Four parts, thirty questions, about forty minutes, under exam conditions: the transcript is hidden, nothing is marked until you hand in, and the clock starts on your first answer. Hear each part twice — or, until the recording arrives, have it read to you twice — answer, hand in, and then read the debrief on the parts that went badly.
This is the exam-conditions mock: nothing is checked until you hand in. The clock starts when you answer your first question. After you hand in, every part is marked at once and the support opens for the debrief.
You will hear three different extracts. For each question, choose the answer (A, B or C) which fits best according to what you hear. There are two questions for each extract. You hear each extract twice.
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 friends discussing a television adaptation of a novel they have both read. Now look at questions 1 and 2.
Clare: I finished it last night and I'm cross.
Ben: Because of the brother?
Clare: No — I mean, they cut him, and I can live with that. Six episodes, something has to go. What I can't forgive is the ending. The book never tells you whether he did it, and that's the whole point of the book, and the series tells you in episode four.
Ben: You've read it three times, though. You know what's missing. Somebody who hasn't just gets a story.
Clare: Is that a defence?
Ben: It's a question. I stopped asking whether it's faithful about ten years ago. I ask whether it's good. Some of them are better than the books. This one isn't, but not because of what it changed.
Clare: Then why?
Ben: Because it's slow. Two episodes of people looking at the sea.
Extract Two. You hear two colleagues talking about their firm's move to an open-plan office. Now look at questions 3 and 4.
Mei: Month three. Are you still against it?
Josh: I've stopped being against it and started working round it. I've moved everything that needs thinking to before nine. The rest of the day is for things that can survive being interrupted, which turns out to be most of them.
Mei: You could go home for the thinking.
Josh: I could go home, I suppose. I haven't. What I'd like to know is why we really did it. The email said collaboration. The floor plan says rent.
Mei: That's unfair — the sales team genuinely talk to design now, which they never did when there was a wall.
Josh: I'll believe that when I see the emails stop.
Mei: Fair. Look — it's wonderful if your job is talking to people.
Josh: And useless if it isn't. Yes. That much I'll sign.
Extract Three. You hear two friends who recently walked the length of Hadrian's Wall together. Now look at questions 5 and 6.
Sara: Eighty-four miles. My feet have only just forgiven me.
Dan: Were you disappointed by the wall? People are.
Sara: No — I knew that. I'd read that most of it's a line in the grass and the good bits are in the middle. The weather did what it does. What I hadn't expected was how little we talked. Whole mornings. I'd assumed six days with you would be six days of you talking.
Dan: I noticed that too. I kept meaning to say something and then not.
Sara: Did it bother you?
Dan: No. That's the odd thing. We've known each other twenty years and I'd never been quiet with you before. I think we're different now — not worse. I don't know what the word is.
Sara: Rested.
Dan: Maybe that.
That is the end of Part One. Now listen again.
How to read this part. If this part went badly, what usually happened is that you heard a word from an option — the brother, home, the weather — said clearly and early, and stopped listening. In every extract here the word from the wrong option is said first and dismissed, and the answer comes after it in a line that begins with a contrast: What I can't forgive, What I hadn't expected, I'll believe that when.
Do it in this order.
The three traps here, in order: a change she accepts offered as the one she criticises; a place he could go offered as a change he made; a fact she already knew offered as a surprise. Each is real, each is said, and each is the wrong answer because of one verb in the question.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
You will hear a woman called Beatrice Kahn giving a talk about the year she spent as a volunteer at a seed bank — a store where seeds of wild plants are kept in case the plants disappear. Complete the sentences with a word or short phrase. Write the words you actually hear — this part does not accept a paraphrase.
one word
a number
one word
a period of time
one word
one word
one word
one or two words
You will hear a woman called Beatrice Kahn giving a talk about the year she spent as a volunteer at a seed bank. 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.
Beatrice: Thank you. A seed bank, for anybody who hasn't come across one, is a store — in this case a building under a hill in Sussex — where seeds of wild plants are kept, dried and frozen, in case the plants themselves disappear. I spent a year there sorting seeds, and I want to tell you what that was like.
Beatrice: I should say first what I was before, because it matters. I'd been a pharmacist for twenty-six years — not a botanist, not a gardener, nothing that qualified me. I applied because I'd read a paragraph about the place in a newspaper and couldn't stop thinking about it.
Beatrice: The seeds arrive in paper bags from all over the world, and the first thing that happens to them is nothing. They're dried at fifteen degrees, which takes weeks, and then they go into a vault at minus twenty, where in principle they stay for ever.
Beatrice: My job was the sorting: checking every batch for damage — insects, mould, seeds that had split — before it went down. It sounds dull and it was not, because every bag is a place, and you spend the day with your hands in a Chilean hillside or a Greek island.
Beatrice: What astonished me was the time. Some of them will still germinate after centuries. Not decades — centuries. There are seeds in that vault that will be planted by people whose grandparents haven't been born.
Beatrice: We had visitors, and I'd expected them to ask about the famous things — the oak, or the wildflower everybody's heard of. They didn't. The one visitors asked about, always, was an orchid — a small brown thing from a hillside in Wales, of which there are fewer than fifty plants left, and the whole future of it fits in a jar the size of my thumb.
Beatrice: The word I'd use for the place is patient. People say calm, and it isn't calm, exactly — it's patient. Everything in it is waiting, and nothing in it can be hurried by wanting it to go faster.
Beatrice: The bank exists for the day something goes wrong — fire, flood, a road built through a meadow — and in my year that day came once. There's a plant from a valley in the Caucasus that we'd been sent seeds of in 2011. Then a landslide took the whole hillside, the only place it grew, and we sent the seeds back. It's growing there again. That is the entire point of the building, and I was in the room when it happened.
Beatrice: I'm not going back to the pharmacy. I'm training as a seed collector — the person who goes out and finds them, rather than the person who counts them in — and I'll be sixty by the time I'm any good at it, and I don't mind that at all.
That is the end of Part Two. Now listen again.
How to read this part. If this part went badly, what usually happened is that you wrote the first word of the right kind that you heard. This speaker says the wrong word first every time — fifteen before twenty, decades before centuries, calm before patient, the oak before an orchid — and corrects it. The answer is the word after the correction, and the correction is signalled: Not X — Y, They didn't, it isn't X, exactly.
Do it in this order.
Gap 9 is the shape to remember: a general word followed by a dash and three examples. The examples are louder and more concrete, and they are not the answer. When a speaker lists, the answer is usually the word before the list.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
You will hear an interview with Julian Marsh, a court artist — somebody who draws what happens in a courtroom for newspapers and television, because cameras are not permitted in British courts. For each question, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which fits best according to what you hear.
You will hear an interview with Julian Marsh, a court artist, talking about his 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.
Nila: Julian, when people find out what you do, what do they get wrong?
Julian: People assume I sit there sketching. I can't. Nothing may be drawn inside the room — that's the law, the same law that keeps the cameras out. So I look. I sit in the public gallery for as long as I can bear, and I look, and I go out, and I draw from memory in a corridor with my pad on my knee. The second thing they get wrong is that they think the court pays me. It doesn't. The newspapers do, and the television, by the drawing.
Nila: From memory. So how accurate can it be?
Julian: More accurate than you'd think and less than people want. Three things have to be right — the face, the position in the room, what they were wearing — and the rest is mine to arrange. Where the light falls, who's looking at whom, whether the barrister has his hand up. I'm not a camera. I'm a witness who can draw.
Nila: Do the people you draw ever see the drawings?
Julian: Constantly, and that's the part nobody thinks about. There was a trial in Leeds — a fraud case, three weeks — and on the last day the defendant's mother came up to me on the steps. She'd seen it on the news at one. She wanted to know if she could buy it. I'd got his tie wrong, she said, but she wanted it anyway, because it was the only picture of him from that year that wasn't a police photograph. I gave it to her.
Nila: The camera ban is rather good for you, of course.
Julian: It keeps me in work, yes. But I'd keep the ban even if it put me out of work. A camera makes a person a performer; a pencil doesn't. The people in that room are having the worst day of their lives, and there's a difference between being recorded and being seen.
Nila: What's changed most? Fewer papers, I imagine.
Julian: No — there's work. What's changed is the clock. I used to have until the evening. Now the drawing is wanted while the hearing is still going on — twenty minutes, sometimes — because it goes online at once. Far more people see it than ever saw it in print. That doesn't change what I do. Twenty minutes does.
Nila: And afterwards? What happens to them?
Julian: They're thrown away, mostly, and I think that's right. It was a drawing of one afternoon, for one edition. I don't mind. I've never minded. The ones that matter, somebody's mother has.
Nila: Julian Marsh, thank you.
That is the end of Part Three. Now listen again.
How to read this part. If this part went badly, what usually happened is that you answered with the interviewer's words. Three times in this interview she puts a guess to him — the ban is good for you, fewer papers, people must mind — and three times he sets it aside and says something else. The options are built from her guesses. Candidates who lost 18 and 19 chose what she said; the answer is always what he said next.
Do it in this order.
The shape to remember from this interview is the separated interest: “It keeps me in work, yes. But…” A speaker who admits the option is true of them and then gives a different reason has just told you the option is wrong. At C1 that admission is offered as the answer every time.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
You will hear five short extracts in which people talk about a time they changed their mind about something. You must complete both tasks as you listen. Task One — questions 21–25: choose from list A–H what caused each speaker to change their mind. Task Two — questions 26–30: choose from a different list A–H how each speaker feels about the change now. Both answers for a speaker come out of the same forty seconds of speech, so the two lists are on the page at the same time throughout.
You will hear five short extracts in which people talk about a time they changed their mind about something. Look at Task One. For questions 21 to 25, choose from the list A–H what caused each speaker to change their mind. Now look at Task Two. For questions 26 to 30, choose from the list A–H how each speaker feels about the change now. While you listen you must complete both tasks. You now have forty-five seconds to look at Part Four.
Speaker One: I was against it — closing streets to cars, all of that. I'd have argued with anyone who told me it made a place better. It wasn't a documentary; I don't watch them. Then they closed our road to through traffic for a summer, as a trial, and I watched what happened to it. Children I'd never seen. People sitting on walls. I didn't need telling; I saw it. What I feel now is mostly embarrassment. I said some quite confident things at meetings, and the people I said them to still live on my street.
Speaker Two: I grew up on a farm and I left it as fast as I could, and for thirty years I'd have told you that was the right decision and the farm was a small life. A woman at a book group lent me a memoir by a man who'd farmed the same valley for fifty years — I read it in two nights and by the end of it I'd stopped being ashamed of where I came from. It isn't relief. I'd expected relief. I'm not sure I've got it right, even now. One book is one book. Some days I think I've just swapped one story for another.
Speaker Three: I hated my home town with real energy. I had an argument with my sister about it at every Christmas for a decade and I won it, which changed nothing. It took two years in Lisbon to see the place I'd left. From there it looked small and kind, and I'd only ever seen the small. So thank you, Lisbon, I suppose. What annoys me is the twenty years. It was there the whole time, and I had to go two thousand miles to notice it.
Speaker Four: A colleague brought in a checklist — every prescription, every time — and I called it an insult, out loud, for about six months. She argued with me and lost, every week. Then I sent a wrong dose through. Nobody was hurt, because the ward sister caught it, and that was the last day I ever called the checklist an insult. I'm not proud of it; there's nothing to be proud of in being wrong for six months. I owe her, and I've told her so. She put up with six months of me being clever at her expense.
Speaker Five: I was certain children shouldn't have phones, and I was loud about it. A man at a party once tried to argue me out of it and got nowhere. My nephew, who was nine, asked me why I was allowed one and he wasn't, and I gave him three reasons and none of them survived him saying “but why?” I leave it in the car now, when I visit. I haven't told my sister. I'd argued the other side at her table for years, and I'm waiting for a moment that isn't going to come.
That is the end of Part Four. Now listen again.
How to read this part. If this part went badly, what usually happened is that you took an option because a speaker said it. Every speaker here names a rejected cause or a rejected feeling out loud — It wasn't a documentary, It isn't relief, I'm not proud of it — and each of those is on the list. The other loss is doing both tasks on the first hearing: the two answers sit in different halves of each speaker, and listening for both at once catches neither.
Do it in this order.
Speakers 2 and 4 are the pair to remember. Both had a person involved — a woman at a book group, a colleague — and in only one case was the person the cause. In Part 4 the person who hands you the thing is not the same as the thing.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
The marks below are your best unaided attempt on each part — the hand-in, or the redo you did after the support closed, whichever came later.
If a part only worked once the transcript was open, the problem is not vocabulary; it is that the answer arrives in a different form of words from the question. That is Part 3 and Part 4 in a sentence, and it is fixed by listening again to the same recording, not by finding a new one.