Listening 2025-09 Test 2

Section 1. You will hear a man booking a tourist tour. First, you have some time to look at questions 1 to 5. You can see that there is an example that has been done for you. On this occasion only, the conversation relating to this will be played first. Hello Mr. Smith. How can I be of assistance today? Good morning. I would like to book a tour to Sydney. The man answers the question. Tour to Sydney. So the word Sydney has been written on the top of the form. Now we shall begin. You should answer the questions as you listen, because you will not hear the recording a second time. Listen carefully, and answer questions 1 to 5. Hello Mr. Smith. How can I be of assistance today? Good morning. I would like to book a tour to Sydney. I can help you with that. What would you like to see? As much of Sydney as possible. What are my choices? There are a number of choices. What type of tour would you like? A pedestrian tour, or a bus tour? I think I'll choose the bus tour. There's a hop-on hop-off bus tour that takes you around to the Harbour Bridge, the Albert House and the Queen Victoria Building. I think it's a good option. Is there a set timetable for the tour? No. The buses run in a loop around the city all day. And what hours do the buses operate? They run from 7 a.m. in the morning until 9 p.m. each night. That sounds nice. Yes. And the closest stop is just 20 metres out from here, at the front of the hotel. Now listen, and answer questions 6 to 10. What ticket types do you have? We have three ticket types. The first one is called Minimal, and it is the cheapest tariff. It costs only $15 and you can use such ticket during two hours. Oh, I want to see as much of Sydney as possible. Do you have full day tickets? Yes, sure. The next ticket type we have is Standard. It's the most popular type. This pass costs $30 and lasts all day. This sounds nice. We also have a Premium ticket. You can buy it for $55. This pass lasts all day and includes free drinks and snacks during your trip. And you will be provided with an audio guide. I think I'll buy the Premium ticket. Great! That is the end of Section 1. You now have half a minute to check your answers. Section 2 Section 2 You will hear the information about tickets to one of the Royal Palaces in London. First, you have some time to look at questions 11 to 16. As you listen to the first part of the talk, answer questions 11 to 15. So you've finally decided to start a fitness program and are now on the lookout for the perfect gym to join. Fitnessland is an ideal gym for both group trainings and individual workout. We offer you a variety of sports facilities, which will make your training effective and pleasant. One of the most famous are our yoga classes. We have seven different yoga programs, including Yogalates, Yoga Nidra and Hatha Yoga. We also want to open Pilates section soon, which will combine relaxation techniques and keep fit exercises. For those people who seek cardio and fat burn workouts, we offer a lot of active classes. For instance, if you love dancing, you can go to our step dance classes. These classes are famous for their intensive rhythm, and include many elements from dancing classes and aerobics classes. At the moment we don't have aerobics or belly dance programs, so step dance can be a good alternative. We also offer great barbell workouts for people who want to build muscle. These classes use very effective strength training strategy and are very helpful for both men and women. There is also a kickboxing room in our gym, where you can find all essential facilities to practice kickboxing yourself. And group programs are likely to open in the next season. But Zumba fitness programs and stretching workouts are already running, so be quick to take part in these wonderful activities. Now listen, and answer questions 16 to 20. And now I'd like to present you the timetable of fitness programs for the coming week. Monday is dedicated to muscle building activities. You'll begin the weekly program with a full body training split, meaning you'll train all major body parts in each workout. Such fitness classes are designed by famous bodybuilders and sport professionals, who are passionate for training others. On Tuesday we offer a variety of fat loss activities. These are high intensity classes that require a lot of physical effort. So we recommend to drink much water during such classes. We also have something called healthy body activities. These activities run on Wednesday. During these programs, you'll do keep fit exercises in a moderate rhythm, alternating upper body and lower body workouts. The next day come relaxation activities. These activities are developed for physical, mental and spiritual practice, and include different kinds of yoga and pilots. Friday is the last day of the week with group activities, in particular interval trainings. Such programs involve series of low to high intensity exercise workouts, interspersed with rest or relief periods. We hope that you'll find your ideal activities in this timetable. But don't forget that you can train individually any day of the week. That is the end of section 2. You now have half a minute to check your answers. you you Section 3 You will hear a scientific discussion about how people experience pain. First, you have some time to look at questions 21 to 25. You As you listen to the first part of the discussion, answer questions 21 to 25. Scientists at University College London have made a discovery which makes mice pain-free and have reversed painlessness in a woman with a rare condition. I'm joined by Dr. Natasha Curran, consultant in anaesthesia and pain medicine at University College London Hospitals, and by Professor John Wood, lead author of this study and a neuroscientist at UCL. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Natasha, perhaps we can start with perhaps a rather basic question, which is, why do we experience pain at all? What's its purpose? Pain is highly preserved in humans because we need pain to prevent us further damaging ourselves. However, what we know in many people is that pain continues past when it's useful for us. And we're all familiar with the idea of sort of feeling pain, but what is happening inside one's body? So when I stub my toe and I scream and shout, what's actually happening inside my body from that moment? Well, receptors in your toe are getting stimulated and they send messages down your nerves, which end up in your brain. And in your brain, various things happen. In one part of your brain, which is the somatosensory cortex, that's the part of the brain that says, it's your toe that's feeling the pain or the injury rather than your hand or your head. So that's one part. But then it's much more complex than that because pain is an emotional experience. So it's connected then to all the other parts of the brain, which they give us our experience of pain, if you like. So that depends on the context in which we're having pain, our past experience, what we think the pain means, lots of factors. And then also it connects to what we think we're going to do about the pain. So parts of the brain light up, if you like, how we're going to respond to the pain that we're experiencing. How big a problem is pain and how big a burden is this for people to be dealing with? In the UK, it's massive. In 2011, the National Pain Audit reported that 31% of men and 37% of women live with persistent pain. So that's 40 million people. Their quality of life is very, very poor, much lower than other medical conditions. It's as bad as people who have, for example, Parkinson's disease. One of the reasons it's really important to understand this is because we know that we can actually help these people. If they attend specialist pain management services, we can improve their quality of life. And specialist pain management services have doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists, and potentially occupational therapists, psychiatrists, in order to help them. John, how thorough is our understanding of pain? Is, for example, chronic pain different to the pain we feel when we knock our knee or have a headache? Well, there are clearly enormous mechanistic differences, and it's very striking how mechanisms to experience pain are conserved across evolution. And pain is really an essential survival mechanism. So the mechanisms that occur in people are quite similar to those that occur in mice, for example. And so we can make comparisons between animal models and the human experience. But we really know very little at all about how pain is experienced centrally. There are various parts of the brain that have been correlated with the experience of pain. But this is very, very weakly done. In fact, to define a precise locus in the brain where pain is perceived has proved completely elusive. So the way we feel pain and the intensity of pain is regulated by all kinds of things like circadian rhythms, emotional state. And we don't have many insights into how this actually works. Why is consciousness linked so much with pain and pain with consciousness? Well, there's a wonderful book by Philip K. Dick, the person who wrote so many perceptive science fiction novels. And he says that pain and beauty are the two underlying themes of human nature. In fact, trying to understand where the brain perceives beauty is just as difficult as trying to understand where the pain is perceived in the brain. Consciousness obviously is required for any kind of sensation. And pain is just one of those types of sensations that we're aware of when we're alive and awake. Well, as an anesthetist, that's part of our main role. Surgery can't go ahead unless we have anesthesia. Because obviously in the modern world, and in most parts of the world, we want to be able to anesthetize so that people don't experience the pain of surgery. And we know that there are some states of consciousness where people can undergo quite stimulating and unpleasant to most people experiences such as surgery. But for most people, they need to be unconscious, so in a state of anesthesia. Now listen, and answer questions 26 to 30. It sounds like we have some clues as to how pain works, although there's a lot that we don't know. Is that why it's so difficult to find ways to block it because we don't really understand the mechanisms particularly well? I think what we do understand is the kind of area that Natasha works in, which is the sensation of tissue damage by specialized nerves in the skin and the muscle and the viscera. And how those nerves are activated and send electrical signals. So the activity of those nerves is absolutely required for most pain states. And so by focusing on them, we can actually find ways to treat pain without understanding anything about pain perception. And so that's the focus of interest of most pain scientists. And that's where anesthetists also are working in terms of blocking the drive into the central nervous system. But pain perception itself is completely mysterious. A good example of this might be when I explain to my patients, which is a phantom limb pain. Listeners might have heard of this already. It's when people can have a painful limb once they've had an amputation. So a person may have had to have an amputation for medical reasons such as the leg in this case, let's say, might become gangrenous. So that's done under anesthesia as a surgical procedure. But after the operation and the wounds healed, then people who are unfortunate enough to get this phenomenon can then experience sensations in that leg which has been removed. And not just sensations that if they've had pain there before, they can often experience pain. So even though the leg's not there, it's no longer physically present, the patient still feels that their leg's there and it can be painful. And of course, that's very distressing. And it also gives us the notion that pain is not just in the nerves, the peripheral nerves, the ones in the leg. It's modulated in the brain. Yeah, if I can come in there. Pain has nothing to do with the peripheral nerves. Pain is in the brain. But there is a requirement for nervous input from the periphery in order to feel pain in almost all states. There are situations where you can get pain after a stroke because you have lesions in your thalamus. And that's obviously some form of central pain syndrome. But almost all inflammatory pain states like rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis or diabetic neuropathy, all these chronic pain states require the activity of peripheral nerves. And that's what we try to block without understanding the perception of the painful stimulus itself. So, Natasha, it's an interesting point that John was saying about us needing stimulation of our nerves throughout our body, our peripheral nerves. So what's happening in the case of a phantom limb? Well, there's several theories. And there's probably not one overarching thing that's happening. We know that pain can create a memory of itself just like any other experience that people have. You might have heard some records on the radio recently about David Bowie, for example. And listening to that record takes you back to a certain point. So listening to music can take you to a certain point in time. And some sort of stimulation, for example, movement in that limb or something else, which is the peripheral that John's talking about, that peripheral input, can cause a learned sensation to be re-experienced. It's not that the person's actively trying to recall that painful experience. Who would want that? So it's like anything that's learned. The nervous system's really, really good at learning things. That's how we've learned to do all the great things that humans and people do in their lives. Unfortunately, it's almost like it can get switched on for some sensations. And then the person continues to feel that pain even though there's no obvious mechanistic reason for them to continue to feel it. That is the end of Section 3. You now have half a minute to check your answers. Section 4. You will hear a podcast about technology and mental health. First, you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40. Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40. I spoke to psychologist Tomasz Czemoropromuzik about the risks he believes are posed by social media and technology. If narcissism is fire, Facebook is gasoline. So people wouldn't have gravitated towards Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or Snapchat if they hadn't been narcissistic in the first place. By which I mean if they hadn't had this desire to broadcast their lives, to behave like celebrities and share personal information about themselves as if it's really interesting, and also seek positive feedback from others that reinforces their kind of self-concept and self-esteem and perhaps self-centered needs. Now, it is also true that if you throw gasoline into the fire, these inherent narcissistic tendencies that were there in the first place will become more exaggerated. Research has shown this. Research has shown a very simple summary of the studies. The more narcissistic you are, the more time you are likely to spend on these various social networks. But at the same time, the more time you spend on these social networks, the more narcissistic you become. So really it's a snowballing effect. Exactly. And the depression one is a different kind of phenomenon. It's the fact that a lot of people spend so much time following or snooping on others on social media. And they're unaware of the fact that the people that they are seeing there are not the real people they know. And because most people portray themselves in an unrealistically positive vein, and Facebook and other social networks encourage the suppression of negative emotions and reward the presentation or display of positive emotions, it makes people miserable and depressed to see others as so happy. Because you compare yourself to others and you're like, why aren't I so successful, so good-looking or so happy? Okay. So when we're talking about tech and also about the impact of technology on our behavior, I think something that's, again, garnering quite a lot of attention is the impact of screen time on well-being, on performance, on cognitive ability and development when we're looking at younger people. And there was an interesting piece in Ars Technica that cited two separate studies that have been conducted in the U.S. The first is by Common Sense Media, which looked at just under 3,000 U.S. children aged 8 to 18 about their media habits. And they found that teenagers were spending about nine hours a day online with media and tweens, so 8 to 12-year-olds, were using media for about six hours a day. So this is within quite a substantial amount of time and then also a time in which they'd probably be better off outside playing or socializing in person with other people. Do you think that there's an impact there on, for instance, being able to read emotional cues or being able to form relationships in a way that's deep and meaningful? Is there anything to suggest that that's starting to be compromised because of our use of screens and tech? So we don't have solid or reliable data on this yet, but at least conceptually, it would make sense. We all come to the world with a set of really basic and rudimentary skills that are developed or nurtured when they are put into practice or when we interact with the right triggers of these skills in the environment. So much like growing up isolated from others in a basement will lead to not having many social skills, if you grow up in the digital world mostly and you don't have much time to practice face-to-face interaction, you probably won't develop many people skills. The other thing that is, of course, problematic is that if people were spending six or ten hours online reading books or getting educated, you could argue at least they're developing intellectual skills or intellectual curiosity. But that's not the case. At most, they can spend 18 minutes on a TED Talk, which will give them more – it's entertainment rather than education. So it's the stuff that people do when they're online that is most problematic. What about things like the sensory input that we receive? So for instance, if you've got very young children aged six to 12 months to 18 months who are looking at screens instead of looking out and developing depth of field, what might that do for their development potentially in the longer term? One could argue that if for them adaptation to the world will be even more technologically mediated, it's okay. So it would only be a problem if you put them in a farm, ask them to hunt animals or make them – force them live in an Amish community. So in that sense, the average five-year-old today is better equipped to interact with much of the industrialized world than a 60-year-old or 70-year-old because they can pick up any gadget and they know how it works. So I think the main deficit is around social and emotional skills. Connecting through people via technology is very different than having an effective face-to-face interaction. And so until this date, for example, we haven't worked out a way in which people can reproduce via technological means. Maybe we will and maybe virtual reality can generate this in the future. But it's been pointed out many times that there are now more iPhones being sold every year, every day, not just every year, than people being born. And this difference between these two numbers keeps increasing. I think probably there is a causal relationship. The more time people spend on their smartphones or interacting with technology, the less time they have for physical interactions with others. So until we work out how to do certain things online, I mean, offline is the way to go. And most people now, young people, don't have these capabilities to develop certain skills in the physical or analog world. So we've heard how tech can have adverse effects on our mental state, but how is it being used in a positive way to help us? With us in the studio today to discuss, we have psychotherapist Dr. Jillian Isaacs-Russell, author of new book Screen Relations, The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. We also have Dr. Richard Dobson, who's head of the bioinformatics at the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health, and the tech team's own Hannah-Jane Parkinson. Welcome, everybody. So Jillian, may I start with you? So you're a practicing psychotherapist. How do you find that tech has affected your profession? So maybe with the advent of remote online therapy, should we start there? Yes. Well, I actually have done quite a bit of technologically mediated treatment, partly because I moved from the UK in 2008 to a remote area in the Black Hills of South Dakota. But wanted to keep practicing. And so I attempted to use a platform like Skype in order to see patients and thought that it was going to really help me to avoid any of the pitfalls of space, distance, time. I could just be anywhere, anytime. And what I discovered and what led to my research and this book was that there are some very distinct differences between working on the screen and working co-presently in the room. So we're all familiar with this idea of traditional Jungian psychoanalysis of lying back in a room on a couch and having our dreams interpreted and being in relationship present with the psychotherapist. But that's not the kind of therapy that we're talking about when we're talking about screen mediated therapy. What have you seen in terms of the change and possibly the use of CBT with screen mediated technology? And why is it suitable for online use? I think that the therapies like CBT or positive psychology, self-help could be very appropriate for online use because they are didactic. They aren't based in a relationship. And the kind of talking therapies that you were referring to earlier are actually very strongly anchored in having a relationship. So if you're actually giving instructions to someone, if you are teaching them something, then of course it can be communicated through a screen. But if you are actually having to pay attention to the implicit non-verbal part of the relationship, which we must do, then it doesn't come across in the same way. 60% of our communication is non-verbal and implicit. And actually informatics researchers themselves, that is specialists in information via technology, are talking about the fact that these kinds of implicit communications can't be carried over a screen at the moment, two dimensionally. So do you think that there are risks associated with the more didactic kind of instructive practices like cognitive behavioral therapy, where the patient is getting a list of instructions? Are there risks kind of taking that approach? Can this treatment kind of mask or even potentially worse than real problems? I think that some of the risks may be that because we're not in the same room, we can't see the whole body. If you've ever worked on screen, you know that it's usually from the shoulders up. We're not able to see a lot of the intimate things that are going on with our patients. And so that means that, for instance, if someone is struggling with an eating disorder, it's going to be very difficult to see where they are in that, which could be dangerous. That is the end of section four. You now have half a minute to check your answers. You will now have 10 minutes to transfer your answers to the listening answer sheet.