Mock 1 — Listening

You will hear three different extracts. For questions 1 to 6, choose the answer (A, B or C) which fits best according to what you hear. There are two questions for each extract.

Extract One. You hear two teachers discussing a proposal to abolish school uniform at their school. Now look at questions 1 and 2.

Helen: You've read the paper, then.

Marcus: Twice. I'm against it, which surprises me. I'd have said I didn't care about uniform one way or the other.

Helen: The head thinks it's a discipline issue — that without it the place falls apart. I don't believe that for a moment.

Marcus: Nor do I. I'm not bothered about discipline. And it's not the cost, either, though I'd have said so last year.

Helen: The uniform's cheaper than what they'd wear instead, if we're honest.

Marcus: That's exactly it.

Helen: So what is it you actually object to?

Marcus: Take the uniform away and you don't remove the competition, you move it onto the clothes — and that's a competition some of them can't afford to enter. Right now the worst thing a kid can be judged on is their shoes. Abolish it and it's everything they own.

Helen: That's a real point. I'd still want to ask them. Not a vote — but I'd want to ask them before anyone decides anything.

Marcus: On that we agree. I suspect they'd surprise us both.

Extract Two. You hear two colleagues talking about their company's trial of a four-day working week. Now look at questions 3 and 4.

Dev: Six months in. Verdict?

Anna: Everyone asks about productivity first, so let's get it out of the way: mine is about the same. Not more. I'd love to tell you I do five days' work in four and I don't.

Dev: But has it actually changed anything for you?

Anna: Yes — and this is the bit that's hard to put on a slide. What's changed isn't how much I do. It's that I don't resent Monday any more. I come in on a Monday like a person who chose to, and I hadn't realised how long it had been since that was true.

Dev: The clients haven't noticed, which I was afraid of. Nobody's complained about a Friday.

Anna: So you'd keep it?

Dev: I would. My worry is that in a year it's just the week. The gain was in the change, and you can only change once. Everybody's grateful now; in eighteen months it's Tuesday.

Anna: There'll be people who start treating the Friday as theirs by right, certainly.

Dev: That's a different problem, and a smaller one.

Extract Three. You hear two friends talking about one of them taking up the cello at the age of forty. Now look at questions 5 and 6.

Paul: So how many weeks is it?

Laura: Eleven. I can play a scale that a stranger would recognise as a scale. My teacher is twenty-three, which people keep asking about, and honestly it doesn't bother me at all — he knows what he's doing and I don't.

Paul: What's the hardest bit? The fingers?

Laura: The fingers are fine; they're just slow. The hard part is being watched while I'm terrible. Nobody's watched me be terrible at anything since I was nine. At work I'm competent, at home I'm competent, and every Thursday at six I sit in a small room and somebody very patient listens to me fail at the same four bars.

Paul: And you go back.

Laura: I go back. Why do you ask?

Paul: I gave my father's violin away in about 2009 and I've just realised I mind. I didn't at the time. I'd have told you I had no use for it.

Laura: Well. They're not hard to find.

That is the end of Part One. Now listen again.

You will hear a man called Tom Ashworth giving a talk about the year he spent as a licensed mudlark on the River Thames. For questions 7 to 14, complete the sentences with a word or short phrase. You now have forty-five seconds to look at Part Two.

Tom: Good evening. A mudlark, for anyone who hasn't met the word, is somebody who walks the foreshore of the Thames at low tide looking for what the river has left behind. It's a Victorian word for Victorian children who did it to survive. I did it for a year because I wanted to.

Tom: I should say what I was before, because it explains the rest. I'd been a quantity surveyor for twelve years — costing buildings, mostly hospitals — and I was good at it and I was tired. I applied for the licence on a Sunday evening in the way that some people book a holiday, and I got it in the post six weeks later.

Tom: People assume the licence lets you do anything you like down there. It doesn't. The standard licence lets you search and pick up. It does not let you dig — not with a trowel, not with your hands, not at all. What's on the surface is yours to look at; what's underneath belongs to the river, and the river is patient.

Tom: Timing is everything, and it's the river that sets it. At high tide there is no foreshore; the water is against the wall. The best hour, by a distance, is the hour before low tide, when the water's still going out and nobody else has arrived. After that you're looking at what the last person didn't want.

Tom: What do you actually find? People always ask that first. Coins, occasionally. Bottle glass, a great deal. But by a very long way the commonest thing is clay pipe — the stems, mostly, in their thousands, because for three hundred years every Londoner smoked a pipe that cost a penny and threw it in the river when it broke.

Tom: People expect me to say the mud is dangerous, and it isn't, particularly, if you watch the tide. The word I'd use for the mud is greedy. It takes things — boots, keys, a phone in my second week — and it takes them without any fuss at all. You feel a tug and it's gone.

Tom: The one I'd save from a fire is a pilgrim badge, pewter, the size of a stamp, from about 1380. Pilgrims bought them at a shrine and pinned them to their hats to show where they'd been, and this one was lost, or thrown, at the bottom of a set of steps that still exist. I stood on those steps and held it and did not say anything for some time.

Tom: There is a rule about what you may keep, and it is a simple one. Anything over three hundred years old goes to the finds officer at the museum to be recorded, and then, usually, comes back to you. The licence itself lasts three years, which is longer than most people last.

Tom: What I'm doing now surprised my family more than the mudlarking did. I'm writing a book about the bridges — not the river, which has been done, but the bridges, one chapter each, starting from the sea. A year on the foreshore taught me to look up as well as down.

That is the end of Part Two. Now listen again.

You will hear an interview with Margaret Doyle, who writes obituaries for a national newspaper, talking about her work. For questions 15 to 20, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which fits best according to what you hear. You now have one minute to look at Part Three.

Tom: Margaret, when people find out what you do, what do they get wrong?

Margaret: Timing. They imagine a phone rings, somebody has died, and I have four hours to write two thousand words about a stranger. That does happen, and it's the worst part of the job, but it's rare. Most of what I write is about people who are alive. We prepare them years ahead — there are perhaps nine hundred in the files at any time — and when the day comes the piece is checked, updated and printed. The hurry people imagine is precisely what the preparation exists to avoid.

Tom: So who qualifies? Who gets a file?

Margaret: Not who you'd think. Fame is not the qualification, and I'd go further and say it's a slight disadvantage, because the famous have been written about already and there is nothing left to find. The test is whether there is one thing — one thing — that you can say they did, precisely, and that nobody else did in quite that way. A woman who ran a lifeboat station for forty years passes that test. A minister who was in the Cabinet through the war may not.

Tom: Do they ever find out? That there's a file?

Margaret: Occasionally, and it's never how you'd expect. There was a retired admiral — this was years ago — who'd heard we had a file on him and he rang up to correct it. Not to complain: to correct it. We'd got the name of his first ship wrong. So he came in, and we went through it together, line by line, and he added two things I'd never have found. He had a very good afternoon. I think he'd have liked to come back and do it again.

Tom: You must get requests from families.

Margaret: Constantly. Leave this out, put this in, he'd have wanted it said. I understand every one of them and I decline nearly all of them, as gently as I can, because an obituary is not a tribute. A tribute is what the family says at the funeral, and it's theirs. What we print is a record, and a record that has been edited by the people who loved the subject is not a record any more. They are a wonderful source of detail. They are not a source of judgement.

Tom: What has changed most in thirty years?

Margaret: Not the speed, which is what everybody assumes. Yes, online readers want it the same day, but that hasn't changed the writing; the piece was ready anyway. What's changed is who we write about. Thirty years ago you had to be a general or a bishop or a duchess. Now the best ones — genuinely the best — are people you have never heard of: the lifeboat woman, a man who spent fifty years recording birdsong in one wood. Readers love them, and I think they're right to.

Tom: And your own? You must have written your own.

Margaret: Certainly not. I'd rather it was written by somebody who didn't much like me. They'd get the facts right and leave out the adjectives, which is exactly what I'd want. The kind ones are always the worst.

Tom: Margaret Doyle, thank you.

That is the end of Part Three. Now listen again.

You will hear five short extracts in which people talk about moving from a city to a small town or village. Look at Task One. For questions 21 to 25, choose from the list A–H what made each speaker move. Now look at Task Two. For questions 26 to 30, choose from the list A–H what each speaker has found hardest. While you listen you must complete both tasks. You now have forty-five seconds to look at Part Four.

Speaker One: I'd have said we were city people for life. I could work from home anywhere, so that was never the question. Then Priya was offered the practice in Ludlow and we had about a fortnight to decide, and we decided in about a day. Three years now. The hardest thing — and I didn't see this one coming — is that the shop knows what I've bought before I've got home. Nothing is private here; it isn't unkind, it's just known. They took us in completely and they know everything, and I hadn't understood that those two things come together.

Speaker Two: People assumed we'd split up. We hadn't. We did the sums one Sunday and the flat we couldn't afford in Bristol was a house with a garden ninety minutes up the motorway, and that was that. The garden's lovely and I'd do it again. But what I hadn't understood is that everything is forty minutes away. The dentist is forty minutes. A birthday present is forty minutes. You plan your week around a car in a way that nobody in a city ever has to.

Speaker Three: There was no plan at all, which I find embarrassing now. We came for a wedding — my cousin's — a weekend, and on the Sunday night we didn't leave. We were renting within a month. Everybody knows everybody, and I like that more than I expected to. What I miss is having somebody to argue with about work. Nobody here does what I do, and nobody wants to hear about it, and I hadn't realised how much of my thinking used to happen out loud.

Speaker Four: Contrary to what people in the village assume, we didn't inherit anything. My mother was on her own by then and I wanted to be twenty minutes away, not four hours, and that's the whole story. The weather doesn't bother me; I grew up here. What I couldn't get used to was the quiet after dark. No traffic, no neighbours, nothing. I lay awake for a month listening to it, and then one night I didn't, and I've slept better ever since.

Speaker Five: I didn't choose the countryside; it was chosen for me. A consultant told me, quite bluntly, that another five years of that air would finish my lungs, so I sold up and bought a cottage for less than my parking space had cost. The bread is better, not worse, before anyone asks. Eight years, and I'm still “the London man”. I'll be the London man at my own funeral. They're perfectly friendly. I just won't ever be from here, and I've stopped minding, mostly.

That is the end of Part Four. Now listen again.