Free IELTS Listening practice tests, marked as you go.
Four full tests, 160 questions, every question type the real exam uses, including the plan you have to label and the choose-two questions. An indicative band the moment you mark, and any answer you miss replayed a line at a time. Below them: two British recordings checked word for word, and a tool that turns any video you already watch into a marked exercise.
·Practice tests
Four full IELTS Listening tests, marked part by part.
The script stays hidden until you mark, and any answer you miss can be replayed a line at a time.
A community centre booking, a repair cafe, a geography tutorial and a lecture on allotments.
Nothing marked yet. Your running score appears here.
Part 1 · A conversation in an everyday social context
Hiring a room at a community centre
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- Narrator Part one. You will hear a telephone conversation between a woman and a member of staff at a community centre. First, you have some time to look at questions one to ten.
- Man Good morning, Riverside Community Centre, Tom speaking.
- Woman Oh, hello. I’m ringing to ask about hiring a room. I teach a small evening class, and the church hall we’ve been using is closing for repairs.
- Man I’m sorry to hear that. We may well have space. Let me take a few details and I’ll see what fits. Could I start with your name?
- Woman Yes, it’s Marianne Ellison.
- Man Marianne. And how do you spell the surname?
- Woman E, double L, I, S, O, N. Ellison.
- Man Thank you. And the best number to reach you on?
- Woman It’s oh seven eight six six, five five three, two one nine.
- Man Let me read that back. Oh seven eight six six, five five three, two one nine.
- Woman That’s right.
- Man Lovely. And what sort of class is it?
- Woman Watercolour painting. Adults, mostly beginners.
- Man Right, so you’ll need water and somewhere to wash brushes. That narrows it down a little. Which evening were you thinking of?
- Woman We’ve always met on a Wednesday, though I’d move if I had to.
- Man Wednesday is our busiest evening, I’m afraid. The choir has the hall and a yoga group has the small room. Thursday is free from six.
- Woman Then Thursday would suit us. Better, if anything.
- Man Thursday it is. And what times?
- Woman We start at half past six and finish at half past eight.
- Man Two hours. With setting up and clearing away, I’d put you down from a quarter past six.
- Woman That’s very helpful.
- Man Now, rooms. The Kingfisher Room is the biggest, but there’s no sink in it, so for painting I’d put you in the Willow Room. It has a sink, a wipe-clean floor, and it’s on the ground floor.
- Woman The Willow Room sounds ideal.
- Man It takes twenty at a squeeze, but for a class working at tables I’d say eighteen is the comfortable maximum.
- Woman Eighteen is more than I have ever had.
- Man And the cost. For a regular weekly booking it’s fourteen pounds a session, paid monthly in advance.
- Woman Fourteen. That’s less than the church hall was charging.
- Man One more thing people always ask about, which is storage. You can leave equipment here between sessions. There’s a locked cupboard in the corridor outside the room, and we give you a key for it.
- Woman Oh, that solves my biggest problem. I’ve been carrying boards about in the boot of the car for two years.
- Man Then the last thing I need from you is proof of insurance. Anyone teaching a class on these premises has to hold their own public liability cover, and I have to see the certificate before the first session.
- Woman I have that. I’ll email it over this afternoon.
- Man Perfect. I’ll pencil you in for Thursdays from the fourth of September and send a confirmation across.
- Woman Thank you very much indeed.
Part 2 · A monologue in an everyday social context
A talk about the Repair Cafe
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- Narrator Part two. You will hear a volunteer coordinator giving a short talk about a repair cafe. First, you have some time to look at questions eleven to twenty.
- Woman Thank you all for coming, and welcome to the Riverside Repair Cafe. For anyone who hasn’t been before, the idea is a simple one. You bring something that is broken, we sit down together, and we try to mend it. Nothing goes in a skip that doesn’t have to.
- Woman A few practical points first, because one or two of them have changed. We used to meet on the last Saturday of the month, which caught everybody out over Christmas, so from January we have moved to the first Saturday of every month. The hours are the same: ten in the morning until one.
- Woman Second, if you are bringing anything electrical, please bring its cable with it. You would be surprised how often somebody arrives with a lamp and no cable at all, and there is very little we can do. We keep fuses and screwdrivers. We do not keep a cupboard full of other people’s cables.
- Woman Third, we have outgrown the little room at the back. From today we are in the Main Hall, which gives us more room and much better light. It is also, I am afraid, considerably noisier, so do speak up.
- Woman Please don’t form a queue at the door. Come in, take a numbered ticket from the table just inside, and have a cup of tea while you wait. We work through the numbers in order, and on a busy morning that can mean waiting half an hour.
- Woman People always ask what we mend most. They expect bicycles, or toasters. In fact, month after month, the commonest job on the table is clothing: a jammed zip, a dropped hem, a seam that has given way. The sewing table is the busiest in the room by a distance.
- Woman Now, the things we cannot do. We cannot work on gas appliances at all, and that is not negotiable. We cannot keep your item overnight, so if a repair defeats us it goes home with you and comes back next month. And we cannot promise a result, which is why nobody pays at the door.
- Woman A word about parts. Our volunteers give their time, and the tools are ours, but if your radio needs a new switch then the cost of the part is met by the owner, not by us. We tell you the price before anything is ordered, and nine times out of ten it is pennies.
- Woman Finally, we would love more help. We are not short of people who can rewire a lamp. What we badly need is somebody who can repair furniture: chairs that wobble, drawers that stick, a table with a broken leg. If that sounds like you, put your name on the green sheet by the door on your way out.
Part 3 · A discussion in an educational context
Two students discuss a high street survey
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- Narrator Part three. You will hear two students, Priya and Callum, discussing a geography project with their tutor. First, you have some time to look at questions twenty-one to thirty.
- Tutor Right, Priya, Callum. Where have you got to with the high street study?
- Priya We’ve finished the counts. We walked the whole of Market Street on three separate days and recorded what every unit was being used for.
- Tutor Every unit?
- Callum Every one, including the empty ones. Forty-two altogether. It took far longer than we expected, mainly because a shop can be surprisingly hard to classify. Is a place that sells coffee and also cuts hair one thing or two?
- Tutor That is the real lesson of fieldwork. So what did you decide?
- Priya In the end we used the council’s own categories, so that our figures can be compared with theirs.
- Tutor Sensible. And the historical side?
- Callum That’s where we are stuck. We wanted photographs of the same street from the nineteen sixties. The local archive holds them, but you can only view them on a Tuesday, and neither of us is free.
- Tutor Ah. Try the library instead. The whole collection was digitised two years ago, and any member can see it from home. Nobody ever thinks to tell the students that.
- Priya That is a relief.
- Tutor And the interviews?
- Priya We’ve done eight so far, shopkeepers mostly. The trouble is that they all say the same thing, which is parking.
- Callum Interesting in itself, but it gives us almost no spread of opinion.
- Tutor Then widen it. Talk to somebody who does not own a shop. Talk to somebody who has stopped coming to the high street altogether. The absent customer is data too.
- Priya We hadn’t thought of that.
- Tutor Now, the write-up. You have a great many numbers. What worries me slightly is the map.
- Callum We were going to put every category on one map, colour-coded.
- Tutor Forty-two units and nine categories on a single map. It will be unreadable. Draw three simpler maps instead, one for each survey day, and let the reader see the change for themselves.
- Priya And the word limit? We are over it already.
- Tutor Three thousand words. That includes your captions, but it does not include the appendix. Put the full data tables in the appendix and the report will lose a thousand words on its own.
- Tutor Before you go, divide the work up between you.
- Priya I’ll ring the library about the photographs, since I have a free morning tomorrow.
- Callum And I’ll redo the maps. I have the software on my laptop.
- Priya The extra interviews we should do together, I think. Two of us makes it less awkward on the doorstep.
- Callum Agreed. And I’ll draft the introduction, along with the methods section.
- Priya Then I’ll take the conclusion.
- Tutor And the references?
- Priya We’ll check each other’s. Last time we each used a different style and it showed.
Part 4 · A monologue on an academic subject
A lecture on the British allotment
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- Narrator Part four. You will hear part of a lecture on the history of allotment gardens in Britain. First, you have some time to look at questions thirty-one to forty.
- Lecturer Good afternoon. Today I want to look at a piece of the British landscape that most people walk straight past: the allotment. A few dozen rectangles of vegetables behind a fence, usually beside a railway line, and behind them a surprisingly political history.
- Lecturer Begin with the word itself. An allotment is quite literally land allotted to somebody, and the practice grew out of the enclosure of common land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the commons were fenced off, the rural poor lost the grazing and the fuel they had depended on, and plots of land were offered, in a very small way, as compensation.
- Lecturer The nineteenth-century allotment was therefore a rural institution, attached to villages and to the parish. What changed it was the growth of the industrial towns. By the eighteen eighties the demand was urban, and it was political: working men wanted land, and working men now voted.
- Lecturer The result was a run of Acts of Parliament, and the one that still matters is the Act of nineteen hundred and eight. It placed a duty on local councils to provide plots wherever six residents asked for them, and that duty has never been repealed. It is the reason your local council still keeps a waiting list today.
- Lecturer Then came the wars, and with them a food supply problem that allotments were well placed to answer. In the Second World War the Dig for Victory campaign turned gardening into a national effort. Parks were ploughed, verges were planted, and even the moat of the Tower of London was dug over and sown with vegetables. At the peak there were something like one and a half million plots in Britain.
- Lecturer Peace proved harder on the allotment than war had been. From the nineteen fifties the plots came under sustained pressure from housing. An allotment site is flat, it is already serviced, and it is publicly owned, which makes it, from a developer’s point of view, very close to ideal. Numbers fell for forty years, and the figure today is nearer three hundred thousand.
- Lecturer There is a second cause of the decline that gets far less attention, and it is the size of the standard plot. The traditional allotment is ten rods, an old measure of roughly two hundred and fifty square metres, and it was sized for a family that expected to eat from it. For a household that simply wants tomatoes and somewhere quiet on a Sunday, ten rods is not a hobby, it is a second job. The single most effective thing a council can do with an empty site is to halve the plots.
- Lecturer And the revival is real. Waiting lists in some cities now run to several years, and the composition of those lists has changed completely: younger, more urban, and far more likely to be female than the old caricature of a retired man in a shed. Three motives come up again and again in the survey work, and only one of them is vegetables. The others are exercise and, above all, company. An allotment is one of the last places in a British town where you talk regularly to people you did not choose.
- Lecturer A research note before you go. Allotment data is patchy, because the statutory duty sits with several hundred separate councils and nobody gathers the figures centrally. So if you quote a national number in your essay, quote the survey it came from and the year it was taken, and treat any suspiciously round figure with caution.
A lost bag on a coach, a nature reserve briefing, a tutorial on sleep and a lecture on the canals.
Nothing marked yet. Your running score appears here.
Part 1 · A conversation in an everyday social context
Reporting a bag left on a coach
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- Narrator Part one. You will hear a man reporting a lost bag to a coach company. First, you have some time to look at questions one to ten.
- Woman Northern Coaches lost property, good afternoon.
- Man Hello. I left a bag on one of your coaches yesterday and I’m hoping somebody has handed it in.
- Woman Let’s see what we can do. I’ll take the details and put them on the system. Your name first.
- Man Daniel Hargreaves.
- Woman And that surname is spelt?
- Man H, A, R, G, R, E, A, V, E, S. Hargreaves.
- Woman Thank you. Which service were you on?
- Man The Leeds to Manchester coach. The one that goes on to the airport afterwards.
- Woman That’s the four twenty service. And you travelled yesterday, which was the Tuesday.
- Man Tuesday, yes.
- Woman Do you remember where you were sitting? It genuinely helps the cleaners.
- Man Upstairs. Seat fourteen C, by the window on the left.
- Woman Fourteen C. Now describe the bag for me, as fully as you can.
- Man It’s a rucksack, quite a large one. Canvas, not nylon, with leather straps.
- Woman Canvas. And the colour?
- Man Dark green. Almost black in a poor light, but it is green.
- Woman Dark green canvas rucksack. What was inside it?
- Man A laptop charger, a jumper, and a notebook. The notebook is the thing I actually mind about. It is half a year of work.
- Woman I’ll put the notebook down as the identifying contents. Anything on the outside that would tell it apart from every other green rucksack?
- Man There’s a badge sewn onto the front strap. A small enamel one, a mountain.
- Woman A badge on the strap. That is exactly the sort of detail we need. Right, your report number is L P four two nine seven.
- Man L P four two nine seven. And if it turns up?
- Woman We hold everything at the Leeds depot, and you collect from the enquiry office on the main concourse, not from the coach stand. Bring some identification with you.
- Man How long do you keep things?
- Woman Twenty-eight days, and then anything unclaimed goes to charity. But do ring back on Thursday, because items handed in overnight are not logged until the following morning.
- Man Thursday it is. Thank you very much.
Part 2 · A monologue in an everyday social context
A briefing for new volunteers at a nature reserve
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- Narrator Part two. You will hear a warden briefing a group of new volunteers at a nature reserve. First, you have some time to look at questions eleven to twenty.
- Warden Morning, everyone, and thank you for giving up a Saturday. I’m the warden here at Fenwater, and this will take ten minutes, then we get our boots on.
- Warden Fenwater is a hundred and forty hectares of wet grassland, marsh and woodland, and it exists for one reason: birds. Everything we do here, every ditch we clear and every hedge we cut, is done to keep the water where the birds need it and to keep the scrub off the ground where they nest.
- Warden The first rule is about the tide, and I mean it. The north marsh floods faster than anybody expects, and the water comes in behind you, not towards you. Nobody works out there alone, ever, and everybody carries a whistle.
- Warden The second rule is dogs. We are not being unfriendly. Ground-nesting birds abandon a nest at the sight of a dog at fifty metres, and once they abandon it, that is the year gone. So dogs stay in the car park, including mine.
- Warden Third, tools. Everything you need is in the green container by the gate, and everything must go back to the container at the end of the day, cleaned. Losing a pair of loppers in long grass costs us more than the loppers, because somebody eventually finds them with a mower.
- Warden Fourth, and I say this every time, please record what you see. Every volunteer here is a pair of eyes, and our funding depends on evidence. There is a sightings book in the hut and the entry takes twenty seconds.
- Warden Now, where things are. The hide, which is the wooden building you can see from here, sits at the edge of the north marsh, and that is where the winter waders are. If you want to see something spectacular before you start, go there first.
- Warden The pond dipping platform is in the visitor field, next to the car park, and it is the only place where school groups are allowed to go into the water. Please do not take a school group anywhere else.
- Warden Our new bat boxes went up in the woodland in February, all thirty of them, and they will be checked in September under licence. The woodland is also where the coppicing happens, so that is where the heavy work is this winter.
- Warden The toilets and the tea urn are both in the visitor field, in the hut behind the notice board. And the wildflower meadow we sowed last year is in the woodland, in the clearing at the far end, which surprises people who expect a meadow to be out in the open.
- Warden Right. Boots on, whistles collected from me, and we start with the ditch behind the hide.
Part 3 · A discussion in an educational context
Two students plan a presentation on sleep
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- Narrator Part three. You will hear two students, Nadia and Sam, planning a presentation with their tutor. First, you have some time to look at questions twenty-one to thirty.
- Tutor So, sleep and student performance. How far have you got?
- Nadia We’ve read a great deal, and that is half the problem. There is so much on sleep that we cannot see where our twenty minutes should go.
- Sam We started with the effect on memory, but every other group in the year is doing memory.
- Tutor Then do not do memory. What did you find that surprised you?
- Nadia The timing, actually. Not how long students sleep, but when. A lot of the studies find that the hours are roughly normal and it is the body clock that has shifted.
- Tutor That is a much better presentation, and it is a narrower one. Build it on timing.
- Sam The trouble is the evidence. Most of what we have found is a questionnaire, and students are unreliable about their own sleep. They overestimate it by about an hour.
- Tutor Then say so, early, and say it as a strength. A presentation that explains why its own evidence is weak is doing exactly what a scientist does.
- Nadia We did find three studies using wrist monitors rather than questionnaires.
- Tutor Then those three carry your argument, and the questionnaires become your discussion of method. What about the practical end?
- Sam We wanted to finish with advice. Get eight hours, avoid screens, that sort of thing.
- Tutor Be careful there. Advice of that kind is the weakest part of most student presentations, because it is not what your evidence shows. Your evidence is about timing, so if you give advice, give advice about timing.
- Nadia So a consistent waking hour rather than a fixed bedtime.
- Tutor Now that does follow from the data. Good. How are you dividing the twenty minutes?
- Sam Ten each, we thought.
- Tutor Do not. Two people talking for ten minutes each is two presentations. Split it by section and hand over three or four times, and rehearse the handovers, because that is where these things fall apart.
- Nadia And the slides?
- Tutor Fewer than you want. One graph you can explain properly is worth nine you rush. And put your references on a handout rather than a slide, because nobody in the room can read a reference from four metres away.
- Sam What about questions at the end?
- Tutor Leave four minutes, and prepare for the one question you are dreading, because somebody always asks it. In your case it will be about caffeine, and you have not read anything about caffeine.
- Nadia We have not, no.
- Tutor Then read one review paper on it before Thursday. One is enough to answer honestly.
Part 4 · A monologue on an academic subject
A lecture on the British canal network
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- Narrator Part four. You will hear part of a lecture on the history of the British canal network. First, you have some time to look at questions thirty-one to forty.
- Lecturer Good morning. Britain has something like two thousand miles of navigable canal, and almost none of it was built for the purpose it now serves. Today the network carries holidaymakers, joggers and herons. It was built to carry coal.
- Lecturer The conventional starting point is seventeen sixty-one and the Bridgewater Canal, cut to bring coal from the Duke of Bridgewater’s mines at Worsley into Manchester. The often quoted result is that the price of coal in Manchester fell by half, and whether or not the figure is exact, the lesson was learnt instantly: water carriage was extraordinarily cheap. A horse that can pull two tons on a road can pull fifty on water.
- Lecturer What followed was a speculative boom that contemporaries themselves called canal mania. In the seventeen nineties, Parliament passed act after act, money poured in from investors who had never seen the ground, and a good many of the schemes were never finished. Several were never begun.
- Lecturer Now, the engineering, and one decision that shaped everything afterwards. The early narrow locks were built about seven feet wide, because a narrow lock uses less water and water at the summit of a canal is the scarcest thing there is. That width fixed the size of the boat, and it is why the narrowboat is seventy feet long and seven feet wide to this day. It also, incidentally, fixed the size of the family that lived aboard one.
- Lecturer The motive power was the horse, walking a towpath, and the horse explains a great deal about how a canal looks. Canals follow contours because a horse cannot climb. Where the contour fails you get locks, and where locks are impossible you get a tunnel, and in the early tunnels there was no towpath at all, so the boat was moved by men lying on their backs and pushing against the roof. The practice was called legging, and it was as unpleasant as it sounds.
- Lecturer The canal age was short. From the eighteen forties the railways took the long-distance traffic, and they took it quickly, because a railway could do in a day what a canal did in a week. Many canal companies were bought by railway companies, sometimes precisely in order to close them. Commercial carrying limped on into the nineteen fifties, and the last regular coal traffic ended within living memory.
- Lecturer What saved the network was not the state. It was a campaign, largely by volunteers, that began in the nineteen forties with the founding of the Inland Waterways Association, and turned into decades of clearing silt, rebuilding lock gates and, in one famous case, physically standing in the way of a proposed road. Restoration is still going on.
- Lecturer And the modern value of a canal is not transport at all. It is leisure, it is property prices, and it is ecology: a continuous, slow-moving, linear wetland running through the middle of a city is a wildlife corridor of a kind that planners now spend a great deal of money trying to create from scratch.
- Lecturer For your essays, one warning. The canal literature is written largely by enthusiasts, and it is affectionate. Dates of opening are often the date of an Act rather than the date a boat first moved, so check which one your source means.
A coastal walking weekend, a city farm plan to label, a tutorial on a river survey and a lecture on the seaside pier.
Nothing marked yet. Your running score appears here.
Part 1 · A conversation in an everyday social context
Booking a place on a coastal walking weekend
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- Narrator Part one. You will hear a telephone conversation between a man and a woman who organises walking weekends. First, you have some time to look at questions one to ten.
- Woman Good afternoon, Headland Walks, Bridget speaking.
- Man Hello. A friend of mine went on one of your coastal weekends in the spring and hasn’t stopped talking about it. I wondered what you had left this year.
- Woman Lovely to hear. We run three coastal weekends between now and October, and there is room on all of them, though one is filling quickly. Shall I take you through them?
- Man Please do.
- Woman The first is the cliff weekend. That is our most popular, and it is the one that is going fast. Saturday and Sunday, staying in a small hotel in the village.
- Man How far do you actually walk?
- Woman On the cliff weekend, eleven miles on the Saturday and rather less on the Sunday. It is not the distance that tires people, it is the climbing. There is a great deal of up and down.
- Man And where do you meet?
- Woman For that one we meet at the harbour, at half past nine on the Saturday morning. There is a long stay car park right beside it.
- Man Right. And the cost?
- Woman Two hundred and ten pounds, and that includes both nights and all your breakfasts.
- Man What about the second weekend?
- Woman The second is the estuary weekend, and that is the gentle one. Flat the whole way, so it suits people who want the coast without the climbing. Seven miles on the Saturday.
- Man Where does that one start?
- Woman We meet at the ferry, which is easy enough to find, and again at half past nine.
- Man And is it cheaper, being gentler?
- Woman A little. One hundred and eighty pounds.
- Man And the third?
- Woman The third is the island weekend, and it is the one people remember. We take the morning boat across, walk the whole way round the island on the Saturday, which is fourteen miles, and come back on the Sunday afternoon.
- Man Fourteen. That is a proper day.
- Woman It is, and there is nowhere to stop halfway, so you carry your lunch. We meet at the quay for that one, at nine o’clock rather than half past, because the boat will not wait.
- Man Understood. And the price?
- Woman Two hundred and forty pounds, because the boat is included.
- Man Thank you. That is all very clear. Can I ask a few practical things?
- Woman Of course.
- Man How many people are there in a group?
- Woman We cap every walk at twelve. Any more than that and the person at the back never hears a word.
- Man Sensible. And is there anything you insist people bring?
- Woman One thing, and we are firm about it. Boots. Not trainers, not walking shoes. The coast path is wet in places all year round, and every year somebody arrives in trainers and regrets it by lunchtime.
- Man Boots. Noted. What happens if the weather is bad?
- Woman We walk in rain quite happily. The only thing that stops us is wind, because the cliff path is genuinely dangerous above about forty miles an hour. If that happens we move inland and walk a valley instead.
- Man And if I need to cancel?
- Woman You get everything back up to a fortnight before. Inside two weeks we can usually resell the place, but I would not promise it.
- Man That is fair. And how do I hold a place?
- Woman A deposit of fifty pounds, and the balance four weeks before you come. I can take the deposit by card now, or send you a link.
- Man A link would be easier. I will put the island weekend down for two of us.
- Woman Wonderful. I will send that across this afternoon.
Part 2 · A talk on a familiar topic
A welcome talk for new volunteers at a city farm
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- Narrator Part two. You will hear a member of staff at a city farm welcoming a group of new volunteers. First, you have some time to look at questions eleven to twenty.
- Guide Right, everyone, gather round where you can see the plan. Welcome to Millfield City Farm, and thank you for giving up your Saturdays.
- Guide Let me walk you round on paper first, because the site is long and thin and it confuses people on their first morning.
- Guide You have all come in at the gate, and the lane runs the whole length of the farm from the gate to the car park at the far end. Everything sits on one side of the lane or the other, so once you know which side a thing is on you cannot really go wrong.
- Guide Start with the very first plot on your left as you come through the gate. That is the tool store. Everything you will need lives in there, and it is the first place you go each morning and the last place you come back to.
- Guide Directly opposite the tool store, on the right hand side of the lane, is the poultry run. That is not on your list today, so I will move on.
- Guide The second plot on your left, the one next to the tool store, is the classroom. School groups come in on weekdays, and on a Saturday it is where we eat our sandwiches if it rains.
- Guide Now cross the lane. The second plot on your right hand side, the one opposite the classroom, is the cafe. It opens at ten and the volunteers get their coffee free, which I mention because it is the single most popular thing about the job.
- Guide Carry on up the lane. The third plot on the left is the vegetable beds, and the fourth and last one on the left, right up at the far end beside the car park, is the goat pen. The goats are the reason we ask you to shut every gate behind you.
- Guide On the right hand side, the third plot along is the orchard, and then the very last plot on the right, the small one at the far end, is the compost heap. It is at that end deliberately, because it is next to the car park and the trailer can back right up to it.
- Guide So that is the shape of the place. Tool store first on the left, classroom next to it, cafe opposite the classroom, goats at the far end on the left, compost at the far end on the right.
- Guide Now, a few practical things about volunteering here, and I would rather say them once and clearly than have you find them out the hard way.
- Guide First, timing. We ask you to arrive by half past eight. That is not because there is anything to do at half past eight. It is because the animals are fed at nine, and if you arrive after the feed has started you cannot join it, and the feed is the interesting bit.
- Guide Second, clothes. Wear whatever you like, but it will get ruined, so do not wear anything you are fond of. We provide gloves and we provide waterproofs, but we do not provide boots, and you cannot work here in trainers.
- Guide Third, the animals. Please do not feed them. I know that sounds unfriendly. The reason is simply that they are on measured diets, and a handful of something from a visitor’s pocket is enough to make a goat genuinely ill.
- Guide Fourth, the public. We are open to visitors every day, and you will be asked questions constantly. You are not expected to know the answers. Say you are a volunteer and point them at the office, and nobody will think any the less of you.
- Guide Fifth, and this is the one people forget: sign out. There is a book by the gate. If you do not sign out, the last person off the site spends twenty minutes looking for you in the dark, and they will not be pleased.
- Guide And lastly, if you decide the work is not for you, please just say so. Nobody minds. What we would rather avoid is people who quietly stop coming, because we hold the place open for them and somebody on the waiting list misses out.
- Guide Right. Gloves are in the tool store. Let us go and meet the goats.
Part 3 · A discussion in an educational context
Two students plan a report on a river survey
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- Narrator Part three. You will hear two students, Priya and Sam, discussing a report with their tutor. First, you have some time to look at questions twenty-one to thirty.
- Tutor So, the river survey. You have the data. Talk me through how you are going to write it up.
- Priya We have split the report into five sections, and we have taken two or three each.
- Sam Priya is doing the background and the results. I am doing the method and the discussion, and we are writing the conclusion together.
- Tutor Let us take them one at a time, because I want to hear what each of you thinks the section is actually for. Background first.
- Priya The background is mine. I have written it as the story of the catchment: what the river is, who uses it, and why anybody would bother measuring it.
- Tutor Good, and be ruthless with it. The commonest fault in a background is that it is too long.
- Priya That is what I keep telling Sam. Mine is going to be a page and a half at most.
- Tutor Method next.
- Sam Mine. And I have found it much harder than I expected, because we changed what we were doing halfway through.
- Tutor Say more.
- Sam We were sampling at three points, and after the second week we added a fourth, above the treatment works. So the method has to describe two different sets of readings honestly, rather than pretending we planned it that way.
- Tutor That is exactly right, and I am pleased you said it out loud. A method that quietly tidies up what really happened is worthless. Results.
- Priya Results are mine as well. It is almost entirely figures, so I am building it around four graphs and keeping the words to a minimum.
- Tutor And no interpretation in there, please.
- Priya None. Every time I want to explain a number I write it down for Sam to use in the discussion.
- Tutor Discussion, Sam.
- Sam This is the part I am worried about. I can see the pattern, but I am not confident I can say what caused it without going further than the data allows.
- Tutor Then say so in the report. A discussion that names what it cannot prove reads as more competent, not less.
- Sam That helps a great deal, actually.
- Tutor And the conclusion is joint. Who is holding the pen?
- Priya Neither of us yet. We agreed to write it last, once we have both read the other’s sections, so it does not just repeat them.
- Tutor Sensible. Now, one thing I want to raise before you go. Your fourth sampling point, above the treatment works. What made you add it?
- Sam Honestly? The readings downstream looked wrong, and we could not tell whether the works were the cause or whether it was the farmland further up.
- Tutor And could you tell, in the end?
- Priya Not conclusively. But the upstream readings were much cleaner than we expected, which points at the works rather than the farm.
- Tutor Points at, yes. Do not write proves. Now, presentation. You have ten minutes each in the seminar. What is your plan?
- Sam We were going to take five minutes each and cover our own sections.
- Tutor I would not. Splitting a talk by who wrote what is the most common mistake in these seminars, and it produces two half talks. Split it by question instead: one of you sets up the problem, the other reports what you found.
- Priya That is better. And it means the graphs all come in one go rather than twice.
- Tutor Precisely. And on graphs: four is too many for ten minutes. Choose the two that carry the argument and put the rest in a handout.
- Sam Two graphs. Right.
- Tutor Finally, the deadline. It is the Friday, and I mean the Friday, because the external examiner reads them over that weekend. Anything that arrives on the Monday is read by nobody.
- Priya We will have it in on the Thursday.
- Tutor I have heard that before, but I will take it.
Part 4 · A lecture on an academic subject
A lecture on the British seaside pier
Not started
- Narrator Part four. You will hear part of a lecture on the history of the British seaside pier. First, you have some time to look at questions thirty-one to forty.
- Lecturer Good morning. The seaside pier is one of those objects that is so familiar that we forget to ask what it is for, and the answer turns out to be a rather good way into nineteenth century Britain.
- Lecturer Begin with the obvious point. A pier is a road built out over water, and the first ones were built for exactly that reason: to let a boat come alongside at any state of the tide. They were landing stages, not attractions.
- Lecturer The oldest of them that survives is at Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, and it opened in the year eighteen fourteen. Its purpose was entirely practical. The sands at Ryde dry out for half a mile at low water, and passengers arriving from the mainland were being carried ashore on carts.
- Lecturer So the pier begins as a solution to a transport problem, and only afterwards becomes a pleasure. That order matters, because it explains why piers are where they are.
- Lecturer The engineering that made the pleasure pier possible was a small invention with a large effect: the screw pile. Alexander Mitchell, an Irish engineer who was himself blind, patented a pile with a broad iron helix at its foot, which could be turned down into sand or mud until it gripped.
- Lecturer Before the screw pile, building out over a sandy beach meant driving timber piles that the sea worked loose. After it, a pier could be founded on sand cheaply and quickly, and it could be built of iron rather than wood, which meant it did not rot.
- Lecturer The great designer of the type was Eugenius Birch, who built fourteen piers in his career, and whose West Pier at Brighton, opened in eighteen sixty-six, is usually taken as the finished article: a promenade over the sea with a pavilion at the end.
- Lecturer Now, why did the Victorians want to walk over the sea at all? Partly it was medical fashion. Sea air was prescribed, and a pier let you take it without the discomfort of a boat.
- Lecturer But the deeper reason was the railway. A resort with a railway could bring thousands of day visitors, and a pier was the cheapest way of giving them something to do and, crucially, of charging them a toll to do it.
- Lecturer The numbers are worth having. By nineteen ten there were roughly one hundred pleasure piers around the coast of Britain, which is the high water mark, so to speak. Fewer than sixty survive.
- Lecturer The longest is at Southend, which runs for one point three miles into the Thames estuary, and it is long for a very unromantic reason: the mud there is so flat that you must go that far out to reach water a boat can use.
- Lecturer Southend is also the reason people are surprised to find a railway on a pier. At that length, walking is not a serious proposition in bad weather.
- Lecturer Now, decline. Three things damaged the pier, and it is worth separating them, because they are often run together.
- Lecturer The first is fire. A pier is a wooden deck on an iron frame carrying a large timber pavilion, standing in a wind, half a mile from a fire engine. Fire has destroyed more piers than storms have.
- Lecturer The second is war. During the second war a great many piers were deliberately cut, a section of the deck removed in the middle, to stop an enemy using them as a ready made landing stage. A number were never repaired afterwards.
- Lecturer The third, and the slowest, is the holiday abroad. From the nineteen sixties the cheap flight took the British seaside holiday to Spain, and the resorts that depended on it lost the visitors who paid the tolls.
- Lecturer What is interesting is what has happened since. A pier costs a great deal to maintain and earns very little, so almost none of them are now owned by a company. The typical modern arrangement is ownership by the local council, often with a volunteer trust doing the fundraising.
- Lecturer And the argument those trusts make is not a nostalgic one. It is economic. A working pier is what makes a town look like a resort rather than a town with a beach, and the value it creates shows up in the shops behind it rather than in the takings on the pier itself.
- Lecturer Which brings us to the awkward question I want you to take away. If the benefit of the pier is captured by the businesses on the front, and the cost falls on whoever owns the pier, then who should pay for it? Hold that thought and we will come back to it after the break.
A bike hire scheme, a radio feature on a new park, a tutorial on a memory experiment and a lecture on the English hedgerow.
Nothing marked yet. Your running score appears here.
Part 1 · A conversation in an everyday social context
Joining a bike hire and repair scheme
Not started
- Narrator Part one. You will hear a woman telephoning a bicycle scheme about becoming a member. First, you have some time to look at questions one to ten.
- Man Good morning, Wheelhouse Bikes, Daniel speaking.
- Woman Hello. I have just moved into the area and somebody at work said you run a hire scheme. Is that right?
- Man We do. We hire bikes by the month, and members get repairs at cost. Would you like me to set you up?
- Woman Yes please.
- Man Lovely. Can I take your name?
- Woman It’s Helen Marchetti.
- Man Could you spell the surname for me?
- Woman M, A, R, C, H, E, double T, I.
- Man Marchetti. Thank you. And an address?
- Woman Flat four, Sixteen Bramble Court. That’s Bramble like the fruit.
- Man Sixteen Bramble Court. And is that the new development by the station?
- Woman It is, yes.
- Man Right. Now, which bike would suit you? We have three kinds on the scheme. There’s the town bike, which is the ordinary sort, upright, with a basket. There’s the folding one, which people take on the train. And there’s the electric, which is the most popular but there is a waiting list.
- Woman How long a wait?
- Man About six weeks at the moment. It goes up in the spring.
- Woman Then I won’t wait. My journey is only two miles and it’s flat, so I’ll take the town bike.
- Man Sensible. The town bike is twenty-two pounds a month, and that includes the lock and the lights.
- Woman And is there anything to pay at the start?
- Man There’s a deposit of forty pounds, which you get back when you return the bike.
- Woman Fine. What about repairs?
- Man Anything that goes wrong through ordinary use we fix free. Punctures, brakes, gears. What we do charge for is damage, and the commonest one, I’m afraid, is a bent wheel.
- Woman Noted. And how do I get hold of you if something breaks?
- Man There’s a workshop here, open Tuesday to Saturday, and we also run a van. If you can’t get the bike to us, the van comes to you, but only on a Thursday.
- Woman Thursday. Right. Is there anything else I should know?
- Man Two things. First, we ask every member to bring the bike in once a year for a safety check. It takes twenty minutes and it’s free, but if you miss it the insurance lapses.
- Woman I’ll put it in the diary.
- Man And second, if the bike is stolen you must report it to the police within twenty-four hours, and send us the crime number. Without that number we cannot claim, and the deposit goes.
- Woman Twenty-four hours. Understood. When can I collect it?
- Man We can have one ready by Friday. Bring some identification, and something with your address on it.
- Woman Will a bank statement do?
- Man A bank statement is ideal. See you Friday.
Part 2 · A talk on a familiar topic
A radio feature on a new town park
Not started
- Narrator Part two. You will hear a radio feature about a park being built on the site of an old goods yard. First, you have some time to look at questions eleven to twenty.
- Presenter For thirty years the goods yard behind the station was a fence, a sign and a great deal of buddleia. On Saturday it opens as Marsh Lane Park, and I have been to see it.
- Presenter The first thing to say is that it is not what the council originally proposed. The 2019 plan was for housing, with a strip of green along one edge, and it was the strength of the objection that changed it.
- Presenter What surprised me, reading the consultation, is what people actually asked for. The single most requested item was not a playground and it was not a cafe. It was lavatories, followed closely by lighting on the through path.
- Presenter Both are in. The lavatories are by the eastern gate and the path is lit from dusk until midnight.
- Presenter The playground is in too, though smaller than campaigners wanted, and the cafe has been deferred until the second phase, which is honest of them, because there is no money for it yet.
- Presenter Now, the part that has made this park unusual. The goods yard left behind a great deal of hard standing, and the ordinary thing to do would have been to break it all up and turf it.
- Presenter Instead the designers kept about a third of it. Concrete holds heat, and a warm, poor, free-draining surface is exactly what a lot of rare insects want. So there are deliberate patches of bare ground here, and they are labelled, so that people understand they are not unfinished.
- Presenter The other survival is the rails. Two hundred metres of track have been left in place, running through the middle of the meadow, and children were walking along them when I visited, which I suspect was the point.
- Presenter There is one genuine controversy, and it is worth stating plainly. The park has no fence facing the railway, only a hedge, and some residents are unhappy about that. The designers argue a fence would have cost the entire planting budget.
- Presenter A few practicalities. It opens at eight every morning and closes at dusk, so the closing time moves through the year. Dogs are welcome except in the meadow between April and July, which is when the ground-nesting birds are there.
- Presenter There is no car park, deliberately. The nearest parking is at the station and it is chargeable, so the message is come on foot, or come by train.
- Presenter The opening event is on Saturday from eleven, and the thing to arrive for is the seed giveaway, because they are handing out meadow mixes grown from the site’s own plants, and when they are gone they are gone.
- Presenter And if you want to be involved afterwards, the friends group meets on the first Sunday of the month. They are looking for people to count butterflies, which sounds whimsical and is in fact how the council will judge whether any of this worked.
Part 3 · A discussion in an educational context
Two students review a memory experiment
Not started
- Narrator Part three. You will hear two students, Nadia and Tom, discussing an experiment with their tutor. First, you have some time to look at questions twenty-one to thirty.
- Tutor So, the memory study. It did not go the way you expected, which is usually the interesting outcome. Where do you want to start?
- Nadia With what went wrong, honestly. We predicted the group who revised in the morning would recall more, and there was no difference at all.
- Tom No difference we could detect, which is not the same thing.
- Tutor Good. Hold on to that distinction. Why might a real effect have hidden from you?
- Nadia Two reasons we can actually defend. The sample was small, twenty-four people, and our test was easy enough that most people scored near the top, so there was nowhere for a difference to show.
- Tutor A ceiling effect. Yes. Anything else you are tempted to blame?
- Tom We wondered about the room being noisy, and about people revising at home beforehand.
- Tutor Be careful. You measured neither of those, so they are speculation, and a limitations section built on speculation reads as excuse-making. Keep the two you can evidence and drop the two you cannot.
- Nadia That is clearer than the guidance we were given, actually.
- Tutor Now, the write-up. There are five sections and I want to know who is doing what, and more importantly why.
- Nadia I am doing the introduction, because I did the reading and I have the references in my head.
- Tutor Fair. Method?
- Tom Mine. I ran the sessions, so I am the only one who knows what actually happened as opposed to what we planned.
- Tutor That is exactly the right reason. Results?
- Tom Also mine. I did the statistics and Nadia has not seen the workings yet.
- Nadia Which I am not thrilled about, but it is the sensible split.
- Tutor Discussion?
- Nadia Mine, and it is the one I am dreading, because a null result is harder to write about than a positive one.
- Tutor It is harder, and it is also where the marks are. And the limitations section?
- Tom We are writing that together, because we disagree about it and we would rather argue it out on paper than submit two views.
- Tutor Sensible. Now, one thing I want to raise. Your consent form said participants could withdraw at any point. One did. What did you do with her data?
- Nadia We removed it entirely.
- Tutor Good. And did you say so anywhere?
- Tom Not yet.
- Tutor Then say it. An unexplained gap between twenty-four recruited and twenty-three analysed is the sort of thing that looks like carelessness when it is actually good practice.
- Nadia We will put it in the method.
- Tutor Finally, presentation. Ten minutes. What is your opening line?
- Tom We thought we would explain the design first, then the result.
- Tutor Reverse it. Lead with the null result, because it is the surprising thing and it buys you the room’s attention. Then explain the design as the answer to why they should believe it.
- Nadia That is much better.
- Tutor And do not apologise for a null result. Half the published literature would be more trustworthy if more of them were reported.
Part 4 · A lecture on an academic subject
A lecture on the English hedgerow
Not started
- Narrator Part four. You will hear part of a lecture on the history of the English hedgerow. First, you have some time to look at questions thirty-one to forty.
- Lecturer Good afternoon. A hedge looks like scenery, and it is in fact a document. Almost everything you can see about an English field boundary tells you something about who owned the land and what they were trying to do with it.
- Lecturer Start with the obvious question: what is a hedge for? Before wire, a hedge was the only way to keep an animal where you wanted it. Everything else, the wildlife, the beauty, the shelter, is a by-product of that one function.
- Lecturer The commonest plant in an English hedge, by a very long way, is hawthorn, which the older books call quickthorn. It is quick to establish, it tolerates cutting, and it grows a thorn that a cow respects.
- Lecturer Now, dating. There is a rule of thumb, and like all rules of thumb it is more useful than it is reliable. It is called Hooper’s rule, after Max Hooper, who noticed a relationship between a hedge’s age and the number of woody species in it.
- Lecturer The method is simple enough to do on a walk. You pace out a thirty-yard stretch, you count the woody species in it, and you multiply by a hundred. Four species suggests roughly four hundred years.
- Lecturer The caveats matter. A hedge planted with a mixture starts rich and looks older than it is. A hedge in a region with few native shrubs stays poor however old it is. Hooper’s rule is evidence, not proof, and it works best in the Midlands, where he did the work.
- Lecturer Why does age matter? Because it separates two completely different landscapes that look similar from a car.
- Lecturer The older is the ancient countryside: irregular fields, winding hedges, hedges that follow a stream or a parish boundary, hedges that are simply older than the records. Much of Devon and Essex looks like this.
- Lecturer The newer is planned countryside, and it is the product of enclosure. Between roughly seventeen fifty and eighteen fifty, thousands of parliamentary acts divided open fields and common land into the rectangular blocks you see across the Midlands, and every block was hedged, usually with hawthorn, usually straight.
- Lecturer So a straight hedge is generally a young hedge, and a wandering one is generally an old one. That single observation lets you read a landscape from the top of a bus.
- Lecturer Management next, because a hedge that is not managed stops being a hedge and becomes a line of trees with gaps underneath, which is useless for stock.
- Lecturer The traditional answer is laying: you cut most of the way through each stem near the base, bend it over at an angle, and weave it between stakes. The stem stays alive, and it throws up new growth from the bottom, so the hedge thickens where it matters.
- Lecturer Laying has strong regional styles, and they are a genuine folk tradition, but the reason for the differences is practical: what the hedge had to hold. A style developed for sheep is built low and dense, one for cattle is taller and stronger.
- Lecturer Then the twentieth century. After nineteen forty-five the pressure was to produce more food from fewer, larger fields, and for several decades government grants actually paid farmers to remove hedges.
- Lecturer The result was a loss on a scale that is genuinely difficult to picture. Estimates vary, but something close to half the hedgerow of England was removed between the war and the nineteen nineties.
- Lecturer Protection came late. The Hedgerows Regulations of nineteen ninety-seven made it an offence to remove certain hedgerows in England and Wales without permission, using criteria of age, species and historical importance.
- Lecturer And the modern argument for hedges is no longer about stock at all, because wire does that job. It is about connection: a hedge is a corridor, and a corridor lets a population move between two woods that would otherwise be islands.
- Lecturer Which leaves the awkward question I want you to take away. A hedge is expensive to lay and cheap to flail. If the public wants hedges for reasons that earn the farmer nothing, who should be paying for the laying? We will come back to that.
·Real voices
Two British voices, checked word for word.
Human readers, public domain, and every gap below taken from a transcript made from the recording itself. Both read the same short fable, one in Received Pronunciation and one in south-east London, so your two scores show which voice you find harder to catch.
The North Wind and the Sun: Received Pronunciation
Aesop’s one-minute fable read by Ruth Golding for LibriVox in a Received Pronunciation, English accent, as the reader describes it. Every word of this recording has been checked against the audio. It opens and closes with a short spoken announcement; the gaps follow the fable in order.
The North Wind and the Sun: South-East London
Aesop’s one-minute fable read by Peter Yearsley for LibriVox in a South-East London, English accent, as the reader describes it. Every word of this recording has been checked against the audio. It opens and closes with a short spoken announcement; the gaps follow the fable in order.
·Your own material
Turn any video you already watch into a marked exercise.
Paste a link, add that video’s own subtitle file, and this page writes a gap-fill and a true-or-false set from the exact recording. It runs entirely in your browser, nothing is uploaded, and nothing is stored.
A YouTube link embeds below. Any other link is kept as a reference: open it in another tab and use the timestamps.
Part 1 · Complete the sentences
Write NO MORE THAN ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer. Spelling counts, exactly as it does in the test. Replay a line before you commit. If a gap tests a weak word, press Swap beside it and the next strongest word in that line takes its place.
Part 2 · True or false?
Do the statements agree with what the recording actually says? These are generated automatically from the captions, so one may occasionally read oddly. The answer key is always the recording itself.
·Where to find material
Free, legal listening, worth your hour.
Four sources that publish audio with the text beside it, which is what the tool above needs. British accents, including northern ones, are in the first two.
- One fable, dozens of accents →
- British readers sorted by accent →
- LibriVox audiobooks →
- VOA Learning English →
All four are public domain. Use captions and transcripts you have the right to download, and remember that VOA voices are American.
Make it deliberate practice, not background noise.
01Numbers, names, spellings. Part 1 lives on prices, dates, phone numbers and spelt-out names. When a gap wants a number, expect it said as words and written as digits.
02Hear the paraphrase. The question rarely uses the recording’s own words. Read the question first, predict the idea, then listen for its disguise.
03One listen, then mark. The real test plays once. Answer everything on a single pass, mark it, and only then replay the lines you missed.
04Spelling counts. A right answer spelt wrong scores nothing. Write the word out, then read it back before you move on.
→Listening, then the marked skills
Listening stays free here. The marked skills are where a tutor helps most.
Use this tool with anything you already watch. It sharpens your ear on your own material, on your own time.
Lessons cover Speaking, Writing and Reading, one to one with a British IELTS tutor, in proper British English. Lessons are £20 for fifty minutes, and the first lesson doubles as a full assessment.
The book of the method
The Proper English Grammar Guide to IELTS Speaking
The method this site drills for free, written down properly: five response frameworks, thirteen grammatical structures taken to automation, vocabulary by band, pronunciation with audio demonstrations one scan away, and first-language guidance for eight language families. 614 pages, built from more than two thousand documented one-to-one lessons. Most guides teach every candidate the same English; this one starts from what your first language makes you do.
Paperback on Amazon →Kindle edition →The free 79-page companion →