IELTS Listening Practice Test 6: Free, with Answers

Manager:Good evening, everyone, and thank you for coming. My name's Graham Shaw, and I'm the practice manager at the new Northgate Health Centre, which opens on Monday the third of next month. Many of you have been registered at the old clinic on Mill Street for years, so I'd like to explain how the new building works, and where you'll find things. The building was designed with a lot of input from patients, and it uses about half as much energy as the old one, thanks to its solar panels and much better insulation. You should all have a copy of the ground-floor plan, so let's start at the main entrance, at the bottom of the plan.

Manager:As you come through the main doors, you'll see the reception desk straight ahead of you, with the waiting area behind it. But before you get that far, on your left, right beside the entrance, is the pharmacy. It's run by an independent company, so it will also serve people who aren't patients here, and it'll be open on Saturdays as well.

Manager:Now, the building has two wings, one on each side of the waiting area, and each one has its own corridor. For blood tests, go into the corridor on the right, just inside the entrance. The first room on your right is for staff only, so please don't go in there. The blood test room is the next one along.

Manager:Physiotherapy has the largest room in the building. It's right at the far end of the left-hand wing, in the corner, and it has glass doors opening onto the garden, so in good weather some of the exercises can be done outside. The other corner room at the back of the building, at the end of the right-hand wing, is our staff room, so please don't confuse the two.

Manager:The children's clinic is something we've thought about very carefully. In the original plans it was right beside the waiting area, but parents told us they wanted somewhere calmer, away from the main entrance. So it's now in the right-hand wing, between the blood test room and the staff room.

Manager:And finally, we've included a small quiet room, for anyone who needs some privacy, perhaps to make a phone call after receiving difficult news. You might expect it to be next to the pharmacy, near the entrance, but we felt that area would be too busy. So it's in the left-hand wing, next door to physiotherapy.

Manager:Now for some practical points. When you arrive for an appointment, you won't need to queue at reception any more. There are touch screens just inside the entrance, and you can check in on one of those in a few seconds. The reception staff will still be there to help with anything else, of course, and if you'd rather speak to a person, just go straight to the desk. You'll also be able to book appointments online or by phone, just as you do now.

Manager:Our opening hours will be eight till six on weekdays. We'd originally planned to stay open late on Wednesdays, but in the survey we carried out last year, more of you said you'd prefer a late evening towards the end of the week. So on Thursdays we'll be open until eight in the evening.

Manager:A lot of you have asked about parking. There are sixty spaces behind the building. For patients, parking is free for the first two hours, which should be more than enough for most appointments, and after that it's one pound an hour. Staff have their own separate area, so they won't be taking your spaces.

Manager:If you're coming for your first appointment at the new centre, please bring a list of your medicines, including anything you buy without a prescription, such as vitamins. Your records have already been transferred from Mill Street, so you won't need to bring any letters or identification.

Manager:And finally, many of you have asked what will happen to the old clinic on Mill Street. There have been rumours that it will be knocked down and replaced with flats, and the council did consider selling it at one point. But I'm pleased to say they've now decided to keep the building, and it's going to become a youth centre, which this part of town has needed for a long time. Thank you very much for listening, and I'm happy to take any questions.

Liam:So, Sophie, shall we go through our notes from the field trip before we start writing it up?

Sophie:Good idea. I've got all the data sheets here. Let's start with the rocky shore.

Liam:Right. We laid out a tape from the low-water mark up to the bottom of the cliff, and every two metres we put down the quadrat.

Sophie:The square metal frame. And then we counted everything inside it. It took much longer than I expected, especially near the top of the shore, where the rocks were covered in seaweed and we had to lift it up to see what was underneath.

Liam:Yes. So what was the most common animal, in the end? I remember we both expected it to be limpets.

Sophie:So did I, because they're so easy to spot. But when we added it all up, the barnacles were far more numerous. There were thousands of them on some of the rocks. Limpets came second, and the mussels were only on the lowest rocks.

Liam:I'd forgotten about the seaweed. My hands were freezing by the end. OK, then the sandy beach. We didn't actually see any lugworms, did we?

Sophie:No, they stay buried in the sand. But we counted the casts in each square, those little coils of sand they leave on the surface. There were far more of them near the low-tide line.

Liam:And after lunch we went to the estuary.

Sophie:Where we measured the salinity, how salty the water was, at five points going upstream. We used that little handheld meter, which was much quicker than the method we practised in the lab.

Liam:And the readings were lower than the figures in the textbook, weren't they?

Sophie:Yes, but that's not really surprising. There'd been heavy rain the day before, so there was a lot more fresh water coming down the river than usual. We should mention that in the report.

Liam:Definitely. And the last site was the harbour.

Sophie:Where we pulled that fine net through the water from the end of the pier to collect plankton. And then we looked at the samples under the microscope back at the field centre.

Liam:That was my favourite part, actually. Some of those tiny creatures were amazing. I'd never realised how much life there is in a single drop of sea water.

Sophie:Me neither. We should include a couple of the drawings we made of them, too.

Liam:Good idea. Mine aren't very artistic, but at least they're accurate.

Liam:Now, in the method section, we'll need to explain the order we did things in. Why did we start at the rocky shore, again? I thought it was because it was nearest to where the minibus parked.

Sophie:It was quite near, but that wasn't the reason. And the warden did tell us to visit the rocky shore at some point, but the main thing was the tide. Low tide was at half past eight that morning, and the rock pools are only uncovered for a couple of hours.

Liam:Of course. And we were supposed to finish with a boat trip round the bay, but that was cancelled.

Sophie:I was really disappointed about that. At first I thought there must be something wrong with the boat, but the skipper said the engine was fine. And there were still enough of us, even though a few people had dropped out. It was the waves. The wind had died down by then, but there was still a big swell out in the bay, and he said it wasn't safe to go out.

Liam:What a shame. Our lecturer said she'd try to arrange another trip next term, though. And what did the warden say about the rock pools, by the way? I was too busy counting to listen properly.

Sophie:She said they used to be stripped every summer by people collecting crabs and shellfish to take home, until collecting was banned about ten years ago. Since then, the number of species has gone up a lot. She also mentioned that a storm last winter moved a lot of rocks around, but it did surprisingly little damage.

Liam:Interesting. We could compare our counts with some of the older surveys, then. The field centre keeps records going back to the nineteen-nineties, doesn't it?

Sophie:It does. I'll email them and ask whether we can have a copy. Anyway, what do you think the trip taught us most?

Liam:Well, I enjoyed working as a team, but we'd done plenty of that before. And I suppose we saw how the coast is changing, although one day isn't really long enough to see that.

Sophie:For me, it was how much our results depended on doing everything in exactly the same way each time. When the other group put their quadrats down a bit carelessly, their numbers came out completely different from ours.

Liam:That's true. Measuring carefully made all the difference. Let's make that the main point of our conclusion.

Sophie:Agreed. I'll start on the results section tonight and send it to you tomorrow.

Lecturer:Good afternoon. Today we're going to look at one of the clearest examples of how human activity changes the climate on a local scale: the urban heat island. The term refers to the fact that towns and cities are usually warmer than the countryside around them. The effect was first described more than two hundred years ago by Luke Howard, an amateur scientist who is best remembered today for giving the clouds their names. In his book The Climate of London, published between 1818 and 1820, he showed that the city was regularly warmer than the surrounding countryside. Interestingly, the difference was greatest not in the afternoon, as you might expect, but at night, and on some days the city was actually slightly cooler during the daytime. That pattern has been confirmed many times since. Today, of course, we don't have to rely on thermometers in a few gardens. Satellites can measure the temperature of every street and rooftop in a city, and the images they produce show the heat island very clearly: the city centre and industrial areas glow like hot spots, while parks, rivers and the surrounding farmland appear much cooler. On average, the difference in air temperature is only a few degrees, but on calm, clear nights it can be considerably larger.

Lecturer:So what causes it? The most important factor is the materials that cities are built from. Dark surfaces, such as roads and roofs, absorb a large proportion of the sunlight that falls on them and store it as heat, which they then release slowly through the evening and the night. That's why cities stay warm long after sunset. A second factor is the lack of vegetation. In the countryside, plants draw water from the soil and release it through their leaves, and that process of evaporation has a powerful cooling effect, rather like sweat on your skin. Replace fields and trees with concrete, and you lose much of that cooling. This is one reason why neighbourhoods with plenty of mature trees can be noticeably cooler than nearby streets without them, even within the same city.

Lecturer:Thirdly, the shape of the city matters. Tall buildings on either side of a narrow street trap heat, and they also block the wind that might otherwise carry the warm air away. And finally, cities produce heat of their own, from traffic, from factories, and from air conditioning, which, ironically, warms the streets outside while it cools the rooms inside.

Lecturer:Why does all this matter? In a cold climate, a little extra warmth might seem welcome, but during a heatwave it can be deadly. In the European heatwave of 2003, tens of thousands of people died, and the great majority of the victims were elderly, many of them living alone in top-floor flats in city centres. Doctors now believe that hot nights are particularly dangerous, because if the temperature doesn't fall after dark, the body has no chance of recovering from the heat of the day. Heat also makes air pollution worse, because many of the chemical reactions that produce smog happen faster at higher temperatures.

Lecturer:Fortunately, there's a great deal that cities can do. Some of the simplest solutions involve colour. Los Angeles has been coating some of its streets with a special paint. It isn't white, which would dazzle drivers, but a light grey, and it reflects much more sunlight than ordinary asphalt, so on hot days the coated surfaces are many degrees cooler. The coating has to be renewed every few years, but it is relatively cheap compared with rebuilding roads. Other cities have concentrated on plants. In Medellín, in Colombia, the authorities created a network of green corridors, planting tens of thousands of trees and other plants along busy roads and streams, and they report that this has reduced the heat island effect by around two degrees. The project also created jobs, as local people were trained as gardeners to look after the new planting. And in Paris, where many children go to school in densely built neighbourhoods, a programme is turning asphalt school playgrounds into shaded green spaces, which can also be opened to local residents during heatwaves. The aim is that eventually every state school in the city will have one.

Lecturer:None of these solutions is perfect, of course. Trees need water, which may be scarce during the very heatwaves they're supposed to protect us from. And light-coloured roofs, which are extremely effective in hot regions, may actually increase heating costs in places with long, cold winters, because they reflect away warmth that would otherwise be welcome. As with so many environmental questions, the right answer depends very much on where you live.