Listening 2026-05 Test 2

==================== IELTS Listening Transcript ==================== PART 1 Speaker 0: Excuse me. I was trying to bother you, but I was wondering if you can help me to carry out a survey about the community here. It won't take more than a couple of minutes. Speaker 1: Okay. No problem. Speaker 0: First of all, can I take your full name? Speaker 1: It's Alex Munali. Speaker 0: How do you spell your surname? Speaker 1: M-U-N-A-L-I. Speaker 0: Where do you live? Speaker 1: Flat 12, 103 Fowler Road. Speaker 0: Is that F-A-U? Speaker 1: No. F-O-W-L-E-R. Speaker 0: Alright. And that's road? Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 0: Do you know your postcode? Speaker 1: Let me see if I can remember it. Oh, yes. It's RO6 2LR. Speaker 0: That's brilliant. Now I will just ask you a few more questions. What do you do? Are you a student? Speaker 1: Actually, I am a waiter. Speaker 0: Fine. One more question. Can you help me fill in your age group? 15 to 19, 20 to 25, or 26 to 30? Speaker 1: I am 27. Speaker 0: Okay. Thanks. Now I'd like to ask you some questions about the local community services. For each question, you can say good, satisfactory, or poor. And the first question is about how clean the streets are. Speaker 1: That's a good question. I suppose I should say alright for that one, you know, in the middle. Speaker 0: What about buses, trams, etcetera? Do they provide a good service? Speaker 1: Actually, they hardly run on time. So I should say I am not totally impressed. Speaker 0: Right. Have you had much contact with the health services? Speaker 1: Not personally, but my friend had a serious operation recently. Speaker 0: And how is that going? Speaker 1: She waited for a week before she had a treatment, so I should say it's not that good for the health services. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. My next question. What about the police? Do you think they are doing a good job? Speaker 1: I don't have much to say, but generally not bad. Speaker 0: So I will put down satisfactory. Speaker 1: Yeah. You can say that. Speaker 3: Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions 7 to 10. Now listen and answer questions 7 to 10. Speaker 0: Okay. Now there are some more open questions. What would you like to say about the facilities here? Speaker 1: The air is quite fresh compared with other cities. That's because there are some national parks, and I can always take my wife for a walk there. Speaker 0: That's very nice. What else? Speaker 1: You know, although my children are not old enough yet, I think the schools here are of high standards with nice facilities and qualified teachers. Speaker 0: Okay. Now any suggestions for improvements? Speaker 1: Well, actually, I am also new here. My family and I just moved in recently. I think you should ask the local people here if you want to get more detailed information. Speaker 0: Uh-huh. That's a good idea. I will do that as well. Speaker 1: There is something else I can mention. The football pitch here is great. I always spend a whole Saturday afternoon there. But the swimming pool is quite old, twenty years at least. I think it really needs renovating. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you so much for your time. Speaker 1: My pleasure. PART 2 Speaker 4: Section two. You have some time to look at questions 11 to 16. Speaker 3: Now listen carefully and answer questions 11 to 16. Speaker 5: Okay. Well, first of all, I'll give you a bit of background to the museum and then tell you about some of the galleries. You probably won't have time to see everything today. So what I recommend you do is go to the Egyptian room first because it's everyone's favorite place, and it gets very crowded with the school parties later in the day. Oh, and I should mention that the photography gallery's undergoing refurbishment at the moment. So while that's definitely worth seeing, it'll have to wait for another time. Now the actual museum building itself is quite interesting. It was designed by a local architect called William Craven in the nineteenth century at a time when the city was developing rapidly with new factories to cope with the expansion of the textile industry. The museum's built in a very similar style to the railway station, which was constructed at around the same time. That was designed by another architect, but William Craven did also provide the plans for the town hall, which was built just a few years later. Construction of the museum began in 1888 with a large team of carpenters, stonemasons, and builders. Then in recent years, it's been extensively refurbished. The lovely big windows have been retained to let the daylight flood in, but the award winning part of the project was the restoration of the area around the central hall. In particular, the beautiful wrought iron staircase, which was brought back to its former glory. Unfortunately, the museum's original tiled floor had to be replaced with new tiles of a similar design. It was a very expensive project, and since we don't charge admission fees, we had to find other ways of funding it. We did get some money from the Department of Culture at national level, but we had even more generous support from companies and industries here in the city who were our main benefactors. However, we do also depend on donations from people living in the area for the ongoing maintenance of the building. So how will the museum mainly be spending its money in the next five years? We already work with schools and colleges helping people get a better understanding of all the creative disciplines. We consider the most important part of our work the restoration of the valuable historical objects we are lucky enough to have in our possession, and this will continue to be where the most funding is allocated. Of course, it would be wonderful to purchase new objects for the museum, but we simply don't have the space at the moment. Well, we do hope you enjoy your day today, but if you would like to learn more about our exhibits on display here, I suggest you come to one of the Saturday morning lectures which are given every month by one of our team of experts. Of course, you can pick up leaflets about the exhibits in most of the galleries too, but you'll only get a basic introduction from those. We're also working to update our website so that it provides more background on the exhibits, but that's still at the planning stage. Speaker 3: Before you hear the rest of the talk, you have some time to look at questions 17 to 20 on page four. Now listen and answer questions 17 to 20. Speaker 5: Okay. Now let me just tell you a bit about what's on at the moment. Well, we're very well known for our collection of eighteenth century paintings, both oils and watercolors. Some of these are English landscapes and portraits, but we also have paintings by other European artists who were working during this period. If you're interested in art that's a bit nearer home, the Farnley Collection is a set of drawings by Paul Farnley. He was born in Ireland, but he came to work here in the city in the early twentieth century and then made it his home. He worked in a factory but spent his spare time drawing the buildings and urban landscape of the city, and his work has now been collected and displayed here. On a more practical note, we have a display of kitchen appliances which might interest you. These are the sorts of things you wouldn't normally expect to see in a museum. There's an electric potato peeler from the nineteen seventies, which sold really well at the time, but no one's got one now. There are lots of other similar appliances, which must have seemed like great ideas at the time, but which never took off. You might also like to visit the Fashion Gallery. This is an exhibition which is running for the next few weeks only and shows men's and women's fashion from 1900 to 2000, including some of the famous designers of the time. Okay. So if anyone's got any questions, follow me. Speaker 3: That is the end of section two. You now have half a minute to check your answers. PART 3 Speaker 4: Now turn to section three. Speaker 3: Part three. You will hear two students called Jen and Rob discussing a project they are about to start working on. First, you have some time to look at questions 21 to 24. Now listen carefully and answer questions 21 to 24. Speaker 7: Hi, Jen. Speaker 6: Hi, Rob. We need to look at this project we're doing together in forensic linguistics. Speaker 7: Sure. The first thing we have to do is define forensic linguistics. I thought we could say something like linguistics involves the analysis of language, and forensic refers to using scientific techniques to solve crimes. So forensic linguistics involves analyzing people's use of language to find out whether they've committed a crime. What do you think of that as a definition? Speaker 6: Sounds okay. I looked it up in my dictionary, and I got something similar. Speaker 7: Then we can add something about what forensic linguists actually do to back it up. You know, like analyzing documents to find out who wrote them. Speaker 6: Good point. Let's do that. Speaker 7: What about the actual project? I'm glad we chose voice identification as the topic. Speaker 6: Yeah. We've been given a voice recording of a possible suspect, not a real suspect, of course. So we've got to listen to the recording and analyse their voice. Speaker 7: Should we... okay? Well, I've already listened to the recording, and I can't even tell if it's a man or a woman. But I guess that doesn't matter. The accent's a local one, though I'm not sure how that will affect anything. Where we're really going to get in trouble is that the recording is very unclear. I'm sure they've done that to test us. Speaker 6: Well, they weren't going to make it easy. We have to analyze the voice sample with that spectrograph instrument, don't we? Learning what to do with it is the only thing that really concerns me about this project. Speaker 7: It'll be fine. I guess so. Speaker 6: And then we have to interview the suspect and make our own recording face to face, and decide if it's the same person as on the original recording. Right? Speaker 7: Yes. It's not an exact science, but it's usually pretty accurate. You can often tell even when they've got a cold, it's the same person, but they might do something like speaking with another accent because the tutor suggests they do that just to test us. So let's get on with it then. Oh, and don't start your usual self doubt about whether you can do the work or not. You usually do okay in the end. Speaker 6: I reckon that as long as we focus on the main points of the assignment, we can think about the finer details later. My problem is creating things to worry about before I've even started. Speaker 3: Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions 25 to 30. Now listen and answer questions 25 to 30. Speaker 7: We'll have to do some background reading first. I'll go to the library later and get what we need. Speaker 6: Okay. I've already looked at Forensics Today, and it didn't say much about voice identification, so we needn't bother with that one. Language and Crime looks a bit more promising, doesn't it? I've got that out of the library already, so we don't need to worry about borrowing that. Speaker 7: Research Methods in Forensic Linguistics. I guess we ought to borrow that. And Voice Identification will be a useful one. I'll borrow that from our classmate, George. He won't need it for his project. But we should get out Modern Forensic Techniques. We need all the help we can get on that subject. Speaker 6: Okay. That's that sorted out. Now onto the practical stuff. I'm not sure about how we're going to record the voices. I'm not too good on the technical side of things. Speaker 7: Me neither. We'd better work out what we're doing. At least we get more than one opportunity to speak to the person playing the suspect. Speaker 6: I just hope whoever it is won't make the task too tricky. Speaker 7: I'm sure they won't be too hard on us. And as long as we do our research properly, it shouldn't be too hard to do the rest of it. I'm more worried about fitting in the writing up. Speaker 6: I know. We've got loads of other assignments to finish as well. Speaker 7: Now, Rob, let's decide how we're going to split the writing between us. Are you any good at introductions? They always seem to let me down. Speaker 6: Okay. Leave that to me. Speaker 7: Are you okay to do the literature review then? Speaker 6: Maybe we should split that part. I don't mind writing the methodology section if you feel comfortable doing the discussion and conclusions. Speaker 7: Okay. Speaker 6: And we can do the analysis between us as well. Speaker 7: Great. Let's get started. Speaker 3: That is the end of part three. You now have thirty seconds to check your answers to part three. PART 4 Speaker 8: Part four. You will hear part of a lecture given to students in a food science department about safety standards. First, you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40. Speaker 9: Good morning, everyone. In today's lecture, I'm going to talk about food safety and the factors involved in setting standards for the food industry with particular reference to the situation here in Australia. Now, before anyone can decide what kind of standards need to be set for ensuring that any specific food product is safe, scientists have to carry out a risk assessment. And in doing this, they have to consider several potential problems. Firstly, they have to consider the ingredients of the product. They have to decide whether any of these might make the finished product more susceptible to harmful bacteria. Then they have to consider the process used in the preparation of the food, and whether or not it includes a step designed to eliminate unwanted microorganisms. After that, they've got to consider the way products are stored, for instance, in warehouses or cold stores, and distributed to retailers. And it doesn't end there. The analysts even have to be aware of problems that might occur after the food has reached the supermarket, things like frozen foods being defrosted and then refrozen, because the temperature fluctuated, or foods being kept past their expiry date. And finally, any assessment of the overall risk has to take into account the way the end users, consumers, normally handle food at home. So, as you see, the risk assessment is quite complicated. Now, there are several factors affecting what kind of food we eat, only one of which is legislation. Another is the attitudes of consumers. A good example of this is the dislike that many Australians have for additives in their food, even when these additives are considered safe, and without them products have a shorter shelf life or a substandard appearance. This has led to the phenomenal expansion of the market for organic food in Australia. Another important influence on what we eat is the food industry itself. In some large supermarkets, low prices are the main strategy for attracting customers, while for more upscale marketers, image is more important. But we should bear in mind for all of them, the key consideration is profitability. Finally, there's the influence of the mass media, which is the most important source of information for most people. Unfortunately, this has a rather negative effect because in general they are not very objective. For one thing, the prime motivation of the media, as with the food industry, is sales, and this has a major influence on the way in which the topic is dealt with. A further problem is that news is regarded as a type of entertainment. Often the issues that get a top billing are those that are sensational or controversial, so it's not at all surprising if the public ends up with a rather distorted understanding of food and food safety. On top of that, up till now food safety and nutrition have never been considered a really interesting topic for the public. Very few TV or radio shows address the issues, and even those shows that are devoted to cooking or eating generally ignore them. At this point, I'll just offer a personal opinion on this subject of food safety. I firmly believe in food safety education, starting at primary schools. We know that many children who have been taught about the benefits of exercise come home and lecture their parents about it. So the same could be done for food and food preparation, and at the same time the countless educational television shows. Speaker 8: That is the end of part four. You now have one minute to check your answers to part four.