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IELTS Listening — Practice Test 25

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40:00
Section 1 A caller makes a provisional booking at a country-house wedding venue · Coordinator, 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 455 ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
3Number of daytime guests: ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
4Package chosen: the ______ package
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
5Price per head: £ ______
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
6Provisional date: ______ May
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
7Deposit required: £ ______
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 does the venue's licence ban because of the neighbouring farm?
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
9What does the coordinator suggest the couple have instead?
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
10What will Martin email to Eleanor this afternoon?
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
Section 2 The coordinator of a new community garden addresses future plot holders · Coordinator
Questions 11-13

Choose the correct letter, A, B or C.

11What was on the site before the garden was created?
12What does the speaker say about the opening ceremony?
13How will the garden plots be allocated?
Questions 14-17

Where are the following features? Choose the correct letter, A–F, from the plan description below.

Plan of Fairview Community Garden — the entrance gate is on the east side, off Mill Road; the main path runs west through the middle of the site.

A = beside the entrance gate   B = first on the north side, near the entrance   C = halfway along the main path, on the south side   D = immediately next to the greenhouse   E = in the far north-west corner   F = in the south-west corner, behind a willow fence

  • A beside the entrance gate
  • B first on the north side, near the entrance
  • C halfway along the main path, on the south side
  • D immediately next to the greenhouse
  • E in the far north-west corner
  • F in the south-west corner, behind a willow fence
14Tool shed
15Greenhouse
16Water tank
17Compost bins
Questions 18-20

Complete the sentences below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.

18Renting a plot costs £ ______ a year, including water.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
19Volunteer sessions take place on ______ mornings.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
20Plot holders will receive the gate ______ by text message.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
Section 3 Two students discuss how to analyse their tourism interview data · Hana, Leo
Questions 21-24

Choose the correct letter, A, B or C.

21What do both students say about transcribing the interviews?
22Why do the students decide not to use the NVivo software?
23How will the students organise the coding?
24What do they agree about the quotes for the findings chapter?
Questions 25-27

Who makes each suggestion? Choose A or B. NB You may use any letter more than once.

  • A Hana
  • B Leo
25identifying interviewees by codes instead of names
26having translated quotes checked by a native speaker
27dividing the writing in the same way as the coding
Questions 28-30

Complete the sentences below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.

28After merging two overlapping categories, the students settle on ______ themes.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
29The draft findings chapter must reach Dr Whitmore by ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
30The supervision meeting has been moved to ______ at 2 pm.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
Section 4 A lecture on the engineering of birds' eggs · Lecturer
Questions 31-40

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

31The shell must bear the parent's weight, yet stay weak enough for the chick to ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
32Gases pass through thousands of microscopic ______ in the shell.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
33A waxy outer coating called the ______ stops bacteria entering.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
34Brown pigment is concentrated where the shell is ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
35Birds lacking ______ lay eggs with heavier speckling.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
36For a century, textbooks explained all egg colour as ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
37Biliverdin may partly function as a ______ for the embryo.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
38Eggs in sun-exposed nests are usually pale, to avoid ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
39An embryo must lose about 15% of the egg's mass as water to create the ______.
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
40Mountain eggs have extra pores because thin air holds less ______.
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 makes a provisional booking at a country-house wedding venue

Coordinator:Good morning, Elmwood Manor, Martin speaking. How can I help?
Caller:Oh, hello. My fiancé and I are looking at wedding venues for next spring, and Elmwood keeps coming up. Could I ask a few questions, and maybe make a provisional booking?
Coordinator:Of course — let me open a booking form. Could I start with your name?
Caller:It's Eleanor Kavanagh.
Coordinator:Kavanagh — is that C-A-V-A-N-A-G-H?
Caller:Almost — it starts with a K, not a C. So K-A-V-A-N-A-G-H.
Coordinator:K-A-V-A-N-A-G-H, thank you. And the best contact number?
Caller:My mobile. It's oh-seven-eight-one, four-five-five, six-oh-nine... sorry, no — six-two-nine. I changed numbers last month and I still say the old one. It ends six-two-nine.
Coordinator:0781, 455, 629. Got it. Now — roughly how many guests are you expecting?
Caller:About eighty for the ceremony and the meal. Probably another forty joining us in the evening.
Coordinator:That's very comfortable for us. The oak hall seats a hundred and twenty at the absolute maximum, so with eighty you'd have space left over for a proper dance floor. I'll put eighty on the form for the day.
Caller:Perfect. And what do your packages look like?
Coordinator:There are two main ones. The Classic is ninety pounds a head — a formal three-course dinner in the hall, house wine, and a master of ceremonies. The Garden package is seventy-five a head: a summer barbecue menu served out on the terrace, weather permitting, with the hall as the wet-weather backup.
Caller:Oh, we're outdoors people — the Garden one, definitely. The Classic sounds lovely, but it's a bit formal for us.
Coordinator:Garden package at seventy-five a head, noted. Now, dates. What did you have in mind?
Caller:We were hoping for Saturday the fourteenth of May.
Coordinator:Ah. The fourteenth I'm afraid I can't do — our marquee goes away for re-proofing at the start of that month and it isn't back until the middle. The first Saturday I have free with everything on site is the twenty-first of May.
Caller:The twenty-first... let me think... yes, actually, that works. Let's pencil in the twenty-first.
Coordinator:Provisional booking for the twenty-first of May. To hold the date we ask for a deposit of five hundred pounds, and it's fully refundable if you cancel within thirty days.
Caller:That's fine. Now, two things my fiancé told me to ask. First — could we bring in our own caterers? His aunt runs a restaurant.
Coordinator:I'm afraid not — all food and drink comes from our own kitchen; it's a condition of our licence. Outside suppliers are absolutely fine for the cake and the flowers, but not for catering.
Caller:He suspected as much. And the second thing — he's set his heart on fireworks to end the night.
Coordinator:That one I'll have to disappoint you on as well. We border a working farm, and our licence bans fireworks completely because of the livestock. What most couples do instead is a sparkler send-off — guests line the drive holding sparklers as you leave. Honestly, it photographs beautifully.
Caller:He'll survive. Sparklers it is.
Coordinator:Anything else at all?
Caller:Just — could we come and look around before we confirm?
Coordinator:Absolutely. Viewings run every Saturday morning, ten till twelve, no appointment needed. And this afternoon I'll email you our brochure — it has the full menus, prices, and a plan of the grounds.
Caller:Wonderful. Thank you so much, Martin.
Coordinator:Thank you, Eleanor. We'll hold the twenty-first for you.

Section 2 — The coordinator of a new community garden addresses future plot holders

Coordinator:Hello, everyone — lovely to see so many of you. I'm Sylvia Grant, coordinator of the Fairview Community Garden. Most of you are on our plot waiting list, so let me bring you up to date, then walk you round the layout.
Coordinator:First, the site itself. People often assume this was always a patch of waste ground, but in fact, until six years ago, it was a council car park — it served the old swimming baths next door. When the baths were demolished the tarmac stayed, and it took two summers to break it up and bring in topsoil.
Coordinator:Now, an apology about the opening ceremony. We had planned the official opening for this Saturday, with the mayor cutting the ribbon. Unfortunately the main paths aren't finished — the contractor is waiting on gravel — and the insurers won't let the public in until the surfaces are safe. So the opening moves back exactly two weeks: same time, same programme, and the mayor has confirmed she can still come. It is not cancelled — just later than we all hoped.
Coordinator:On to the plots. There are forty in total, and allocation will be strictly in order of the waiting list. I know a few of you hoped living next to the site might move you up the queue, and someone even suggested drawing names from a hat — but the committee decided neither of those would be fair.
Coordinator:Right — the layout; there's a plan on the noticeboard too. The entrance gate is on the east side, off Mill Road, and the main path runs straight ahead, heading west through the middle of the garden.
Coordinator:As you come through the gate, the very first thing you reach on your right — that's the north side — is the tool shed. All the shared tools live in there: spades, forks, wheelbarrows.
Coordinator:About halfway along the main path, on your left — the south side — you'll see the greenhouse. The frame is already up; the glass goes in next week, all being well.
Coordinator:Now, the water tank — this has changed. The printed plans from last year show the tank beside the entrance gate. It is not there. In the end we've placed it immediately next to the greenhouse, so the rainwater runs straight off the greenhouse roof into the tank.
Coordinator:Carry on to the far, western end of the site, and in the corner on the north side — the corner furthest from the gate — you'll find the compost bins, three big timber bays. Green waste only, please — no cooked food.
Coordinator:And diagonally opposite, in the south-west corner behind a low willow fence, is the children's area — raised beds built at child height, plus a little story circle. Schools will use it on weekday mornings.
Coordinator:A few practical points to finish. Plot rent is thirty pounds a year, payable each April, and that does include water. Volunteer sessions run on Sunday mornings, nine till twelve — no experience needed. And the gate has a combination lock: once the paths are finished, every plot holder will be sent the code by text. Please don't pass it on.
Coordinator:Any questions, I'll be by the tool shed. Thank you for your patience — two more weeks, and we're open.

Section 3 — Two students discuss how to analyse their tourism interview data

Hana:Right, Leo — that's all fifteen interviews transcribed. Eleven hours of audio. If I never type the word 'authentic' again it'll be too soon.
Leo:The transcription honestly took twice as long as we budgeted for. Neither of us saw that coming. Still — the data's rich, especially the guesthouse owners.
Hana:So, analysis. I did look at NVivo like we said we would. And before you ask — the department has a licence, so cost isn't the issue at all. But the training videos alone run to four hours, and we've got one week left. We'd spend it learning software instead of reading data.
Leo:Then let's drop it. Spreadsheet and highlighters — old-fashioned, but we already know how they work.
Hana:Agreed. Now, the actual coding. My plan was that we simply split the transcripts: you take eight, I take seven, and we each code our own half.
Leo:See, I'm really not comfortable with that. If we code separately from the start, what you call 'community pride' I might call 'local identity', and at the end we'd be merging two incompatible messes.
Hana:But coding everything twice is double the work. We don't have the time...
Leo:Not everything. What if we both code the same three interviews first, compare our labels, agree a shared codebook — and then split the rest between us?
Hana:...Actually, that fixes it, doesn't it. Three shared, then divide the other twelve. Fine — you've convinced me.
Leo:On themes — I sketched some out from memory last night, and I got six: money, seasonality, community pride, heritage, overcrowding, and, er, transport. Though — no, hang on, five. Heritage and community pride kept collapsing into each other in almost every interview; that's really one theme, not two. Five.
Hana:Five works for a findings chapter. Now — quotes. I pulled out the most entertaining ones. The man who compares cruise passengers to seagulls is going in whatever happens.
Leo:It's a great line, and keep it — but if we only quote the fireworks, we misrepresent the sample. Most of our interviewees were mild and quite balanced. We should choose quotes that show the full range of opinion, including the boring, reasonable ones.
Hana:You're right — that's fairer to the data. One seagull, plenty of balance.
Leo:Ethics next. My suggestion is we give every interviewee a code — H-one, H-two for the hoteliers, G-one for the guesthouses — no names anywhere, and no business names either. In a town that small, people are identifiable in seconds.
Hana:Yes, do that. And I'll deal with the two interviews we did in Spanish. My translations were quick and rough — so my cousin, who's a native speaker, is going to check the wording of any quote we actually use before it goes in the chapter.
Leo:Perfect. Timeline, then. Can we get the draft findings chapter to Dr Whitmore by Friday?
Hana:Friday's tight, but it's doable — my suggestion is we divide the writing up exactly the same way we divided the coding. You draft the themes you coded, I draft mine, and we edit each other.
Leo:Deal. Oh — and did you see Dr Whitmore's email? She's examining a thesis in Bruges on Monday, so our usual Monday supervision is off. She's offered Wednesday at two instead.
Hana:Wednesday at two. Honestly, that helps us — it buys the draft two extra days.
Leo:Silver linings. Right — three shared transcripts each, then. I'll put the kettle on.

Section 4 — A lecture on the engineering of birds' eggs

Lecturer:An egg looks like the simplest object in nature. Today I want to persuade you otherwise: an eggshell is precision engineering, and like all engineering it is built out of compromises.
Lecturer:Start with the mechanical paradox. A shell must be strong enough to carry the weight of an incubating parent — a brooding bird settles onto her clutch thousands of times. Yet that same shell must be weak enough, from the inside, for the chick to hatch. Evolution's answer is the domed shell — arch architecture: strong against pressure spread across the outside, weak against a point of force from within. The parent cannot crush it; the chick can peck through it.
Lecturer:But strength is only half the brief — an egg also has to breathe. Running through every shell are thousands of microscopic pores, finer than a human hair. Oxygen diffuses in; carbon dioxide out. Seal an egg with varnish and the embryo suffocates within days.
Lecturer:Those pores are also an open door for infection. The defence is the outermost layer, a thin waxy coating called the cuticle, which lets gases through but physically blocks bacteria from entering the pores — a doorman applied minutes before laying.
Lecturer:Now, colour. Just two pigments paint every bird's egg on Earth: a brown one and a blue-green one. The brown pigment, protoporphyrin, does far more than decorate. It is laid down preferentially where the shell is thin, acting as a structural filler for the weak spots. Female birds that are short of calcium lay more heavily speckled eggs, painting over the deficiencies in the shell.
Lecturer:For over a century, textbooks explained egg colour with a single word: camouflage. And camouflage is real — a plover's eggs genuinely vanish against shingle. But it cannot be the whole story: many birds that nest in dark tree holes, where no predator can see anything, lay vividly blue eggs. So the camouflage-only explanation has quietly collapsed; colour is doing several jobs at once.
Lecturer:The blue-green pigment, biliverdin, may work partly as a sunscreen — it filters ultraviolet light before it reaches the embryo. But pigment brings its own trade-off: darker shells absorb heat faster. So in open, sun-exposed nests, eggs tend to be paler, because the greater danger there is overheating. I stress 'tend to be' — these are strong tendencies, not iron laws.
Lecturer:Back to the pores, which hide the sharpest trade-off of all. Every pore that admits oxygen also lets water vapour escape, and an egg cannot be refilled. An embryo must lose some water — around fifteen per cent of the egg's mass — to form the air cell it will breathe from just before hatching. Too few pores and it suffocates; too many and it dries out.
Lecturer:And you can watch evolution adjust that balance. Eggs laid at high altitude, where the air is thin, have measurably more pores than lowland eggs of the same species — because the air holds less oxygen, and the embryo must compensate. The price is faster water loss, which mountain birds offset with damper nest sites.
Lecturer:So next time you crack one over a pan, spare it a moment's respect. Strength against the parent, weakness for the chick; breathing against drying; warmth against sunlight. There is no perfect egg — every shell is a compromise, tuned over millions of years to one particular nest. Next week: nests, and engineers of a different kind.