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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 patient phones a pharmacy to set up a prescription delivery service · Pharmacist, 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
2Phone number: 01625 477 ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
3Medication to deliver: tablets for ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
4Take one tablet each morning with ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
5Delivery day: ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
6Free service accepted: reminders by ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
7Charge per delivery: £ ______
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.
8Where is the medicine taken if the patient is not at home?
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
9What must the patient show the driver on the first delivery?
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
10How long before running out should repeat prescriptions be ordered?
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
Section 2
An events officer explains the arrangements for a town harvest festival · Events Officer
Questions 11-13
Choose the correct letter, A, B or C.
11What does the speaker say about the history of the festival?
12What is different about this year's parade?
13What has happened to the judging of the produce competition?
Questions 14-17
Where will the following be found? Choose the correct letter, A–F, from the plan description below.
Plan of the Market Square — you enter from Bridge Street on the south side; the town hall faces you at the north end.
A = at the north end, in front of the town hall steps B = along the east side, under the lime trees C = in the south-west corner, next to the bank D = in the centre of the square E = on the west side, beside the library F = outside the square, on Bridge Street
- A at the north end, in front of the town hall steps
- B along the east side, under the lime trees
- C in the south-west corner, next to the bank
- D in the centre of the square
- E on the west side, beside the library
- F outside the square, on Bridge Street
14main stage
15food stalls
16children's area
17first-aid point
Questions 18-20
Complete the sentences below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.
18Competition entries must be on the tables by ______ o'clock.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
19All the pitch-fee money will go to the town ______ this year.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
20A free ______ will run from the station car park every 20 minutes.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
Section 3
Two students and their tutor plan a series of oral-history interviews · Dr Fenwick, Amara, Tom
Questions 21-24
Choose the correct letter, A, B or C.
21What is the main purpose of the students' project?
22Why did the students decide not to record on their phones?
23Why have the students chosen individual rather than group interviews?
24Why does Dr Fenwick say interviews should last under an hour?
Questions 25-27
Who makes each suggestion? Choose A, B or C. NB You may use any letter more than once.
- A Amara
- B Tom
- C Dr Fenwick
25contacting the local history society
26borrowing recorders from the media department
27storing consent forms apart from the recordings
Questions 28-30
Complete the sentences below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.
28The students will now interview ______ people.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
29Completed transcripts must reach Dr Fenwick by the end of ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
30Next week's meeting has been moved to ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
Section 4
A lecture on microbes that live in extreme environments · Lecturer
Questions 31-40
Complete the notes below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.
31Extremophiles = organisms that ______ in extreme conditions, rather than merely tolerating them.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
32Heat-loving bacteria survive because their ______ remain stable at very high temperatures.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
33Vent bacteria obtain energy through a process called ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
34These bacteria form the base of the vent's ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
35Textbooks once claimed that deep underground rock was ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
36Because energy is scarce, some deep microbes may divide only once in a ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
37Estimates suggest the deep biosphere may contain more ______ than all surface life combined.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
38A heat-stable enzyme from a hot-spring bacterium is used in laboratories to copy ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
39Cold-adapted enzymes allow ______ to work well at low temperatures.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
40Similar microbes might survive on ______, where salty water seems to exist underground.
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 patient phones a pharmacy to set up a prescription delivery service
Pharmacist:Good afternoon, Milford Pharmacy, Raj speaking.
Caller:Oh, hello. My doctor said you deliver prescriptions now? My knee's playing up and getting into town every month is becoming a real struggle.
Pharmacist:We do indeed — I can set that up for you right away. Could I take your surname first?
Caller:It's Raeburn. Mrs Ellen Raeburn.
Pharmacist:Raeburn — R-A-Y-B-U-R-N?
Caller:No, there's no Y in it. It's R-A-E-B-U-R-N — A-E together, like the old Scottish painter.
Pharmacist:R-A-E-B-U-R-N, lovely. And a phone number, in case the driver needs to reach you?
Caller:The landline's best. It's oh-one-six-two-five, four-double-seven, three-oh-two... oh, wait, I'm telling you my daughter's number, aren't I. Ours ends three-oh-eight. So four-double-seven, three-oh-eight.
Pharmacist:Four-seven-seven, three-zero-eight. Right. Now I can see your file here — this is for your regular tablets, the ones for blood pressure?
Caller:That's it. Just those — I get my eye drops from the hospital, so don't worry about them.
Pharmacist:Blood pressure tablets only, noted. And you know the routine with these — one each morning, and always with food. On an empty stomach they can make you dizzy, so breakfast time is ideal.
Caller:With food, yes, the doctor drummed that into me. Now, when would you deliver? Tuesday would suit me — that's when I'm always home.
Pharmacist:Ah — Tuesday's the one day I can't offer, I'm afraid. The van does the villages on Tuesdays. Your side of town is covered on Wednesdays. Would that work?
Caller:Wednesday... yes, all right, I can be in on Wednesday mornings.
Pharmacist:Wednesday it is. Now, two optional extras. We can put your tablets into a weekly pill organiser — a tray marked with the days — that's three pounds a month. And we have a free reminder service: a text message three days before each delivery is due.
Caller:The tray thing I don't need — honestly, one tablet a day, I'd feel silly. But the reminders, yes please. My memory's worse than my knee.
Pharmacist:No organiser, texts on. So the only cost is the delivery itself: two pounds fifty each time. Prescriptions over twenty pounds are delivered free, but yours won't reach that.
Caller:Two fifty, that's fair. What happens if I do miss the driver?
Pharmacist:That's the one awkward bit. Because it's medication, he's not allowed to leave it with a neighbour or in the porch — regulations. It comes back to the pharmacy, and we try again the next day.
Caller:Back to the pharmacy. Understood — I'll make sure I'm in.
Pharmacist:One more thing for the very first delivery: the driver has to confirm who you are, so please have some photo ID ready — a passport or a bus pass with your photograph is fine. After that first time he'll know you.
Caller:Photo ID the first time. I'll dig out my bus pass. And ordering repeats?
Pharmacist:Just ring us at least forty-eight hours before you run out. Any later and I can't promise the van. So — first delivery this coming Wednesday, Mrs Raeburn.
Caller:Wonderful. Thank you, Raj, you've been a great help.
Section 2 — An events officer explains the arrangements for a town harvest festival
Events Officer:Hello, everyone — thanks for coming to this briefing about Saturday's Harvest Festival. I'm Karen from the council events team, and I'll run through the day, because a few things have changed since the leaflets were printed.
Events Officer:First, a bit of background for the newer volunteers. Visitors love to tell us the festival is an ancient tradition, and the costumes do encourage that idea — but in fact it only goes back to nineteen seventy-eight, when the traders' association started it to bring people back to the market square after the new shopping centre opened. Ancient it is not — though around eight thousand people came last year.
Events Officer:Now, the parade. Normally it comes straight down the High Street, but the gas board has half the street dug up until November, so this year the parade will go along Riverside Walk instead. It's actually a prettier route, and it sets off from the railway station at eleven sharp, finishing at the square around half past.
Events Officer:One more change, and it's an annoying one. The produce competition — the marrows and the chutneys — is normally judged at eleven, with results at lunchtime. Our judge this year is coming up from Exeter, and her train doesn't get in until after one, so judging has been pushed back to three o'clock. Entries still have to be on the tables by ten, mind — that hasn't changed, and latecomers will be turned away.
Events Officer:Right, the layout of the square. If you're walking in from Bridge Street, you'll enter at the south side, and it helps to picture the town hall facing you at the far end — that's north.
Events Officer:The main stage usually sits in the centre of the square, but this year the parade needs to sweep right through the middle to reach the finish, so we've moved the stage to the north end, directly in front of the town hall steps. The steps actually make a natural back wall, so the sound should be better than usual.
Events Officer:The food stalls — all thirty of them — run along the east side of the square, under the row of lime trees.
Events Officer:The children's area, with the face painting and the straw maze, is over on the west side, right beside the library. We put it there deliberately — the library's opening its toilets and its baby-change room for us all day.
Events Officer:And please learn this one: the first-aid point is in the south-west corner of the square, next to the bank. St John's volunteers will be there from nine until six. If anyone asks you for help, that corner is where you take them.
Events Officer:A couple of final things. The festival isn't just a party — every stall pays a pitch fee, and this year all of that money goes to the town food bank, which is a change from last year's split between several charities. Do mention it to visitors; it encourages spending.
Events Officer:And parking. The square and Bridge Street are closed to traffic all day, so we're running a free shuttle bus from the station car park, every twenty minutes from nine in the morning. Point drivers there rather than letting them circle the back streets. Right — any questions, grab me afterwards. Otherwise, see you all at eight on Saturday for setup.
Section 3 — Two students and their tutor plan a series of oral-history interviews
Dr Fenwick:Right — your oral-history project on the Denton textile mill. Remind me of the shape of it.
Amara:The mill closed in nineteen eighty-two, and the people who worked there are mostly in their late seventies and eighties now. Our aim is to record their working lives properly before those memories are gone for good — the archive has photographs of the machines, but almost nothing about what a shift actually felt like.
Tom:The council's website has three paragraphs on a mill that employed two thousand people.
Dr Fenwick:A genuinely worthwhile gap, then. How are you finding your interviewees?
Amara:That was my suggestion — I've written to the local history society. Their newsletter goes out to about four hundred members, and the chairwoman thinks a dozen former mill workers are active in the society itself.
Dr Fenwick:Much better than knocking on doors. And how will you record? Please don't say your phones.
Tom:That was my plan, honestly — everyone has one, it costs nothing. But we tested it in the common room and the recording was hopeless. Any background noise at all and you lose whole sentences, and most of these interviews will be in people's kitchens with kettles and clocks and dogs.
Dr Fenwick:Exactly the right reason to drop it.
Tom:So I've been on to the media department — they'll lend us two proper digital recorders with clip-on microphones. I've filled in the booking form already.
Dr Fenwick:Good. Now, format. One at a time, or in groups?
Amara:I originally wanted group sessions — three or four people around a table sparking memories off each other. Tom disagreed and, having watched one of the society's committee meetings, I now think he's right. Two confident voices did all the talking and the quiet people just nodded along. One-to-one it is.
Dr Fenwick:I'd have pushed you the same way. Keep each session under an hour, by the way — people this age tire, and the quality of recall drops sharply once they do.
Tom:Under an hour, noted. Now, the consent forms. We've used the standard university template — it covers recording, archiving and quotation.
Dr Fenwick:Signed before the recorder is switched on, not after — that's the part students get wrong. And nothing goes to the archive without a signature, however good the material is.
Amara:There's one more thing I picked up from the ethics guidance: the signed forms shouldn't be stored with the recordings themselves. So I'm suggesting the forms live in the department office, and the audio files on the secure drive — that way a name can't be matched to a voice if one system is ever breached.
Dr Fenwick:Sensible, and yes, do exactly that. How many interviews altogether?
Tom:Ten — no, sorry, eight. I keep saying ten, but two of the people on our list have moved away to be near family, one to Canada. So eight confirmed.
Dr Fenwick:Eight is plenty for the timescale. And transcription? It's slower than you think.
Amara:We're splitting it evenly: whoever conducts the interview transcribes it, so four each.
Dr Fenwick:Agreed. Full transcripts to me by the end of November, then, so we can select extracts before the holidays. Last thing — our Tuesday meeting next week. I'm at a conference in Leeds until Wednesday night, so come on Thursday instead, usual time, and bring the first two recordings with you.
Tom:Thursday, usual time. We'll be there.
Section 4 — A lecture on microbes that live in extreme environments
Lecturer:This morning I want to introduce you to the toughest organisms on the planet — microbes whose study has quietly reshaped biotechnology and the search for life beyond Earth.
Lecturer:We call them extremophiles: organisms that don't merely tolerate extreme conditions but actually thrive in them — in boiling springs, in saturated brine, in acid strong enough to strip paint. That distinction matters: a vent microbe is at home there, and dies if you bring it up to what we'd call comfort.
Lecturer:Take heat first. In the hot springs of Yellowstone, some bacteria grow happily above eighty degrees Celsius — temperatures that cook the proteins of ordinary cells within seconds. The heat-lovers survive because their enzymes are unusually stable: folded tightly enough, and bonded strongly enough, to keep working at temperatures that unravel our own. That one property, as we'll see, turned out to be worth billions.
Lecturer:The most dramatic address of all, though, is the deep-sea hydrothermal vent — a crack in the ocean floor, two or three kilometres down, jetting mineral-rich water at several hundred degrees. No sunlight has ever reached these places, and until the vents were discovered in 1977 most biologists would have said no rich ecosystem could exist without it. Yet the vents swarm with life. The trick is a process called chemosynthesis: instead of capturing light, the resident bacteria strip energy from the chemicals in the vent fluid — hydrogen sulphide, mostly. Those bacteria then form the base of the entire local food chain, feeding the tube worms, clams and blind white crabs found nowhere else.
Lecturer:Now let me demolish an old assumption properly, because it held for most of a century. Textbooks used to state — flatly — that rock deep beneath our feet was sterile. No light, no oxygen, crushing pressure: nothing could live there, the reasoning went. Then, in the 1980s and 90s, boreholes drilled kilometres into the crust started coming back contaminated — except it wasn't contamination. The microbes were native.
Lecturer:Life down there runs almost unimaginably slowly, and the cause is simple: energy is desperately scarce, so metabolism throttles down to match. Some deep populations appear to divide perhaps once in a century — compare that with twenty minutes for gut bacteria in the lab. And the sheer volume of inhabited rock changes our arithmetic: by some estimates — and I stress these are estimates — the deep biosphere may hold more carbon than every forest, whale and human on the surface combined.
Lecturer:Why should anyone outside a university care? Because extremophiles keep handing us tools. The most famous is an enzyme taken from a Yellowstone hot-spring bacterium, which laboratories everywhere now use to copy DNA — the reaction has to run at near-boiling temperatures, and only a heat-stable enzyme survives the cycles. Every PCR test you've ever taken depends on it. At the cold end of the scale, enzymes from Antarctic microbes now let detergents clean effectively at low temperatures — which saves energy across millions of washing machines.
Lecturer:And one final implication. If microbes flourish in dark, frozen, chemical-fed corners of the Earth, then similar organisms might — might — survive on Mars, where briny water appears to persist below the surface. I want to be careful: the evidence suggests such life is possible; it certainly doesn't prove it exists. Next week: how we might actually detect it.