Practice CAE (C1) Listening Test 06 with Answers and Audioscripts

1 C   2 A   3 B   4 C   5 C   6 A

Audioscript

Extract One

Lizzie: So, have you come to a decision about taking up the keyboard or the drums? I have and I’ve bought a great keyboard!

Raphael: I’m still not 100% sure, to be honest. We’ve got a huge garage at home that’d be easy to soundproof, so my parents don’t think the noise will be a problem whether I go for a keyboard or drums.

Lizzie: Are they sure about that?

Raphael: Well, anyway, on keyboards and on an electronic drum kit there’s a knob to adjust the sound level. But the deciding factor might be that I’d struggle to take drums anywhere. I don’t have my own car. But going back to what I was saying, our garage would make a great rehearsal space for any instrument. Why don’t you come over to see it?

Lizzie: Sounds fantastic! Listen, if you went for the drums, we’d be able to practise together at your place. And my brother’s got a van, so if we got to the point where we played in a group, he’d be happy to give us and our kit a lift. What do you think?

Raphael: Oh, I don’t know. I want to make sure I decide what’s best for me because neither instrument’s cheap to buy.

Extract Two

Man: Hi. Are you meeting our new Mexican clients next week?

Woman: Yes, I’ve booked the main board room for the meeting and I’m taking them out to the Clayton restaurant for lunch.

Man: Wow! That’ll make a great first impression. The atmosphere’s perfect for a formal lunch.

Woman: Yes, I always feel a bit tense when I meet clients for the first time, even when I don’t need to put my best business suit on and I just meet them in my office – you know, a much more informal meeting. I always feel as though I’ve got to watch what I say and I end up not being my usual candid self.

Man: But it’s interesting how relationships change over the years. Do you remember Lilly Douglas? We all thought she was wonderful when we first met her, but when she became the chief accountant, she became very distant …

Woman: Absolutely, to the point where she was almost unfriendly. That can happen. It just goes to show that there’s a very clear line between business relationships and the genuine closeness you get with your friends.

Extract Three

Woman: Nick, did you put that chocolate dessert on the menu of your restaurant – the one we often had when we were kids?

Man: Oh yeah, we’d been talking about that, hadn’t we, and I thought: why not? I found the recipe and did a trial run to see what it was like. The recipe’s quite complicated because there are several stages you have to go through, but anyway, I managed it.

Woman: And?

Man: Well, the honey flavour came across well, but, apart from that, it was heavy, sticky and sickly. After a couple of spoonfuls, I binned it. I didn’t even dare tell the other chefs it’d been a family favourite – I just very quietly got rid of it and hoped no one would notice that I’d made something so foul.

Woman: Oh no! But it’s great that you have a job where you can do that, just decide to try something out. And I think it’s funny that you didn’t want the others to know about it. I’m intrigued about that sense of rivalry that seems to go through everything you do at the restaurant. And I think good chefs need that drive so that they keep experimenting with new techniques and ingredients.

7 management skills   8 landscape

9 textiles   10 health checks

11 tourism   12 laugh

13 posture   14 stream

Audioscript

Good morning. My name’s Diana and I’d like to talk about what it’s like to be a volunteer at a riding school in Costa Rica. You never know, you may be inspired to do something similar.

Of course, one of my aims for volunteering was to become a better rider, but that’s not the only skill volunteers can gain. Running a horse-riding school requires excellent management skills and I and several of the volunteers I worked alongside were there also for that reason. I had studied Spanish at school, but, for some volunteers, the fact that Spanish lessons were offered for free was very attractive.

The location of the riding school was out of this world. Although Costa Rica’s famous for wildlife – it’s one of the countries with the highest biodiversity in the world – it was the landscape that I found particularly awesome. If you’re thinking of going, make sure you choose the dry season, between December and April.

Volunteers live at the riding school and the accommodation there was clean, comfortable and secure, with simple furniture. I could choose a single room or share. The textiles used throughout the space had all been woven in the next village. The designs were based on traditional patterns and I really appreciated that desire to promote local culture.

Now, to tell you something about my routine: every day started with a healthy breakfast prepared by the cooks. Then I had a list of jobs to do during the morning. I had to feed the horses, which was a really lovely job. But top of my list was to go through what was called the ‘health checks’ with a senior member of staff. Each horse had its own medical file and the records were updated every day.

The owner of the school always joined us for lunch and it was a great opportunity to get advice from him. I was keen to establish if it might be a career for me. He recommended studying Animal Science at college, even though he’d come to the business by a quite different route – he’d done a tourism course after high school.

In the afternoons, I helped out with kids’ riding lessons and just one or two were a bit hesitant. I remembered my own riding instructor telling me to laugh when I was feeling tense and I passed this on to my little students. One of the instructors in Costa Rica advised children to hum a tune if they felt worried. I think these are both good techniques because you breathe and relax.

After a week’s riding every day, most of the other volunteers had aching muscles, but, because I run 8k most days back home, I didn’t experience that. I found my posture got better, though. I’ve always had good balance on a horse, but it was obvious that several volunteers improved that very quickly.

For me, the most exciting part was when a group of us went on a cross-country ride. I was on my much-loved Valetina, a young mare, and, even though I’d jumped over poles or small fences in a training ring at the school, that was the day I took my horse over a stream, or perhaps the horse took me. I’ll never forget that.

Now, if anyone …

15 D   16 A   17 B   18 B   19 D   20 C

Audioscript

Interviewer: Matthew and Tracy, thank you for taking part in our series of discussions on journalism and the news. In particular, I’m interested in what you have to say about how news consumers, whether they watch TV or read newspapers, recognise if they’re being presented with facts or a journalist’s opinion. Matthew?

Matthew: That’s a very good question and, actually, I think it’s often hard for the average news consumer to know what’s fact and what’s opinion. As journalism students, we’ve spent quite a bit of our course, a whole module, on this area. In the first part of the module, we looked at how the news is changing – people get soundbites, just quick headlines online, if you like. And, of course, increasingly, people use their phones while they’re travelling or waiting for something, as a way to keep in touch with the news at any time. But, unless they know and understand what has led up to an event, telling fact from fiction in the news is a challenge for them. However, on the positive side, many people get their news from several different media and that means they have a greater chance of getting a balanced view.

Interviewer: Now, I understand you put together a questionnaire to ask people if they were aware of when they were getting facts and when they were getting opinions from the news. Tell us about that, Tracy.

Tracy: Well, it was a very useful exercise because we had to really think about what we understood by the word fact ourselves first! Anyway, we drafted our questionnaire and tried it out on some other students on our course. We realised that asking open questions was problematic because the answers were so long, so we abandoned those and stuck to multiple-choice questions. And even then, I cut those from four choices to three to make the whole thing more manageable.

Interviewer: And I see your findings showed that most people were not that sure whether they were reading facts or opinions.

Matthew: No, so then we had to find an article that was a good example, I mean where it was clear whether it was giving facts or opinions. And, we read about a dozen before we found a really good one. I read one about the railways and even within one sentence there was a mixture of fact and opinion.

Tracy: Yes, it was puzzling, just like the one on class sizes. But one I read on plastic in the oceans was obviously factual because it gave statistics.

Matthew: And said where those data came from. I loved the one about football too, but it wasn’t that well written.

Tracy: And, despite its enthusiasm, it actually said very little.

Interviewer: So, what did you do next on your module?

Matthew: We had to write a factual article. I always feel apprehensive about doing that. I got some quite negative feedback from my tutor for the first one I wrote, even though my peers thought I’d researched it thoroughly. I’m getting better at it with each one I write, but I still wake up at night concerned that I might not have checked everything carefully enough and there’s some error somewhere. That can easily happen and OK, readers probably won’t get hold of the wrong end of the stick because of that, but it’s just not professional.

Tracy: But can I just say something about photos and video? I think that lots of people mistrust photos now because it’s so easy to manipulate them. So a photo in a newspaper doesn’t always support or enhance what a journalist has written. Video seems to be what most people favour when there’s a choice between the two. The extent to which news has visuals depends largely on the type of publication or news channel.

Interviewer: Do you think there’s more scope for developing your own style when you write opinion articles rather than factual ones?

Matthew: Definitely, I love that. I’m quite a chatty sort of person and I like it when I can write an article that stems from a conversation I’ve had or even sometimes just overheard. The reason I admire the author Brenda McGovern is her ability to make conversation sound so real. I heard her speak recently at a book fair and she was tremendous. You can’t always write in a chatty style, though, because if the subject’s something quite serious, you have to adapt so that the language is appropriate.

Interviewer: Well, thank you both …

Task One

21 C   22 G   23 D   24 F   25 B

Task Two

26 H   27 F   28 A   29 E   30 D

Audioscript

Speaker 1

Boredom’s a weird thing and not something I experience often. I used to think it was a negative emotion, but, in fact, when I’m bored my brain gets time to sort stuff out, especially at work – I work as a book illustrator. I’m not saying I suddenly become more efficient or talented – just that I feel less stressed and listen to what friends and family are really saying, understand the bigger picture behind what they’re saying, and I feel more empathy. Recently, I finished work on a book way ahead of schedule and I’d never felt so much at a loose end before. So I decided to go visit my brother who lives a four-hour flight away.

Speaker 2

I’m a runner, quite serious stuff, so I have a sports psychologist to help improve my performance and I sometimes go to extra lectures on technique, and that sort of thing. Anyway, the one I went to last was so dull, I thought about walking out, but decided that would look rude, so I just sat there and zoned out. Then, quite quickly, I started going over in my head how hurt I’d felt when my coach was being hard on me about my diet. And then I remembered the whole conversation and all the positive things she’d said, and I recognised that the diet bit was the only negative part. I’d just blown it up out of all proportion!

Speaker 3

I know a lot of people think of boredom – or perhaps it’s better to call it daydreaming – as a good opportunity to go through every minute aspect of something they’re working on, but for me it’s time when I allow my imagination to wander. And as I’m a fashion designer, I need that mental space to come up with something original. Not many people would find something positive about having a bad back, but I did. On doctor’s orders, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the radio and this gave me the mental space I needed. My wife says she often comes up with answers to work issues when she’s waiting at the bus stop!

Speaker 4

I’m a working mum and there are always a hundred and one things to do. In fact, there are so many that my mind goes blank and I don’t know where to start. But, if I find myself doing some mindless chore again and again, like the ironing I was doing the other day, my brain seems to get things in order so that I know which is the most important thing to do first. I might have thought I needed to go to the grocery store, but, in fact, I should check my work emails, for example. If more people realised the benefits of doing monotonous things, they’d be a much more positive person to be around.

Speaker 5

I moved house a while back and it means a forty-minute commute to get to the office. Yes, very boring in many ways, but, actually, I’d been thinking about giving up teaching and going into tourism, and do you know what? That commuting time allowed me the mental space to organise how I needed to go about it. I knew I had lots of transferable skills, like people skills, so I was pretty sure it was the right thing for me. When I told a friend about my plans, he reminded me that it wasn’t always a glamorous job being a tour rep – a lot of my time would be waiting at airports! But then, no job’s perfect, I suppose.