Practice English Listening Test for B2 with answer and audioscript – Test #50

1 A   2 C   3 B   4 C   5 A   6 A   7 B   8 B

Audioscript

1

I’d like to start my talk today about green spaces in cities by acknowledging the fact that more and more governments are coming to accept that they are a vital element of a healthy society. Whether you’re an adult, a teenager, or a young child, parks play a crucial role in ensuring our wellbeing. Yet too few of us really understand that, and as a society, we tend not to make enough use of the ones we already have. So when it comes to planning decisions, there just isn’t enough pressure on local authorities to incorporate them in the future development of our cities. The consequences are potentially very serious.

2

I play a lot of tennis because staying in good physical shape is absolutely vital if you’re a singer or a musician. When I’m playing tennis, I always think how much it has in common with singing. For example, playing tennis, you learn how to concentrate, develop self-control and of course how to pace your breath and maximise the use of your energy. Before I have a big concert in the evening I’ll often have a quick game of tennis just to relax. It can’t be too energetic though or I wouldn’t be able to give a good performance!

3

Well, Jonny, my husband, happened to hear me being interviewed on the radio and thought I’d be good for the part of the heroine in a play he was about to appear in. So he persuaded the director to send me the script. I liked it, we met on stage at the rehearsals, fell in love, and the rest is history. I’d seen Jonny perform before and admired his work but I didn’t accept the part just because he was in it. I did know he was a nice person though, because a friend of mine had sat next to him at a film premiere and had told me about him.

4

Man:   Do you ever use the bus between Boroughbridge and Malton?

Woman:   No, is it any good?

Man:   Could be worse, I suppose, but I can’t say it’s cheap. You can save a bit by buying a season ticket, but not actually that much.

Woman:   Really?

Man:   Well what it does have in its favour is that it’s very rarely late. Although it’s a shame it only runs every three quarters of an hour.

Woman:   I’ll stick to my motorbike, then!

Man:   You can’t read your book on that, though, can you?

Woman:   No, true, but I like to get to places quickly!

5

Nowadays, ballet is much more acrobatic than in the past. The audience wants to see internationally famous dancers doing lots of jumps and legs going remarkably high. It’s a bit more like a circus now, and the depth of feeling that we tried to convey in the past isn’t always there in modern ballet. You only find it in one or two dancers. I’d love to see less focus on technique. I usually come away from watching a ballet feeling impressed with what I’ve seen but it hasn’t moved me.

6

I was approached to do a TV cookery series, where I had to compete against another chef every week. Never having met him before, I was a bit apprehensive about working with him. But we got on like a house on fire. It’s rare for me to spend ten hours a day with someone for five weeks and like them more by the end of it than I did at the beginning. Halfway through filming the producer had to ring me up and ask if we could be less friendly with one another on camera, because it was supposed to be a competition!

7

Woman:   So are you enjoying the art course?

Man:   I am, I think. I mean, what we’re actually learning about is interesting – what inspired the nineteenth-century French painters and that sort of thing.

Woman:   I feel I’ve heard it all before – I’d hoped the teacher would tell us more about their actual techniques. But at least there aren’t too many of us on the course.

Man:   That certainly helps when it comes to group discussions and stuff. And the teacher’s amazing, don’t you think?

Woman:   He certainly thinks he is – I’m not convinced! I just don’t feel very motivated at the moment, to be honest.

8

I had such a good time at the championships, better than I expected. The atmosphere was incredible with everyone cheering. I didn’t expect so many people to turn up to the event, though I don’t suppose they were there to see me. I hadn’t been too happy with my performance in the previous competition, so to turn things round like that was very satisfying. The pressure started to get to me at one point, but I had a talk with myself and got things into perspective. I must work on my nerves before the next big event, but I can’t wait to get back in the pool and start training for it.

9 cousin   10 roof   11 sport(s)   12 singer   13 violins   14 magazine

15 museum   16 typing   17 canteen   18 radio station

Audioscript

Hi, my name’s Sid Holmes, and I’m here to talk about my experiences studying journalism at Kramer’s College.

I decided to do journalism because my aunt, who’s a newspaper reporter herself, advised me to do it. And I heard all about how good the Kramer’s course was from my cousin, who’d been a student on it.

On the first day of the course we did some reporting exercises which I just couldn’t get my head around. How do you write in fifty words about someone getting stuck on a roof and having to be lifted off by helicopter? But that was what I had to try and do! Another group had to do the same thing – about someone being stuck in a tree and rescued by boat.

We also met someone called Lisa on the first day. She works on a local paper and gave us some very informative talks throughout the course on what life is really like as a journalist. She’s an assistant editor – every newspaper section has one. She started off in the fashion section as a junior reporter, but is now in sports and enjoying that more. Her aim is to run the news section one day.

Our main tutor on the course, Jim Tyler, who did most of the teaching, was great – I was particularly impressed to find out that not only was he an experienced journalist but also an accomplished painter, who’d had his work in quite a few local exhibitions. And he’d actually written a book too – about the life of a singer who’s well known internationally, but is actually originally from our area.

Jim asked us to come up with ideas for articles, and then we all discussed them as a group. Someone mentioned this guy who makes watches and sells them online – that reminded me I’d heard about a retired teacher who’d taken up making violins. He doesn’t sell them but lends them to talented schoolchildren. Jim said he thought that was a great idea. He said he’d recently written about a craftsman too – a man who makes shoes.

So off I went to write my first article! I finished it in a day, and emailed it to a few people, you know – newspapers, websites and so on, as we’d been told to do. Amazingly, one magazine got back to me just a week later and said they’d put it in their next issue! So a month later, my work was in print!

Because you have to do lots of work experience on the course, we were each sent off to report on different council meetings in the town hall. Not exactly exciting, but good practice I suppose. Some of the others had to write about the town park or even the shopping centre. I went to one about a community group’s plans to make the museum more attractive to visitors – it would be great for the town if their proposals were adopted, so I actually enjoyed that.

Although on the whole, the course was fantastic, there were inevitably a few things that were less so. I mean, compared to learning all about photography, the typing lessons were pretty dull! I know they will come in useful, though, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.

The other students on the course were cool – we got on very well, and after lessons we’d often meet up. If a few of us were around at lunchtime, we’d get together in the canteen – the food was pretty good, made with produce from the college garden. We’d discuss what we were working on and that was a great help when I was stuck for inspiration.

So now, I’m doing a bit of freelance stuff and looking for a job! It’s tough, and I’ve already been turned down for three jobs on news websites. I’ve got another interview next week, though, as a junior reporter for a radio station. It’d be amazing if I got that!

So, have any of you got any questions? …

19 C   20 A   21 G   22 D   23 F

Audioscript

Speaker 1

I collect toys from all over the world, and have done for about five years now. I spend a lot of time on it, trawling the internet for rare ones and going to toy fairs at the weekend. Some of the toys I’ve found are very beautiful. I have a busy job, so it’s hard to make time for it sometimes. But it’s great because there are so many different collectors out there, from all walks of life, who are fascinating to talk to. It’s the social side of it that appeals to me, really. And it’s taught me so much about how parents in different countries bring up their children.

Speaker 2

My passion is coins. I’ve met a few people who’ve been surprised when I told them that! It takes up most of my spare time, but I don’t mind – I get such a sense of achievement when I’ve finally tracked down a really rare coin. It wouldn’t be nearly so much fun if there was less effort involved. Sometimes I give one or two away – to friends, you know – if I have two or three of the same type, then it’s a nice thing to do. Some of the coins in my collection are hundreds of years old.

Speaker 3

My magazine collection’s getting bigger all the time. I read every one of them from cover to cover, which is time consuming and unfortunately means I have less time to spend with my children. The magazines are all about things I’m keen on, of course, like sports and cars. I’m very interested in how attitudes to sports have changed over time, and like to feel that link between life, say, fifty years ago, and the present day. It’s quite a valuable collection now, so I keep it in a locked room to be on the safe side. I certainly have no plans to give my collection away, and I don’t want to lose it!

Speaker 4

Postcards are amazing things to collect, and I have over a thousand now. I know people tend to communicate online, but a surprising number of people still send them! It’s not just about the pictures on the front, but what’s written on the back, too. Lots just have the usual stuff, like ‘Weather good, food great’, but I look out for ones with a story, or glimpses of a story. My collection is relatively modern, but I imagine historians in the future could learn a lot from them. That’s my aim really, to make them available to the public one day – I’ll donate them to my local museum.

Speaker 5

I’m crazy about hats: smart men’s hats, caps, anything like that. They aren’t beautiful, like some women’s hats, but wherever I go in the world, and I’ve travelled quite a lot, I bring another one home with me. It’s quite a large collection now, and I’ve been told it’s worth quite a lot. That’s mainly why I keep on adding to my collection. It’s good to know I can sell it one day if I’m short on funds. I’d also like to make them myself and I’m looking for someone who can teach me – I have lots of ideas but none of the right skills.

24 C   25 B   26 B   27 A   28 A   29 C   30 B

Audioscript

Interviewer:   Thank you for coming into our studio today, Peter, to tell us about your research into an ancient species of tree called the gingko. First of all, how did you develop an interest in it?

Peter:   I think that anyone who’s seriously interested in plants inevitably comes across the gingko tree pretty early in their training, because very unusually, it’s a single plant species with no known living relatives; what particularly fascinated me was the fact that it’s been essentially unchanged for more than two hundred million years. Other people are attracted by its distinctive leaf – once you see it, you don’t forget it.

Interviewer:   When was the gingko first cultivated?

Peter:   Our best estimate is about one thousand years ago in China, which is somewhat late. There’s a lot of Chinese literature from before that time, and it doesn’t mention the gingko, while it does mention a lot of other plants. The evidence points to the fact that the gingko was probably always a rather rare tree, until it first attracted the attention of people about a thousand years ago, when they realised it could be cultivated as a source of nuts.

Interviewer:   And does the gingko tree have medical uses?

Peter:   The plant itself has long been valued for its healing properties. The medicinal uses in the East and the West have gone in different directions, using two different parts of the plant: mainly the seeds in the East, and mainly the leaves in the West. In the West, work has been done on the leaves to see whether they contain substances that might help improve people’s memories. The results, however, have shown no strong evidence for such powers.

Interviewer:   What else do humans use the gingko tree for?

Peter:   Well, it’s a very popular tree in city streets all over the world. It’s incredibly tough, so can tolerate conditions that might kill other types of tree. It’s hard to know exactly why, but the leaves are particularly unattractive to insects that harm other trees. And it seems to survive in a street setting: its roots aren’t getting much oxygen, they’re getting a lot of salt and goodness knows what else is getting poured on them, but it seems relatively resistant to that.

Interviewer:   You’re interested in the benefits of street trees in general, aren’t you, Peter?

Peter:   That’s right, I am. They’re important for a number of reasons. One advantage is that trees along a street make it feel narrower and cause drivers to go more slowly. And obviously they provide shade, making people feel a lot more comfortable; they don’t mind being outside if they can be in the shade. And so trees help bring all the benefits that come from that: kids playing outside, neighbours keeping an eye on each other’s houses, people encouraged to linger in a shopping area that they would otherwise walk right through.

Interviewer:   Do you think there are lessons we can learn from the gingko about preserving other plant species?

Peter:   Well, because humans have distributed gingko around the planet, they have helped ensure the species’ long-term survival. There are probably a couple of wild original populations of gingko tree still left in China, but even those may have been aided by people. Obviously, we should try to preserve animals and plants in their native habitats, but in the same way that we’ve used other methods for conserving large mammals, I think conservation through widespread cultivation is essential for preserving plant diversity for the future.

Interviewer:   And finally, does working on such an ancient tree species affect your view of the world?

Peter:   Yes, as humans, one of our biggest shortcomings is that we can’t see the long term. So reflecting on a plant like gingko that was around in very different ecosystems hundreds of millions of years ago, really makes our own species seem very young.