. The thing is that a couple of options have been removed and replaced with new ones, and we haven’t had the chance to update it online yet. OK. Let me just pull it up in my screen, just a second.[…]
CUSTOMER: All right.
EMPLOYEE: So, in the meat-based food section, the dishes that have been discontinued are the mini fajitas and the pulled pork bruschetta.
CUSTOMER: Ah, that’s a shame.The pulled pork bruschetta looked really nice.
EMPLOYEE: Yeah. But we’ve replaced them with two new really popular dishes: we’ve got a trio of sliders, which is three mini burgers made one each with chicken, beef, and pulled pork, and we’ve also got ham and cheese croquettes.
CUSTOMER:Oh, that sounds nice. So I’ll have 7 of the mini burgers, then. I see you’ve also got vegetarian croquettes, are they still in the menu? [5]
EMPLOYEE: Yeah, we’ve got the vegetable croquette and the potato croquette.
CUSTOMER: And how many croquettes are there in each dish?
EMPLOYEE: The vegetable one is five; the potato one is four.
CUSTOMER: OK, so I’ll have two of the vegetable croquettes. [6] And…I’ll also have two of the ham and cheese ones, please.
EMPLOYEE: Great. Anything else?
CUSTOMER: Well, I don’t know. It all looks so nice! What would you recommend?
EMPLOYEE: Hmm… Well, what I would recommend is the simmered squid-it’s slow-cooked in wine and served with potatoes. I’d also recommend the hummus platters; our chef actually makes his own hummus, and it’s one of our most popular sharers. And of course all of our salads, especially the Caesar salad-we’re famous for them.
CUSTOMER: Right. So I’ll go for five hummus platters-or should I get six? No, you know what? Five is just fine [7]. I… I won’t be having any of the squid; it sounds lovely, but I’m just not sure how popular it’d be with my colleagues.
EMPLOYEE: Yeah, fair enough.
CUSTOMER: And finally, one Caesar salad. and one vegetarian-the goat’s cheese one. [8]
EMPLOYEE: Great. And, just for the final question… For how many hours would you be booking the venue?
CUSTOMER: Well, we’d be arriving straight after work, so somewhere around 7 p.m., and I’d expect we’d need it until at least 9 p.m., maybe even 10 p.m., so…
EMPLOYEE: So, three hours?
CUSTOMER: Well, probably, but let’s make it four just in case. [9]
EMPLOYEE: Right. Great. So, just give me a minute and I’ll get back to you with a quote, all right?
CUSTOMER: Yes, of course. [… ]
EMPLOYEE: Ehmm, hi. So, I spoke to my manager and the total with the food and a drink starter for 17 people would come up to £318.95.
CUSTOMER: OK.
EMPLOYEE: But he’d be happy to offer you a 5% discount, which would bring the total down to just £303-and that includes a pint of any beer, a glass of wine or a fizzy drink for each person. [10]
CUSTOMER: OK, that sounds reasonable enough. Let’s go for it.
EMPLOYEE: Right, so I would just need a deposit of…
IELTS Listening Section 2
Hello, everyone, and welcome to this year’s award ceremony for the Antonia Watson Memorial Poetry Award. As with previous years, the competition has been particularly fierce and we have received numerous excellent entries, so it’s an incredible achievement for our three finalists who are sitting here amongst you, and we should congratulate them all. However, as with every competition, there can unfortunately only be one winner, and we will be announcing them shortly. Before we do, though, a few words about the award itself.
As most of you know, the Antonia Watson Memorial Poetry Award has been presented annually since 2010, and was presented biannually for two more competitions prior, once in 2008 and once in 2006. [11] It is entirely funded by Antonia Watson’s very generous parents, who offer £1,500 to the author of the best poem on a topic announced at each previous award ceremony, as well as £500 to the first runner-up [12] and £250 to the second, bringing the total up to £2,250.
Now, a few words on Antonia Watson herself, without whom none of us would be standing here today. I briefly knew Antonia while at university, where we were flatmates for a year, and I’m afraid that any speech I give will not be able to do her justice, as she was the kindest, sweetest person I’ve ever met. Thankfully, this part of my speech was written with the assistance of one of her siblings, Thomas Watson, who was not only her brother, but also her best friend. [13]
Antonia was born in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, in December 1986. From a very young age, she displayed an inquisitive and creative nature, matched in volume only by the gentle kindness of her spirit. She wrote her first poem, named “Love Barks”, about the death of her dog, at the age of ten. This was also her first poem to be published at her school’s newspaper-just two months after another of her poems, “Be Kind” [14], won the 1996 Triad Children’s Writing Competition and was published in the competition’s anthology.
While her early forays into poetry were crowned with impressive success, Antonia unfortunately ceased to write for a few years following the death of her very dear grandfather, Peter William Watson in 1999. Despite her writer’s block [15], however, her artistic nature didn’t lie dormant during the next four years: she had an active role in various theatre plays, and she also ventured into painting. [16] A few of the plays are available on the Internet, and you can also find several of her self-portraits on our website, and you can see for yourself how impressive they are. But poetry, of course, remained her passion even then – which is why in 2003 she resumed writing, and her next poem, “The War on Both Sides”, was published in her college’s journal.
At the age of 18, Antonia moved to Sheffield to study English Literature at the University of Sheffield. This is where she and I met, spending a whole year in adjacent rooms in a flat in central Sheffield. This is also where I met her good-natured, generous parents, Mr and Mrs Watson, who came to visit her regularly and always treated me like a daughter as well. Antonia and I grew very close during that period and while we ran in different circles, we always found time for each other every week. [17]
Antonia self-published one collection of poems in August, 2005. [18] It was named “Burning Stars”, after the poem on page 16, which is also the date of her birthday. It was an immediate success amongst her peers at the University of Sheffield, and it was so cherished by her English Literature classmates specifically that it attracted the attention of one of her lecturers, who put her in touch with a literary agent. She had been due to begin working on her second collection right before her tragic passing in a car accident just five days before her 19th birthday in December, 2005. [18]
Antonia was always interested in societal shifts and how they affect humanity as well as the environment, and this award was designed to reflect her faith that regardless of what we do, we are all inherently good [19]. With this in mind, all of the topics this competition has dealt with have been about the potential and the positive side of humanity, such as this year’s “young love” theme, or last year’s “inner power” theme. We’ve had poems about personal strength, about immigration, about gender equality, and peaceful protest. And hopefully in twelve months, the poems we’ll be awarding will be just as inspiring with the topic of “poverty” [20]. I know Antonia would be really proud of what her parents, and what all of you together have achieved.
So finally, let’s get on with the actual award.As I said before, it’s been a fierce competition this year and with more than 5,000 entries it was quite the task for our three judges to cut them down to just three, but our three finalists definitely deserve to be here, and without further ado I would like to…
IELTS Listening Section 3
MELANIE: Hey, Chris.Thanks for coming.Are you ready to practise our presentation for tomorrow?
CHRIS: Yeah, just give me a moment to switch on my laptop. […] There we go. What d’ you think?
MELANIE: Wow, that actually looks really nice.Well done! So…
CHRIS: So I’ve put the title up here in the middle, “Reasons People Move Out of Their Parents’ Homes”. I thought we could start with the general graph outlining why people fly the nest at any age, and then we could break it down to age groups and social or ethnic backgrounds before we get into how our findings fit into what sociologists say about leaving your parents’ house and what the effects of the timing and the circumstances of your decision can be.
MELANIE: That sounds good to me. So we can start with the bar chart here… Do you think they’ll be able to read the tiny letters here?
CHRIS: No, which is why we’ll have to read them out to them.
MELANIE: OK, so we could take turns then. I’d start with Bar A, which says that the number one reason that young people leave home is to go to college or university.
CHRIS: Exactly, and then I’d go on to the second bar, which gives the number of people who said they felt smothered by their parents’ control over their lives, and decided to get their own house to avoid that. [21]
MELANIE: Right.Then in Bar C we’ve got people who found a job and decided that it was a good opportunity to move away because of their new income…
CHRIS: Yep, and then those who didn’t feel exactly… smothered by their parents per se, but more so because of the lack of room in their parents’ house, and the fact that their parents were around pretty much 90% of the time. [22]
MELANIE: Maybe we should move this bar so that it can be next to Bar B? Since they seem to be quite similar to each other.
CHRIS: Well, actually, that’s why I kept them separate-but maybe you’re right, they would lead smoothly into one another.So that means that jobs will now be Bar D, and Bar E…
MELANIE: Bar E is about those who moved because of their partner or spouse. [23]
CHRIS: Right, and then at the end we’ve got those who were pushed to leave by their parents, and those who left because of a conflict at home. [24]
MELANIE: I guess at this point we should mention that, as expected, we had almost zero people reply that they left home because of emancipation or abuse, despite the fact that our study was conducted anonymously, probably because the participants didn’t feel confident enough to share such private details with us, or maybe just because there was no one in our pool of participants with such experiences.
CHRIS: Yeah, so…Then we can break it down to age groups, and show these four different graphs for our four age groups: under-18s, 18-20, 21-24 and 25 and above.
MELANIE: Shall we take the graphs by age or should we start with the second group, what do you think? Because we haven’t got that much data on under-18s, and starting with 25 and above would also feel a bit strange to me seeing as it was our second smallest group and most participants were between 18 and 24 when they moved out of their parents’ home…
CHRIS: Yeah, you’re right.Perhaps we should start with our two biggest groups and then move on to the other two.
MELANIE: So you can present 18-20 and I can present 21-24, and then we can maybe present the other two groups together? [25,26]
CHRIS: I think it’s best if we present them separately, since the findings are so different.
MELANIE: Yeah, I guess you’re right. So I can present the under-18s and you can present the 25 and over.
CHRIS: Perfect. […]Or, wait, should we do it the other way around so it flows more naturally?
MELANIE: Yeah, sure. [27,28] And then we can include a brief note at the end for those who haven’t moved out yet.
CHRIS: Yeah, great. [29]
MELANIE: Excellent. So, then we can move on to the final chart before we get to the bibliography, and explain what they said they found difficult when they moved out.
CHRIS: Yeah, so we can say the biggest issue for everyone was finding a place to live, especially for those who didn’t have a guarantor or didn’t live in a student hall of residence.
MELANIE: Yes, and that 30% of the participants also experienced some financial problems in the beginning, with bills and rent and food and everything.
CHRIS: Right. Then, an even larger number reported that they didn’t expect to miss their family that much, but ended up visiting their parents’ home often just to see them and spend some time with them… [30]
MELANIE: Although we should probably cut that number down a notch to exclude those who went back home just so their parents could cook and do their laundry for them… [laugh]
CHRIS: [ha-ha] Yeah, sure. Anyway, then we should finish off with the final issue, which was flatmates.
MELANIE: Oh, yeah. So we should say that a whopping 67% complained about the people they had to live with, and that they were often dirty and inconsiderate. [30]
CHRIS: Right. Great! So then we can move on to how our findings fit into…
IELTS Listening Section 4
Lecturer: Hello, everyone. I’m glad so many people have shown up here today to hear about these fascinating little creatures called the turbellaria. My name is Dr Baker, and I’ve spent twenty years researching thousands of different species of platyhelminths, what are commonly known as flatworms, both free-living and parasitic. So there are a lot of things I could tell you about these extremely interesting invertebrate, but I will try to keep it short.
Turbellaria are unique amongst flatworms in three ways. The first one is that, unlike 80% of all platyhelminths, turbellaria do not need to secure nourishment from a living source. This means that they do not generally parasitise a host, but are instead found living freely in the environment. [31] So no need to worry about any of these little samples I’ve got here escaping and causing havoc! [Laughter]
The second way in which they’re different is that they are… well, they’re incredibly simple-and by simple I don’t mean in terms of structure, as their structure is indeed quite complex and I’ll get to that later; by simple, I mean that they’re not the brightest bulbs in the box. Flatworms in general are not known for their cognitive abilities, especially when compared with other invertebrate such as cuttlefish or octopuses or even insects, but amongst flatworms turbellaria are by far the most primitive of the bunch. [32] Finally, and this is a direct result of the first thing I mentioned, turbellaria tend to have a much more complicated sensory system in their head region.This includes a set of eyes with receptors that can detect light, as well as chemical sensory organs that assist turbellaria in locating food. [33] Obviously, as other flatworms receive nutrition directly from their host, they have no need for this.
Despite these three differences, however, turbellaria are quite similar to other flatworms in all sorts of other ways. First of all, as their name suggests, they’re incredibly flat, which allows them to hide under stones. [34] They’re symmetrical on both sides, and they don’t have a body cavity; they also don’t have any specialised respiratory, skeletal, and circulatory systems.What they do have, however, and this is what I meant when I referenced their structure before, is three layers known as the endoderm, the mesoderm and the ectoderm, as well as a head region where their brain and sense organs are located, and a spongy connective tissue that fills all the space between their organs. [35] Finally, like most species of flatworms, they’re hermaphrodites. This means that a single flatworm has a set of each gender-but don’t take this to mean they reproduce alone. [36] Their preferred method of reproduction is called cross-fertilisation, which means that each flatworm fertilises the other.
I mentioned before that most flatworms need a host, but turbellaria feed from the environment. So what do they feed on? Most turbellaria can be found either in fresh or salt water [37], and they feed on small insects, microscopic matter, and crustaceans. They will pretty much eat anything they find they have no preference on whether their food is living or dead. Also, and this is the most remarkable part about their eating habits, if they ever find themselves in a situation where food is scarce, they might also feed on themselves! That’s right, they’ll start eating their own body, starting with the least essential muscles and organs and working their way up. They will shrink in size until they’re able to find food again, at which point they’ll begin to regenerate everything they’ve lost. One final thing about food, and apologies in advance if I disgust you: turbellaria don’t possess an anus, which means that their mouth, which is a muscular opening on the underside of their body, has to serve as one. [38]
Before I finish this presentation, one more thing you’ve probably heard before but weren’t sure if it was a myth or not. I mentioned already that turbellaria can reproduce on their own-but there’s a second method they can use, which is known as fission. Now, as a child you were probably told that if you cut a worm in half it will grow into two new worms. That’s not entirely true, but flatworms are not worms exactly, and they do have the ability to regenerate by splitting into two, perhaps even more smaller parts, at which point each part regrows the missing organs and becomes a brand new turbellarian. [39] Now this is extremely important for us, and this is how I’d like to close this presentation, because their ability to regenerate endlessly makes them virtually immortal, and it might open pathways to regeneration in human cells, or slowing the human aging process – which is why scientists like myself have been studying these unique creatures, hoping to get some answers. [40] Thank you for listening, and please come along to see me and my samples if you have any further questions.
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