Raw score

0/40

Estimated band

–

By section

–

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.

Try another test

Your browser has no English speech voices available, so the audio cannot play. Try Chrome or Edge on desktop, or check your system's text-to-speech settings.

IELTS Listening — Practice Test 21

0/40 answered

40:00

Section 1 A caller arranges to have carpets cleaned at his home · Receptionist, 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: 0742 688 ______

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

3Address: 14 ______ Close, Denton

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

4Number of areas to be cleaned: ______

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

5Pre-treatment needed for a ______ stain (£15)

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

6Day of appointment: ______ morning

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

7Total cost: £ ______

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.

8What should the customer do to the carpets before the team arrives?

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

9Which optional service does the caller decide NOT to have?

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

10How long must the family stay off the carpets after cleaning?

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

Section 2 A transport officer explains changes to the city bus network · Transport officer

Questions 11-13

Choose the correct letter, A, B or C.

11Why is the bus network being redesigned?

A to reduce the cost of running the service B because passenger numbers have grown in one part of the city C to support the new congestion charge

12What does the speaker say about fares?

A They will not change for the first year. B They will rise when the new network starts. C They will be cheaper on all routes.

13What is the problem with the night bus service?

A The buses have not yet been delivered. B There are not yet enough trained drivers. C It will only run at weekends.

Questions 14-17

Where will passengers board the following buses? Choose the correct letter, A–F, from the plan description below.

Plan of the new city-centre stops — the new interchange is on Corporation Street; the old bus depot on Fenwick Lane is closing.

A = directly outside the railway station B = on the north side of Market Square C = beside the new shopping centre D = along Riverside Drive, opposite the rowing club E = at the old bus depot on Fenwick Lane F = by the university's main gates

A directly outside the railway station
B on the north side of Market Square
C beside the new shopping centre
D along Riverside Drive, opposite the rowing club
E at the old bus depot on Fenwick Lane
F by the university's main gates

14Route 4 (airport)

15Route 7

16Route 12

17Route 20

Questions 18-20

Complete the notes about the ticket app below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.

18Step 1: download the app and register using an ______.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

19Step 2: pay in the app — the phone then displays a ______.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

20Passengers without smartphones can buy paper tickets at the ______ on Bridge Street.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER

Section 4 A lecture on the history of weather forecasting · Lecturer

Questions 31-40

Complete the notes below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.

31For centuries, forecasting meant observing the ______ and the behaviour of birds.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

32The ______ allowed storm reports to travel faster than the storms themselves.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

33FitzRoy's warnings were displayed at harbours using canvas ______.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

34FitzRoy invented the word '______' for his published predictions.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

35Richardson proposed stepping the weather forward using the atmosphere's governing ______.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

36Richardson estimated a real-time forecast would need 64,000 human ______.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

37Lorenz found that forecasts were extremely sensitive to tiny changes in the ______ conditions.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

38Lorenz's own early example featured a ______, not a butterfly.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

39Because of ensemble forecasting, modern forecasts are expressed as ______ rather than certainties.

NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

40Beyond about ______, detailed weather prediction becomes impossible.

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 arranges to have carpets cleaned at his home

Receptionist:Good morning, Brightway Carpet Care, Dawn speaking. How can I help?

Caller:Oh, hello. A neighbour gave me your number — I'd like to have some carpets cleaned, please.

Receptionist:Certainly, we can arrange that. Let me set up a booking. Could I take your name first?

Caller:Yes, it's Alan Pearse.

Receptionist:Pierce — like the verb? P-I-E-R-C-E?

Caller:No, the other spelling, I'm afraid. P-E-A-R-S-E. E-A in the middle, and an S rather than a C.

Receptionist:P-E-A-R-S-E. Thank you. And a daytime contact number?

Caller:My mobile is best. It's oh-seven-four-two, six-double-eight, six-one-nine... wait, sorry, I always do this — six-one-nine is my wife's. Mine ends five-one-nine. So oh-seven-four-two, six-eight-eight, five-one-nine.

Receptionist:Zero seven four two, six double eight, five one nine. And the address where we'd be cleaning?

Caller:Fourteen Sycamore Close — that's Sycamore spelt S-Y-C-A-M-O-R-E — in Denton.

Receptionist:Lovely, we've got teams in Denton all the time. Now, which carpets are we talking about?

Caller:The living room, the hall and stairs, and the main bedroom.

Receptionist:We'd count that as three areas — the hall and the stairs go together as one. Our three-area package is seventy pounds. Are there any stains we should know about? Ordinary marks come out in the standard clean, but some things need pre-treating.

Caller:There is one, yes. Red wine, on the living-room carpet, from Christmas. We dabbed at it, which apparently was the wrong thing to do.

Receptionist:Dabbing's fine — scrubbing is the sin. Wine we can usually shift, but it does need a special pre-treatment, and that's fifteen pounds extra.

Caller:Go on then — it's right in the middle of the floor, so we can hardly ignore it.

Receptionist:So that's seventy plus fifteen — eighty-five pounds altogether. Now, days. We have a team in Denton on Thursdays —

Caller:Thursday would be perfect, actually.

Receptionist:— ah, but not this week, I'm sorry. Both of our Thursday crews are finishing a big hotel job that's overrun. I could offer you Wednesday morning instead, between nine and eleven?

Caller:Wednesday... let me think. Yes, all right, Wednesday morning. My wife will be at home then anyway.

Receptionist:Wednesday it is. A few practical things. Please vacuum the carpets before the team arrives — the machines work far better on a vacuumed carpet, and if we have to do it ourselves we just lose cleaning time.

Caller:We can certainly do that.

Receptionist:And would you like the furniture-moving service? For ten pounds the team will shift the sofas and beds and put everything back afterwards.

Caller:No, I don't think so — we'll move things ourselves the night before. There's not much in the bedroom anyway.

Receptionist:No problem, I'll mark that as not required. Last thing: afterwards the carpets stay damp for a while. Keep everyone off them for four hours — longer for the wine patch, ideally — and open the windows if it's dry outside.

Caller:Four hours off the carpets, windows open. And how do I pay?

Receptionist:Card to the team on the day, or cash if you prefer — there's no booking fee. You'll get a text the evening before confirming the time.

Caller:That all sounds fine. Thank you very much, Dawn.

Receptionist:Thank you, Mr Pearse. We'll see you on Wednesday morning.

Section 2 — A transport officer explains changes to the city bus network

Transport officer:Good evening, everyone. I'm Martin Doyle from the city transport department, and I'll explain the changes to the bus network starting next month — what's changing, why, and how the new ticket app works.

Transport officer:First, the why. There's a rumour that this is about cutting costs, and another that it's connected to the congestion charge. Neither is right. The plain reason is growth: passenger numbers in the western suburbs have doubled in five years — new housing, mostly — and the old network, which was designed forty years ago, simply doesn't go where people now live and work. So we've redrawn it.

Transport officer:The centre of the new network is the new interchange on Corporation Street. From next month, most cross-city routes will call there. Let me run through the four routes that change the most — do follow on the plan on the screen.

Transport officer:Route four — that's the airport service — currently leaves from the old bus depot on Fenwick Lane. The depot site has been sold for housing, so from the fifth, route four will depart from directly outside the railway station instead — better for nearly everyone, since most airport passengers connect from trains anyway.

Transport officer:Route seven keeps its number but changes its path through the centre. Instead of squeezing down the High Street, which delays it terribly on market days, it will now run along Riverside Drive. You'll board at the new shelters there, opposite the rowing club.

Transport officer:Route twelve is the students' route, and it's the biggest winner. It has been extended, and its new terminus is right by the university's main gates — no more ten-minute walk from Mill Road.

Transport officer:And route twenty, our orbital service, also used to start from the old depot. From next month you'll catch it on the north side of Market Square — the north side, please note, by the bank. The south side is where the tourist coaches stop, and the stop beside the new shopping centre is for local circular services only, so don't wait at either of those.

Transport officer:Now, fares. People always assume a shake-up means a fare rise. Not this time: fares are frozen for the first twelve months of the new network. After that, I make no promises.

Transport officer:One piece of less good news. We had hoped to launch the night bus service — hourly buses on the main corridors until three in the morning — at the same time as the daytime changes. That launch has had to be pushed back to January. It's not the vehicles — the buses are already bought — it's drivers: we're still recruiting and training enough of them, and we won't run a night service short-staffed.

Transport officer:Finally, the ticket app — the cheapest way to travel on the new network. Three steps. Step one: download the app and register — all you need is an email address; there's no long form to fill in. Step two: choose your ticket and pay inside the app, and your phone screen will then display a QR code. Step three: when you board, hold that QR code flat against the scanner by the door until it beeps. And if you don't use a smartphone, don't worry — paper tickets will still be sold at the travel office on Bridge Street, which is staying open at least until next summer.

Section 3 — Two students plan a joint literary translation project

Lena:Right, Marco — the joint translation project. We need to settle on a text today, or we'll never make the deadline.

Marco:Agreed. The three options we shortlisted: the Moravia novel, the newspaper articles, or Rossi's short stories.

Lena:My vote is the short stories. The novel is wonderful, but it's still in copyright — we'd have to write to the estate for permission, and that could take months.

Marco:And the articles? They'd be quick.

Lena:Quick, but dated — half of them are about a nineteen-nineties election. The examiners' notes say the commentary matters more than speed. The stories are out of copyright, they're self-contained, and there are exactly ten of them — easy to divide.

Marco:Fine, the Rossi stories it is. How long is the collection altogether? About eight thousand words?

Lena:More than that — sorry, I counted it on Friday: it's eighteen thousand. Eight thousand would barely be one long story.

Marco:Eighteen thousand between the two of us — still workable. Now, terminology. I looked properly at that online tool, LexiTerm. It's slick — it keeps every agreed term in one database and flags inconsistencies automatically.

Lena:I nearly signed us up — then I read the small print. It's only free for thirty days. After the trial it's twelve euros a month each, and our project runs for four months. I don't think a student budget stretches to that.

Marco:Ah. No, that settles it — we'll do what last year's pair did and keep a shared spreadsheet instead. Actually, can I suggest we also give it a separate tab just for idioms? Those are the things we'll each translate differently without noticing.

Lena:Good idea — an idioms tab it is. Now, dividing the work. I'd say you take stories one to five, I take six to ten, and then we swap and edit each other's half.

Marco:Mm, I'm not sure about that. If we split it down the middle, won't the two halves end up sounding like two different translators? Rossi's voice is so particular. I'd rather we worked through every story together, sentence by sentence.

Lena:Together would be twice as slow — last term one page of the poem took us an entire evening. Look, this is exactly what the style guide is for. Before either of us translates a word, we write a short guide — how we render the dialect, which spellings we use, how we punctuate dialogue — and we both follow it.

Marco:...Yes, all right. With a proper style guide, I'm persuaded — half each, then swap to edit. And let me add one more safeguard: my flatmate is a native speaker. Let's ask her to read the final draft aloud and flag anything that doesn't sound natural.

Lena:Perfect. And I'd like to compare the two published English versions of story seven — not to copy, just to see how each handled the dialect problem.

Marco:As long as we log that in the commentary. Now — the check-in with Dr Fabbri. That was set for the twelfth of May, wasn't it?

Lena:It was, but she emailed this morning: she's at a conference that whole week, so we're seeing her on the fifth instead. A week earlier — which means the style guide has to be finished before the fifth.

Marco:Then let's write it this weekend. Saturday afternoon, usual library room?

Lena:Saturday afternoon. Bring the idioms.

Section 4 — A lecture on the history of weather forecasting

Lecturer:Today, a short history of weather forecasting — from folklore to supercomputers — and two ideas that changed how we think about prediction itself.

Lecturer:For most of history, forecasting meant reading the sky. Sailors and farmers memorised rhymes — red sky at night — and watched cloud shapes, wind shifts, the behaviour of birds. Some of it encoded real patterns, but it could only see a few hours ahead, because no observer knew what was happening beyond their own horizon.

Lecturer:The invention that changed everything was not a weather instrument: it was the telegraph. From the eighteen-forties, observations could outrun the weather itself. A storm lashing one coast could be reported to ports hundreds of miles away before it arrived — for the first time, a warning could beat the wind.

Lecturer:The man who turned that into a public system was Robert FitzRoy. After a terrible wreck in eighteen fifty-nine, in which hundreds drowned in a storm that had been perfectly predictable, FitzRoy set up a national storm-warning service. When the telegraphed reports pointed to a gale, harbours hoisted canvas cones on tall masts, so every fisherman could read the warning at a glance. FitzRoy then began publishing predictions in the newspapers — and because 'prophecy' sounded mystical, he coined a sober new word for them: forecast.

Lecturer:The next revolution was conceptual. In the early twentieth century, Lewis Fry Richardson argued that since the atmosphere obeys the laws of physics, tomorrow's weather could in principle be calculated: express today's atmosphere as numbers, apply the governing equations, and step forward in time. This is numerical prediction — forecasting by calculation rather than experience. His own attempt failed: one hand-computed forecast took weeks and was badly wrong. He estimated that beating the weather in real time would need a hall of sixty-four thousand human computers — in effect, a machine that did not yet exist. When electronic computers arrived after the war, his method worked, and it underpins every modern forecast.

Lecturer:Then came the humbling discovery. In nineteen sixty-one, Edward Lorenz re-ran a weather simulation and, to save time, typed in the starting numbers rounded to three decimal places instead of six. The two runs began identically, then drifted apart until they bore no resemblance at all. Tiny differences in the initial conditions had grown into completely different weather. Popular accounts credit Lorenz with declaring that a butterfly flapping its wings causes a tornado. In fact, his own early example used a seagull, and the butterfly arrived later, in the title of a conference session — written by another scientist, not by Lorenz. The poetry stuck; the point is that the atmosphere is chaotic.

Lecturer:Forecasters responded by changing what a forecast is. Instead of running the model once, they now run it fifty or more times, each starting from very slightly different initial states — a technique called ensemble forecasting. Where the runs agree, confidence is high; where they scatter, it is low. That is why a modern forecast speaks in probabilities — a seventy per cent chance of rain — rather than in certainties.

Lecturer:Chaos still sets the outer boundary. Beyond roughly two weeks, even the best ensembles scatter so widely that detailed prediction dissolves. Within that limit, a five-day forecast today beats a one-day forecast from forty years ago. FitzRoy would be quietly pleased that we still use his word.