IELTS Listening Practice Test 4: Free, with Answers

Coordinator:Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Saltmere Bay. My name's Fiona, and I coordinate the volunteer programme for the Shoreline Trust. Thank you all for giving up your Saturday morning. Before we split into groups, I'd like to go through a few practical things, and then I'll explain what each group will be doing today.

Coordinator:First of all, a word about what to bring next time. We provide all the equipment you'll need for the work itself, so there's no need to buy gloves or litter pickers, and we have plenty of bags. Some people turn up with sun cream, which is very sensible in the summer, but at this time of year you really won't need it. What you will need is a good waterproof jacket. The weather here can change completely in ten minutes, and there's very little shelter on the beach. The other thing to remember is food. There used to be a café at the visitor centre, but it's closed for the winter, so please bring your own lunch. Hot drinks, though, we can provide.

Coordinator:Now, let me tell you a little about our work this winter. The Trust has been running for more than twenty years, and in that time our priorities have changed. We used to do a lot of work with local schools, but we've had to hand that over to the county council. And many of you will have seen the seals on the sandbank. People often assume we look after them, but in fact the seal colony is managed by a separate wildlife organisation, so that isn't part of our work. This winter, we have two main aims. The first is to keep a detailed record of everything that washes up here. Every piece of plastic you pick up is counted and noted down, and that information goes to a national database, so scientists can see how the amount of waste arriving on our coast is changing. The second aim is to repair the damage caused by last year's storms, which was considerable, as you'll see.

Coordinator:So, let me explain what each group will be doing today. The first group will be working on the north beach. That's the long stretch of sand you passed on your way here. The tide brings in a huge amount of material there, especially after a storm, so you'll be gathering up whatever the sea has left behind and sorting it into bags.

Coordinator:The second group will be in the dunes, just behind the north beach. Last month, a team of volunteers put up new fencing around the dunes to keep walkers off them, so that part of the job is finished. Today's task is to put in marram grass. It has very long roots, which hold the sand together and stop the dunes from blowing away.

Coordinator:The third group will go to the salt marsh, at the mouth of the river. The problem there is a type of grass that was brought over from North America about a hundred years ago. It spreads very quickly and pushes out the native plants, so we're digging it up wherever we find it. Please don't confuse it with the marram grass the dune group is planting. We'll show you the difference before you start.

Coordinator:Down at the harbour, the fourth group will be helping with our winter bird survey. Thousands of wading birds spend the winter here, and we need to know exactly how many of each species there are. You'll be working with an experienced birdwatcher, so don't worry if you can't tell one bird from another yet.

Coordinator:Then there's the cliff path. The storms damaged a lot of the posts and wire along the edge of the cliff, and it's now quite dangerous, so the fifth group will be replacing them. That's heavy work, so it's best suited to people who don't mind getting their hands dirty.

Coordinator:And finally, a small group will stay at the visitor centre. Even in winter, we get quite a few visitors at weekends, and they always have questions about the wildlife and what we do, so you'll be there to give them information. Checking the signs around the bay is also on the list, but our ranger has already done that this week.

Coordinator:Right, if you look at the list on the board, you'll see which group you're in.

Chloe:OK, Josh, shall we start with the methods section? I think if we write down exactly what we did, step by step, the rest of the report will be easier.

Josh:Good idea. So the first thing was choosing who to survey. We spent ages on that.

Chloe:We did. At first we wanted to look at the hospital, because it's the biggest employer in the city.

Josh:But so many of the staff work shifts, and their travel patterns are completely different from everyone else's. It would have been really hard to compare them.

Chloe:Exactly. So in the end we went for the business park on the edge of town. There are about two thousand people working there, in lots of different companies, and almost all of them start work between eight and nine.

Josh:Right. Then we wrote the questionnaire. And before we used it properly, we tried it out on twenty students from our course.

Chloe:That pilot study was really useful, actually. It showed us that some of the questions were confusing.

Josh:It also showed us the whole thing was far too long. Some of them took nearly ten minutes to finish it, and nobody's going to give us ten minutes on their way into work.

Chloe:True. So we cut it down to twelve questions, and most people managed it in about three minutes.

Josh:And one of them people just didn't want to answer. We'd asked for their home address so we could work out the distance they travelled.

Chloe:Yes, everyone said that was far too personal. So we took that question out and asked for the first part of their postcode instead. That still gave us a rough idea of distance.

Josh:OK. Then the actual data collection. Our original plan was to stand in the car park and catch people as they arrived.

Chloe:Which lasted about ten minutes, until the security guards told us we weren't allowed to be there.

Josh:So we ended up standing by the main entrance instead. That was better in the end, because the people who came by bus or bike passed us too, not just the drivers.

Chloe:We had to go back on three different mornings to get enough replies, though. The Monday was hopeless. It poured with rain and hardly anyone would stop.

Chloe:And we didn't bother with paper forms, did we? We typed the answers straight into a shared spreadsheet on our phones.

Josh:That saved us so much time. We didn't have to type anything up afterwards.

Josh:So, the results. What surprised you most?

Chloe:Well, I wasn't surprised that hardly anyone cycles. There are no proper cycle lanes out there, and it's on a busy main road. And the journey times were roughly what we'd predicted. But I really didn't expect more than half of them to say they'd work from home at least some of the time, if their employer allowed it.

Josh:Yes, that was striking. Especially as most of them seemed perfectly happy with their journey.

Chloe:Then there's car sharing. Hardly anyone does it, even though most people drive alone.

Josh:And it's not because they don't know who to share with. Several of the companies already have a website to match people up.

Chloe:So why don't they use it?

Josh:I think it's because people want to be able to leave work whenever they like. If you share a car, you have to fit in with someone else's day. A couple of people actually said that.

Chloe:That makes sense. The bus users had quite a lot to say as well, didn't they?

Josh:Mostly about how often the buses run. After nine o'clock there's only one every half hour.

Chloe:Which is fine if you start at half past eight, but not much use if you work flexible hours.

Josh:We should definitely mention that in the recommendations.

Chloe:Agreed. What about the response rate? We got about three hundred replies, out of two thousand people.

Josh:That's fifteen per cent. I was quite disappointed at first.

Chloe:So was I. But our lecturer said that's about what most surveys of this kind manage, so I don't think we need to apologise for it.

Josh:Fair enough. Now, is there anything else you think we should add before we hand it in?

Chloe:I'd love to compare our business park with another one, but we really don't have time for more data collection. What we could do, though, is use the postcode answers to show on a map where people are travelling from. That would make the patterns much clearer.

Josh:Good idea. That shouldn't take long.

Chloe:And then there's the presentation. Are you OK about presenting the findings to the managers at the business park?

Josh:Oh, I don't mind standing up in front of them. That's not the problem. I just have a feeling they'll listen politely, say it's all very interesting, and then carry on exactly as before.

Chloe:Well, let's make the recommendations as practical as we can, and send them the report a week before, so they've had time to read it. Then at least we'll have tried.

Josh:OK. Let's get the map done first, and then we can start on the slides.

Lecturer:Good morning. Today we're looking at a material that we use so often we hardly notice it, and that's paper. I want to trace how it was invented, how it spread across the world, and how it changed along the way.

Lecturer:Let's start with what people wrote on before paper existed. In ancient Egypt, the main writing material was papyrus, which was made from a reed that grew along the Nile. In the dry heat of Egypt, papyrus could last for thousands of years, but it didn't travel well. In damp conditions, it soon became brittle and fell apart, which is one reason why so little of it survives in Europe. Europeans relied instead on parchment, which was made from animal skins, usually those of calves or sheep. Parchment was strong, but it was very expensive, since a single book could require the skins of a whole flock. In China, meanwhile, people wrote on strips of bamboo, which were heavy and awkward to store, or on silk, which was far too costly for everyday use.

Lecturer:The usual story is that paper was invented in China in the year one hundred and five by a court official called Cai Lun. However, archaeologists have found fragments of paper in China that are around three hundred years older than that. Interestingly, this early paper doesn't seem to have been used for writing very much. It was used mainly for wrapping, for example to protect mirrors or medicines. So what did Cai Lun actually do? It seems that he improved the process and made it cheaper. Instead of expensive materials, he used the bark of trees, together with hemp, old rags and even fishing nets, which were beaten into a pulp, mixed with water, and then spread on a screen to dry. The basic method, a layer of fibres collected on a screen, then pressed and dried, has hardly changed since. Over the following centuries, papermaking spread across East Asia, and by the seventh century it had reached both Korea and Japan.

Lecturer:Paper then spread slowly westwards along the trade routes of Central Asia. There's a famous story that Chinese prisoners, captured at a battle in seven fifty-one, taught the craft to papermakers in the city of Samarkand. It's a good story, but historians now think it's probably untrue, because paper was already being used in Samarkand several decades before the battle. What is certain is that by the end of the eighth century there was a paper mill in Baghdad, and paper soon became the standard material for government records. One reason, some historians believe, was security. On parchment, a dishonest official could simply scrape off the ink and write something different, whereas paper absorbs the ink, so any change can be seen.

Lecturer:From the Islamic world, papermaking reached Spain by the twelfth century, and then Italy, where the town of Fabriano became famous for its paper. The papermakers there introduced several important improvements. Until then, the fibres had been beaten by hand or with hammers worked by people, but in Fabriano heavy hammers were driven by water wheels, which produced pulp much faster. They also coated their paper with gelatine made from animal bones and skin. This gave it a smooth surface and stopped the ink from spreading, which made it ideal for writing with a pen. And they began to add watermarks, faint designs that can be seen when you hold the sheet up to the light, which showed which workshop had made the paper.

Lecturer:For the next few centuries, European paper was made mainly from old linen rags. But after the invention of printing, demand rose so fast that rags were in short supply, and people began to look for alternatives. The answer came from an unexpected source. In seventeen nineteen, the French scientist René de Réaumur pointed out that wasps make their nests by chewing wood into a kind of paper, and he suggested that humans could do the same. It took more than a hundred years for the idea to become practical, but by the eighteen forties, machines had been developed that could grind wood into pulp, and the cheap paper we know today became possible. Cheap paper made newspapers and books affordable for ordinary people for the first time. But it came with a hidden cost. Paper made from wood pulp in this period contained acids, which slowly break down the fibres, so the pages turn yellow and eventually crumble. As a result, many libraries now face the strange situation that their books from the nineteenth century are in worse condition than those printed four hundred years earlier. Next week, we'll look at how libraries are trying to save them.