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Estimated with the standard Listening conversion. Every question below now shows the correct answer and what confirmed it — and the full transcript is open at the bottom so you can trace anything you missed.
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Section 1
A caller enquires about joining a local photography club · Secretary, Caller
Questions 1-7
Complete the form below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.
1Surname: ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
2Mobile number: 0781 552 ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
3Type of membership: ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
4Item to borrow first: ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
5Meetings now held on: ______ evenings
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
6Venue: upstairs at the ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
7Total payment for first year: £ ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
Questions 8-10
Answer the questions below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.
8How is the club newsletter now sent to members?
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
9What is the theme of this month's competition?
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
10What should new members bring to their first meeting?
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
Section 2
A guide introduces a walk around a botanical garden · Guide
Questions 11-13
Choose the correct letter, A, B or C.
11What does the guide say about the origin of the garden?
12Why is the Victorian glasshouse currently closed?
13What has happened to today's koi feeding?
Questions 14-17
Where are the following places? Choose the correct letter, A–F, from the plan description below.
Plan of Hartwell Botanic Garden — you are at the main gate on the east side; the central avenue runs west, with a fountain halfway along.
A = directly behind the main gate B = on the left of the avenue, just past the fountain C = behind the lake, north of the avenue D = at the far western end of the avenue E = beside the herb beds on the south lawn F = next to the children's play area
- A directly behind the main gate
- B on the left of the avenue, just past the fountain
- C behind the lake, north of the avenue
- D at the far western end of the avenue
- E beside the herb beds on the south lawn
- F next to the children's play area
14Rose Terrace
15Japanese Garden
16Alpine House
17Café
Questions 18-20
Complete the sentences below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.
18The glasshouse is now expected to reopen in the ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
19The guided walk lasts about ______ minutes.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
20Visitors can hire ______ from the kiosk for £4.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
Section 3
Two students and their tutor discuss a study comparing two revision apps · Dr Osei, Lena, Marcus
Questions 21-24
Choose the correct letter, A, B or C.
21What is the main aim of the students' study?
22Why do the students decide not to use time spent in the app as their measure?
23Why will the students recruit through lectures rather than posters?
24What does Dr Osei say about recruiting friends as participants?
Questions 25-27
Who makes each suggestion? Choose A, B or C. NB You may use any letter more than once.
- A Lena
- B Marcus
- C Dr Osei
25measuring improvement between two tests
26speaking to students at the end of a lecture
27submitting the ethics form this week
Questions 28-30
Complete the sentences below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.
28The trial will run for ______ weeks.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
29The students plan to recruit ______ participants in total.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
30The next meeting will take place in the ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
Section 4
A lecture on the acoustics of concert halls · Lecturer
Questions 31-40
Complete the notes below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.
31Reverberation time = the time a sound takes to ______ by 60 decibels.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
32In narrow halls, sound reaches listeners quickly off the ______, producing strong early reflections.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
33The tall, narrow, rectangular design is known as the ______ hall.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
34In vineyard halls, the audience sits on ______ stepping down towards the orchestra.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
35Popular belief: a hall's quality depends mainly on its ______.
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36An audience absorbs sound — mainly because of people's ______.
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37Modern ______ are designed to absorb as much sound as a seated person.
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38Reverberation can be shortened by unrolling heavy ______ from the ceiling.
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39A movable ______ above the stage helps the musicians hear one another.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
40Before construction, designs are tested using ______ at about one-tenth size.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
Audio script / transcript
Trace every answer back to the exact words. Distractors — changes of mind, corrections, rejected options — are part of the recording, so read the whole exchange, not just one line.
Section 1 — A caller enquires about joining a local photography club
Secretary:Hello, Fenbridge Photography Club, Marion speaking.
Caller:Oh, hi. I've just moved to the area and I'd like to join the club. Could you sign me up over the phone?
Secretary:Certainly. Let me take some details. Your full name, please?
Caller:It's Adam Leyburn.
Secretary:Leyburn... is that L-A-Y-B-U-R-N?
Caller:No, it starts L-E-Y. So L-E-Y-B-U-R-N. Everyone assumes it's spelt like the word 'lay'.
Secretary:L-E-Y-B-U-R-N, thank you. And a contact number?
Caller:My mobile — oh-seven-eight-one, double five two, six-nine-oh. Hang on, sorry, that's not right. It's six-three-oh at the end, not six-nine-oh. I always muddle those.
Secretary:So oh-seven-eight-one, five five two, six three zero. Got it. Now, membership. We have three levels. Basic is thirty pounds a year and covers the weekly meetings. Full membership is fifty-five, and that adds use of the darkroom and the equipment loan scheme. And there's a student rate at twenty-five if you have a valid card.
Caller:I finished university years ago, sadly. Hmm... I was going to say basic, but actually the loan scheme is the thing that interests me most, so let's make it full membership.
Secretary:Full it is. Was there anything particular you wanted to borrow?
Caller:Yes — a tripod, to start with. Mine broke in the move. I'd love the lighting kit too at some point.
Secretary:I'll note the tripod. Fair warning, there's a waiting list for the lighting kit — it's our most popular item. Now, meetings. Until this summer we met on Tuesdays, but the choir has taken that slot at the hall, so we're now on Thursdays, seven thirty to nine thirty.
Caller:Thursdays. That actually suits me better.
Secretary:Good. We meet upstairs at the Grange Hall — that's the red-brick building opposite the swimming pool, not the community centre on the same street. People do go to the wrong one.
Caller:The Grange Hall, upstairs. And what do I owe you altogether?
Secretary:The fifty-five, plus a one-off joining fee of ten pounds, so sixty-five in total. After your first year it's just the fifty-five.
Caller:Sixty-five pounds. Fine. Do you post out a programme of events?
Secretary:We stopped printing anything a couple of years ago — too expensive. The newsletter goes out by email every fortnight, so do check your spam folder for the first one.
Caller:By email, no problem. Anything I could get involved in straight away?
Secretary:Well, there's the monthly competition. The theme this month is reflections — puddles, mirrors, shop windows, whatever you like. Entries close on Friday.
Caller:Reflections... tempting, but I think I'll wait until I've been to a few meetings before I put my work up in front of everyone. Maybe next month.
Secretary:That's very common. One thing, though — for your first meeting, do bring a memory card with about ten recent shots on it. Nothing formal; the welcome session projects a few images from each new member so people can chat to you about them.
Caller:A memory card with ten shots. Lovely. Where do I park on the night?
Secretary:Behind the church, just along from the hall — it's free after six. See you on Thursday, Adam.
Section 2 — A guide introduces a walk around a botanical garden
Guide:Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Hartwell Botanic Garden. I'm Rosa, your guide for this morning's walk, and before we set off I'll give you a quick introduction to the site.
Guide:First, a little history. Visitors often assume the garden was laid out by the university, because the campus is next door. In fact it began in the eighteen-sixties as the private collection of a tea merchant called Josiah Hartwell, who shipped seeds home from every port he traded through. The university only took over the management in the nineteen-fifties, and today it's run by an independent trust.
Guide:Now, one disappointment I have to get out of the way. The Victorian glasshouse — the big one on all our postcards — is closed at the moment. A winter storm cracked dozens of the original panes, and the repair work means it's simply not safe to go inside. You can still photograph it from the outside, and it is worth photographing.
Guide:On a happier note, the koi feeding at the lake normally happens at two o'clock, but a school group is booked in this afternoon, so today it's been brought forward to half past twelve. If you want to see it — and children love it — keep an eye on the time, because we won't interrupt the walk for it.
Guide:Right, let me talk you round the map in your leaflet. We're standing at the main gate, on the east side of the garden, and the central avenue runs straight ahead of us, west, with a stone fountain about halfway along.
Guide:If you walk up the avenue, just past the fountain on your left you'll come to the Rose Terrace. It's past its June peak, but the late varieties are still flowering beautifully.
Guide:Carry on to the far western end of the avenue — right at the very end, where the gravel runs out — and you reach the Japanese Garden. That's the newest part of the site, opened only five years ago, and in my opinion the maples there are the best thing here in autumn.
Guide:The Alpine House is a little harder to find. From the fountain, take the narrow path north — that's to your right as you face away from the gate — go round behind the lake, and it's the low white building tucked in there. People miss it because it can't be seen from the avenue at all.
Guide:And if you need refreshments, you don't have to walk anywhere: the café is directly behind the main gate where we're standing, sharing the building with the ticket office. It serves hot food until three, drinks and cake until five.
Guide:A few practical points before we start. On the glasshouse — the repairs are taking longer than anyone hoped, so reopening, which we'd originally promised for the autumn, is now planned for the spring. Do check the website before making a special trip.
Guide:Today's walk takes about ninety minutes at a gentle pace, with plenty of stops, and we finish back here at the gate. And finally, if you'd like more detail than I can give you, audio guides can be hired from the kiosk beside the ticket office for four pounds — they're keyed to the numbered posts you'll see along the paths. Right — shall we make a start?
Section 3 — Two students and their tutor discuss a study comparing two revision apps
Dr Osei:So, your study comparing the two revision apps — Cardbox and QuizTree. Talk me through where you've got to.
Marcus:Well, the core question hasn't changed. Both apps claim to improve exam performance, but the reviews are all about how nice they are to use. Nobody seems to have tested whether people actually remember more.
Lena:That's the gap. We're not interested in which app students enjoy — we want to know which one leads to better recall when it counts.
Dr Osei:Good. And how are you going to measure that?
Marcus:My first thought was to use the time students spend in each app — both apps log it automatically, so the data's free.
Lena:And I talked him out of it. Time in the app tells you about engagement, not learning. Someone can have QuizTree open for an hour and take in nothing. What I suggested instead is a short test before the trial and the same test after it, and we measure the improvement between the two.
Marcus:Which, to be fair, she's right about. Screen time was a lazy metric. The two-test design gives us an actual learning outcome.
Dr Osei:I agree — improvement between tests is the defensible measure. Now, participants. Last time we spoke you mentioned posters around the department.
Lena:That was the plan, but we looked at what happened when last year's group tried posters — they got nine volunteers in three weeks.
Dr Osei:Nine is hopeless. Here's what I'd do: ask Professor Hale if you can have two minutes at the end of his first-year biology lectures. You'll be in front of three hundred students who all have the same exam coming — that's your pool.
Marcus:That would solve it. I did wonder about just using our friends to top up the numbers if we fall short.
Dr Osei:I'd steer clear of that. Friends want to please you — they'll try harder, and your results end up biased in whichever direction they think you're hoping for. Better a smaller sample than a distorted one. And before you recruit anyone, remember you'll need ethics approval — the form takes ten days, so submit it this week.
Lena:It's already drafted, actually. We just need your signature.
Dr Osei:Then I'll sign it after this meeting. How long will the trial itself run?
Marcus:Three weeks — no, wait, sorry, two. I keep forgetting the exam board moved the mock exams forward. If we ran three weeks, the post-test would collide with their mocks, so two weeks it is.
Dr Osei:Two weeks is tight but workable. And numbers?
Lena:We're aiming for forty participants — twenty on each app, assigned randomly. If the lecture pitch goes well, we might get more, but forty is the target we've written into the design.
Dr Osei:Sensible. Right — writing up. Who does what?
Marcus:Lena's taking the methodology chapter, I'm doing the results and the statistics, and we'll draft the introduction together over the break.
Dr Osei:Fine. One last thing — our usual Monday slot. I'm examining in another department all next week, so we'll meet on Friday instead. And not here — the media lab, because I want you to show me the app dashboards on the big screen rather than describe them.
Lena:Friday, media lab. We'll have the ethics form and the pre-test ready to show you.
Section 4 — A lecture on the acoustics of concert halls
Lecturer:Today's lecture is about a kind of architecture you experience with your ears: the concert hall. Why do orchestras sound glorious in some rooms and lifeless in others? It isn't luck — it's physics, and mostly the physics of one number.
Lecturer:That number is reverberation time — formally, the time a sound takes to decay by sixty decibels after the source stops. In a cathedral it can exceed six seconds; in your living room it's well under one. For symphonic music, the sweet spot in most cases is around two seconds: long enough to blend the strings into that famous golden wash, short enough that fast passages don't smear into mud.
Lecturer:But reverberation alone doesn't explain the halls musicians treasure. The Musikverein in Vienna, perhaps the most admired hall on earth, owes much of its magic to its narrowness. Because the room is tall and slim, sound reaches each listener quickly off the side walls, and these strong early reflections create the sense of being wrapped in the music rather than watching it from a distance.
Lecturer:That tall, narrow, rectangular design has a nickname: the shoebox hall. Vienna, Amsterdam, Boston — the nineteenth century built shoeboxes, largely by imitation rather than theory, and got it triumphantly right. The twentieth century wanted something more democratic, and the result was the vineyard hall, pioneered in Berlin in 1963, where the audience sits on terraces that step down towards the orchestra from every side. No listener is far from the stage; the trade-off is that designing good early reflections for seats behind the players is fiendishly difficult.
Lecturer:Now let me correct a popular belief. Ask an audience what makes a hall great and many will say its loudness — the idea that a fine hall simply makes the orchestra sound bigger. The evidence points elsewhere. In blind comparisons, listeners consistently prefer halls that balance clarity against warmth; sheer volume ranks surprisingly low. A hall can be loud and dreadful.
Lecturer:Here's a subtler problem: a hall changes when people walk into it. An audience is, acoustically, a field of absorbers — above all it's the clothing that soaks up sound, particularly the high frequencies. So a hall that glowed in the empty afternoon rehearsal can turn dry by evening. The standard remedy is elegant: modern seats are engineered, with padding and perforated undersides, to absorb almost exactly as much sound as a seated person, so the room behaves the same whether it's full or half empty.
Lecturer:Designers also want one room to serve many kinds of music, which is why adjustable acoustics have become standard. The cheapest tool is fabric: heavy banners that unroll from slots in the ceiling to shorten the reverberation for amplified concerts, and disappear again for the symphony. Above the platform you'll often see a movable canopy, a floating reflector that can be lowered so that the musicians hear each other clearly — players who can't hear their colleagues drift apart in tempo.
Lecturer:And because a failed hall is a hundred-million-pound mistake, nobody relies on intuition any more. Long before construction, acousticians test the design on scale models — typically at one-tenth size, using scaled-up frequencies — and increasingly on computer simulations alongside them. The models don't guarantee perfection, but they catch disasters. Next week: why recording studios chase the opposite goal — no reverberation at all.