IELTS Listening Practice Test 2: Free, with Answers

Presenter:Good morning, and welcome back to Westbury Today. Now, it's that time of year again, and judging by the messages we've been getting, a lot of you want to know about the Westbury Summer Festival. It started twenty years ago as a small craft fair in the church hall, and it's now one of the biggest events in the county, so I've got all the details for you this morning.

Presenter:First of all, there are a few changes this year. For the last ten years, the festival has run for three days over a long weekend. This year, for the first time, it'll last for five days, from Wednesday the twentieth to Sunday the twenty-fourth of August. There were rumours that it might move to the new sports ground on the edge of town, because there's more space there, but I'm pleased to say it'll stay where it's always been, in Victoria Park.

Presenter:Ticket prices are exactly the same as last year, which is good news: twelve pounds for adults and six for children, and as before, under-fives go free. What is new is transport. The organisers have arranged a free bus that will run every twenty minutes between the railway station and the main gate, from ten in the morning until midnight. Just look out for the green signs outside the station. They'd also hoped to add a special programme for teenagers this year, with a skate park and a music tent, but unfortunately that's been postponed until next year.

Presenter:Now, a few tips if you're going. You can pay on the gate, but if you buy your ticket online before the day, you'll save two pounds, and you'll avoid the queue, which can be very long on Saturday morning. Don't worry about bringing cash, by the way; every stall on site takes cards this year. The forecast is looking good for the whole week, so you probably won't need a raincoat. But if you're planning to stay for the evening concerts, do bring a blanket or a folding chair, because there's no seating provided on the main lawn. And please don't drive there; the car park on Mill Lane is closed for repairs, and there's no parking in the surrounding streets.

Presenter:So, let's look at some of the events. The open-air cinema is back in its usual spot by the lake, and this year they're showing family classics every night. Last year the films began at eight, but people complained that it was too light to see the screen properly, so this time they won't start until half past nine. There's no need to book; just turn up.

Presenter:In the big tent, there's the puppet theatre. The shows are short, only about twenty minutes, and they've been written especially for the very youngest festival-goers, so it's ideal if you've got toddlers or babies with you. Don't worry, nobody will be asked to go up on stage; it's a chance to sit back and enjoy the show. Older children may find it a bit too simple, though.

Presenter:Then there's the street food market, with over forty stalls from all over the region, selling everything from fresh seafood to Indian sweets. It's always the event that draws the biggest crowds, so if you want to eat at lunchtime, my advice is to get there before twelve.

Presenter:On Saturday afternoon, the Westbury Brass Band will be playing on the bandstand. They've been going for over a hundred years, and they're celebrating with a programme of film music. The concert's free, but there'll be a collection at the end, and every penny goes to the children's ward at Westbury Hospital, so please be generous.

Presenter:If you fancy getting your hands dirty, try the pottery workshop. A local potter will show you how to make a bowl on the wheel, and you can take it home once it's been fired. But there are only twelve wheels, so once those places have gone, that's it for the day.

Presenter:And finally, on Thursday and Friday evening, there's a night walk around the park to look for bats. You'll be given a special detector that lets you hear them, and there's a short talk from a wildlife expert at the start. The walk is completely weather-dependent, though. If it rains, it'll be called off, because the bats simply won't come out.

Presenter:So, that's the Westbury Summer Festival. You'll find the full programme on our website. Now, here's the weather.

Hannah:Right, Ethan, shall we start planning the write-up? Dr Patel wants a draft by Friday.

Ethan:Sure. I guess we should begin with why we chose the topic. I know she gave us a list of ideas at the start of term, but in the end we didn't use any of them, did we?

Hannah:No. It really came from the two of us arguing in the library. You always have music on when you're revising, and I can't concentrate unless it's completely quiet.

Ethan:True. We both thought our own way was better, so we decided to test it. I'd assumed there'd be loads of studies on it already, but actually there weren't many, and the ones we found didn't agree with each other.

Hannah:That's worth saying in the introduction too. It shows there was a gap. OK, then participants. Getting people to take part was much easier than I'd expected.

Ethan:Yeah, we had more volunteers than we needed, and nearly everyone turned up when they were supposed to. The problem was who they were. Almost all of them were first-year psychology students, because we only put the poster up in our own department.

Hannah:So they all had a very similar background, and some of them may even have guessed what we were testing. We should mention that as a weakness.

Ethan:Definitely. At least the consent forms were straightforward. Dr Patel approved them first time, which was a relief. What about the instructions, though? I thought they were fine.

Hannah:The wording was fine, and they were short enough. My concern is that you read them out on some days and I read them out on others. We might have sounded quite different, and that could have affected how people approached the task.

Ethan:Hmm, so next time one person should give them every time. Or we could even record them.

Hannah:Exactly. Now, the results. What surprised you most?

Ethan:Well, classical music came out about where we predicted, somewhere in the middle. But I was sure the songs with lyrics would be the worst, because the words would get mixed up with the words on the list. In fact, they made hardly any difference compared with music without words.

Hannah:I was expecting that too. And people in the silent group did best, which I was pleased about, obviously.

Ethan:Of course you were. So, what do we do next? We could run it again with a larger group.

Hannah:We haven't got time for that before the deadline.

Ethan:Or we could compare our results with that study from Edinburgh?

Hannah:We already do that in the discussion section. But I think we should send everyone a short questionnaire about their study habits, so we can see whether people who normally study with music did better with it.

Ethan:Good idea. That won't take long. I'll put one together tonight.

Ethan:OK, for the method section, I think a flow chart would be clearer than a long paragraph.

Hannah:Agreed. So, step one: each person was given a list of thirty words. We should explain that it was forty at first, but when we tried it out on our flatmates, they found that far too many.

Ethan:True. And we should say what kind of words they were, because we chose them carefully. They were all nouns, things you can picture, like table or river. We avoided verbs and adjectives because they're harder to remember.

Hannah:Right. Then they had two minutes to study the list. While they were doing that, they heard one of three things: classical music, pop songs with lyrics, or silence.

Ethan:And we used the same headphones for everyone, even the silent group, so the conditions were the same.

Hannah:Good point. Then came the bit people hated.

Ethan:The puzzle. They had five minutes to work on it, and the point was to stop them repeating the words in their heads. A few people asked if they could do a crossword instead, but we wanted everyone to do exactly the same task.

Hannah:Then finally, they wrote down as many words as they could remember. They didn't have to write them in any particular order, which I think made it fairer.

Ethan:Yes, some studies make people recall them in order, but that's really testing something different. And then we put all the scores into a spreadsheet.

Hannah:I'd originally planned to use a statistics program, but the spreadsheet did everything we needed. OK, I think that's the method done. Shall we look at the graphs next?

Ethan:Sure, let me open them.

Lecturer:Good morning, everyone. Today I want to look at a material that has puzzled engineers for a very long time: the concrete used by the ancient Romans. All over the Mediterranean, you can still see Roman harbours, bridges and domes that are around two thousand years old. The best-known example is probably the Pantheon in Rome, whose dome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Some of these harbour structures have spent their entire life standing in seawater.

Lecturer:Compare that with modern concrete. Most modern structures contain steel bars for strength, and when water gets in, the steel slowly rusts and expands. The result is that many of our buildings and bridges begin to crack within fifty years, and some need major repairs much sooner. In several countries, motorway bridges built in the nineteen-sixties are already being replaced. So what did the Romans know that we don't?

Lecturer:Let's start with the ingredients. Roman concrete was made from lime, which acted as the glue, together with fragments of rock, or sometimes broken pottery and brick. But the crucial ingredient wasn't the sand that we would use today. It was volcanic ash. The most prized ash came from the area around the Bay of Naples, near the town of Pozzuoli, and it was shipped in huge quantities right across the empire. The Roman architect Vitruvius wrote about it with great enthusiasm. He even recommended roughly one part lime to three parts ash, although he couldn't really explain why it worked so well.

Lecturer:Now, the most surprising discovery concerns structures built in the sea. You'd expect seawater to damage concrete, and with modern concrete it certainly does: the salt attacks the steel inside. But when seawater soaks into Roman concrete, it reacts with the volcanic material, and over the centuries, new minerals form. Under powerful microscopes, researchers found that these minerals had grown as tiny interlocking crystals, which reinforce the structure from within. So Roman harbour structures have, in a sense, been getting stronger for two thousand years.

Lecturer:There's another feature that scientists ignored for decades. If you look closely at Roman concrete, you can see small white lumps of lime, which we now call lime clasts. For a long time, these were taken as evidence that the builders had used poor-quality lime, or that they'd been careless with their mixing. Recent research suggests the opposite: the clasts are there for a reason. When a tiny crack forms and water gets in, it dissolves some of the lime in the clasts. The calcium then flows into the crack and hardens. In other words, the concrete is able to heal itself. In laboratory tests, cracks in samples made this way sealed up within about two weeks.

Lecturer:So how were these clasts produced? It now seems that the Romans used a technique known as hot mixing. Instead of first combining lime with water, they added quicklime directly to the other ingredients. That reaction releases a great deal of heat, along with clouds of steam. And the heat had two advantages. It created the lime clasts, and, although it didn't make the concrete any stronger at first, it allowed the mixture to set more quickly, so construction could move ahead much faster.

Lecturer:Now, I don't want to give the impression that Roman concrete is perfect. It's considerably weaker than modern reinforced concrete when it comes to supporting heavy loads. You could build a harbour or a low bridge with it, but not the tall buildings that make up a modern city centre. It also takes a long time to reach its full strength, which wouldn't suit today's construction schedules.

Lecturer:Even so, engineers are very interested in it, mainly for environmental reasons. Producing modern cement means heating limestone to around one thousand four hundred and fifty degrees, and the cement industry is responsible for roughly eight per cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. The Roman approach needs far less energy, and that matters if we want to reduce construction's impact on the climate. Nobody yet knows, though, whether it could be produced cheaply enough on an industrial scale.

Lecturer:One of the most promising applications is on the coast. Because of the way it reacts with seawater, Roman-style concrete is now being tested for sea defences, where modern concrete tends to wear away quite quickly. Some teams are also exploring whether it could be used to repair historic monuments, although that work is at a much earlier stage.

Lecturer:In the second half of today's session, we'll look at some of these trials in more detail.