A complete timed IELTS test

You will hear a conversation between a man called Tom at Riverside Sports Club and a woman called Karen Donovan, who is enquiring about membership. First you have some time to look at questions 1 to 7.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 1 to 7.

RECEPTIONIST: Good afternoon, Riverside Sports Club, Tom speaking. How can I help? CALLER: Oh, hello. Yes, I hope you can. A friend of mine is a member with you, and she is always telling me how good the club is, so I am thinking of joining myself. Would you mind if I asked a few questions first? RECEPTIONIST: Not at all, that is exactly what I am here for. Can I start by taking your name? CALLER: Yes, of course. It is Karen Donovan. RECEPTIONIST: Is that Donovan with an O? CALLER: That is right. D-O-N-O-V-A-N. Donovan. People often try to put a U in it for some reason. RECEPTIONIST: I can imagine. Right then, Karen, let me explain how membership works here. We have three options. There is the basic membership, which gives you the gym and the pool during off-peak hours only, so that is weekday mornings and early afternoons. Then there is the standard membership, which gives you full access at any time we are open, seven days a week. And finally there is the premium, which includes everything in the standard, plus unlimited fitness classes, so yoga, spinning, circuit training, that sort of thing. CALLER: I see. I do like the sound of the classes, but the premium is probably a bit much for me, at least to begin with. And the off-peak one would not really work, because I am at work during the day. I think the standard membership is the right one for me. RECEPTIONIST: Standard it is, and honestly, that is what suits most people best. Now, in terms of cost, the standard is normally fifty pounds a month. However, you are calling at a good time, because we are running a summer promotion at the moment, so it is actually forty-five pounds a month, and that price is fixed for your whole first year. CALLER: Forty-five a month, that is very reasonable. Is there a joining fee on top of that? RECEPTIONIST: There usually is, but that is waived during the promotion as well, so there is nothing extra to pay. CALLER: Even better. And when could I start? Does it have to be from the first of the month? RECEPTIONIST: No, not at all. You can start whenever suits you, and we simply adjust the first payment. Did you have a date in mind? CALLER: Well, I am away visiting family at the start of June, so could I begin on the fourteenth of June? RECEPTIONIST: The fourteenth of June. Let me just make a note of that. Yes, that is absolutely fine. And is there a particular sport or activity you are mainly interested in? It helps us to know. CALLER: Mainly swimming. I actually used to swim competitively at school, and I would love to get back into it properly. I might try the gym at some point as well, but swimming is definitely the main thing for me. RECEPTIONIST: Lovely. The pool here is twenty-five metres with six lanes, and we keep two lanes free for lane swimming all day. Now, one thing you should know: every new member gets a free induction with one of our instructors. They show you around the whole club, explain the equipment, and help you set some realistic goals. It used to be thirty minutes, but people found that a little rushed, so we have extended it, and it now lasts sixty minutes. CALLER: A full sixty minutes, that is generous. RECEPTIONIST: And for that first session, the only thing you need to bring is a towel. Everything else, lockers, padlocks, even shampoo in the changing rooms, is provided by the club. CALLER: Just a towel. Got it.

Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions 8 to 10.

Now listen and answer questions 8 to 10.

CALLER: Can I ask about a couple of practical things while I have you? What is the parking situation like? RECEPTIONIST: Ah yes, parking. It used to be completely free, and I know some of our longer-standing members still grumble about the change, but I am afraid it is now two pounds per visit, and that applies to members as well as visitors. The machine takes cards, and the car park is open every day, including weekends, from six in the morning. CALLER: Two pounds, fair enough. That is still cheaper than parking on the street around there. And the pool, is it open every day? I would mostly be coming in the evenings after work. RECEPTIONIST: The pool is open daily, from half past six in the morning until ten at night. The only exception is that it is closed on Wednesday afternoons, between one and five, for cleaning and maintenance, so do bear that in mind. Evenings tend to be busier than mornings, but if you come after eight it usually quietens down again. CALLER: Good to know. Well, you have been really helpful, thank you. I have to say, though, before I actually sign anything, I think I would like to come in and have a look around first, just to get a feel for the place. RECEPTIONIST: That is a very sensible idea, and honestly, most people prefer to do exactly that rather than joining over the phone. There is no need to book anything. Just come to reception any day and ask whoever is on duty for a tour. It takes about twenty minutes, and you can see the pool, the gym and the studios. CALLER: Perfect. I will pop in later this week, then. Thanks so much for your help, Tom. RECEPTIONIST: You are very welcome, Karen. Hopefully we will see you soon.

That is the end of section 1. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

Now turn to section 2.

You will hear a guide giving an introductory talk to a group of visitors at Hartwood Country Park. First you have some time to look at questions 11 to 15.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 11 to 15.

GUIDE: Good morning everyone, and a very warm welcome to Hartwood Country Park. My name is Ellen, I am one of the rangers here, and I will be giving you a short introduction before you head off and explore. First, a little history, because people are always curious. The land here was originally a private estate belonging to the Hartwood family, who lived in the big house you can see across the valley. After the Second World War the family could no longer maintain the estate, and it was given to the local council. The park was then landscaped and first opened to the public in 1958, so we have been welcoming visitors for well over sixty years now, and some local families have been coming here for three generations. Now, walking. We have several waymarked trails of different lengths, all starting from this point. The longest is the Hill Circuit, which is about eight kilometres and quite demanding in places, so proper footwear is a must. At the other end of the scale there is the gentle Riverside Loop, just under two kilometres, completely flat, and very popular with families and pushchairs. But by far the most popular trail, especially at this time of year, is the Bluebell Walk. In late spring the woodland floor along that route turns completely blue, it really is a wonderful sight, and it does get very busy at weekends, so if you want photographs without crowds, do come early in the morning. A couple of important rules while you are here. You are very welcome to bring food for yourselves, and there are picnic tables in several places, but please do not feed the deer. We have a small herd that roams freely in the northern half of the park, and although they will happily take bread and crisps from visitors, human food actually makes them quite ill, so please admire them from a distance and keep your food to yourselves. Dogs are welcome everywhere in the park, but they must be kept on a lead at all times, again mainly because of the deer. And please take your litter home with you or use the bins by the gates. Now, refreshments. If you would like a coffee or something more substantial, the cafe is located next to the lake, in a lovely position with a terrace looking straight out over the water, and you can watch the ducks while you eat. It serves drinks and cakes all day, and hot food until three o'clock. And finally, if you would like some company on your walk, free guided tours leave from this very spot, just here by the information board, at eleven o'clock every day of the year, and they last about an hour. The rangers who lead them know the park inside out, so do join one if you can.

Before you hear the rest of the talk, you have some time to look at questions 16 to 20.

Now listen and answer questions 16 to 20.

GUIDE: Right, let me quickly describe the layout of the park so you do not get lost, because it is bigger than it looks. We are standing at the main entrance, and right beside us, immediately on your left as you came through the gates, is the car park, which you have probably just walked through. From here, the main path leads down towards the lake, which is the heart of the park. If you follow the shore round to the north side, so the far side of the lake from where we are now, you will find the bird hide. It is a wooden building with viewing slots, and it is excellent for photography, especially early in the morning when the herons and kingfishers are feeding and the light is coming across the water. On the near shore of the lake, just below us here, there is the boathouse, and in the summer months you can hire a rowing boat from there by the hour, which children absolutely love. Now, if you are feeling energetic, follow the main path as it climbs, and at the very top of the hill you will come to a lookout tower. It is a bit of a climb, I will be honest, about twenty minutes of steady uphill walking, but the view from the top across the whole valley is more than worth it, and on a clear day you can see the cathedral in the city. The river runs along the eastern edge of the park, and if you walk along the riverside path you will eventually come to the old mill. It is a lovely red-brick building, it still has its original water wheel, which turns when the river is high, and inside it is now a small museum about the history of the estate, which is free to enter. There is also a beautiful rose garden a short stroll from the entrance along the western path, which is at its very best in June, so you have timed your visit well. And finally, for those of you with children, just behind the cafe there is a large playground with swings, a climbing frame and a zip wire, so the little ones can burn off some energy while you have a coffee on the terrace. Right, that is everything from me. Any questions before you set off?

That is the end of section 2. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

Now turn to section 3.

You will hear two students, Jacob and Maria, discussing their project on food waste with their tutor. First you have some time to look at questions 21 to 25.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 21 to 25.

TUTOR: Come in, both of you, sit down. So, it has been a couple of weeks since we last spoke. How is the project going? Remind me of the focus, first of all. JACOB: Thanks. Well, originally we were going to look at recycling habits in the student halls, whether people actually separate their rubbish and so on. But when we started the background reading we realised that topic has been done to death, so we changed direction. The project is now about food waste, specifically how much edible food students throw away each week, and what the main reasons for that are. TUTOR: Food waste, good. That is more specific, and there is much better national data to compare your results against. Any problems so far? MARIA: Yes, actually, one thing is bothering me quite a lot. It is our survey. We put a questionnaire online and shared it in the halls group chats, and we have only had thirty responses so far. I just do not think thirty people is enough to say anything reliable about several thousand students. The sample is simply too small. JACOB: Although, to be fair, I thought the answers we did get were honest enough. People admitted to throwing away whole loaves of bread, bags of salad, that kind of thing. Nobody was trying to look perfect. MARIA: Oh no, I am not doubting they were honest. Some of the answers were almost embarrassingly honest. It is purely the number that worries me. If we only have thirty, one unusual person can move the whole average. TUTOR: That is a fair concern, and it shows you are thinking statistically, which is good. Now, some students in your position panic and change the topic completely, and I would definitely not do that at this stage of the term. You would lose all the reading you have done. What I would suggest instead is this: keep the survey running in the background, but add a small number of in-depth interviews. Even five or six interviews, twenty minutes each, would give you a kind of depth and detail that thirty short questionnaires simply cannot. You can ask people to actually describe what was in their bin this week. MARIA: I like that. Real examples would make the report much more interesting to read as well. JACOB: That makes sense. And how long should we keep collecting data? We were not sure whether to stop now or keep going. TUTOR: I would say two weeks from today. One week is really too short to see any pattern, because shopping habits vary so much from week to week, and a whole month would leave you no time to actually write the thing up before the deadline. MARIA: Two weeks it is, then. We can put it in the calendar today. TUTOR: And tell me honestly, what has been the hardest part of the project so far? JACOB: Honestly? The reading was not too bad, we shared it out between us, and so far we have kept to all our internal deadlines, which I am quite proud of. For me it has definitely been the statistics. Working out which tests we are supposed to use, and when, and what the results actually mean. MARIA: Same for me. The numbers have been the real struggle. I understood it in the lecture and then completely lost it when I sat down with our own data.

Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions 26 to 30.

Now listen and answer questions 26 to 30.

TUTOR: That is extremely common, and by the way, the library runs a statistics workshop every Friday lunchtime this term, so do go along to that, both of you. Right, before you leave, let us sort out exactly who is doing what, so nothing falls through the cracks. The questionnaire needs finishing and polishing before you send it to anyone else. Who is taking that? JACOB: I will design the questionnaire. I have already started laying it out, and I have rewritten a couple of the confusing questions, so it makes sense for me to finish it. MARIA: And I will analyse the numbers when the data comes in. I know I just said I find the statistics hard, but that is exactly why I want to do it. I need the practice before the exam, and the workshop should help. TUTOR: Good, that is the right attitude. What about the introduction to the report? That is the part the examiners read most carefully. JACOB: We talked about that on the way here, actually. We thought we would write the introduction together, because it has to set up both the survey part and the interview part, and we each know our own half best. TUTOR: Sensible, a joint introduction it is. And the slides for the final presentation? MARIA: I will do the slides. I genuinely enjoy that side of it, and Jacob's colour choices are, let us say, brave. JACOB: That is fair. In exchange, I will check the references at the end, go through the whole reference list and make sure everything is formatted correctly and nothing is missing. That is the kind of fiddly job I do not mind. TUTOR: Excellent. That is a very clear division of labour, much better than most groups manage. One last thing: send me the questionnaire before you launch it, and I will give you feedback within a day or two.

That is the end of section 3. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

Now turn to section 4.

You will hear a lecture about the history of artificial light. First you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40.

LECTURER: Good morning, everyone. Today I want to trace a single thread through human history, and that is the story of artificial light. It is a wonderful example of how one technology can quietly reshape almost every part of daily life. We take the switch on the wall completely for granted, but for almost all of human history, light after sunset was scarce, expensive and precious, and most people simply organised their lives around the sun. So where does the story begin? The very earliest lamps, and we have examples that are tens of thousands of years old, were extremely simple: a hollow stone, or later a shaped bowl, in which people burned animal fat, with a twisted fibre of moss or plant material acting as a wick. The light they gave was dim, smoky and rather smelly, but it pushed back the dark, and it allowed the painting of caves and the mending of tools after sunset. It was, in a very real sense, the beginning of the evening. The Romans refined this technology considerably. Their lamps were usually made of clay, mass-produced in moulds by the thousand, and they burned olive oil, which was cleaner and steadier than fat. Wealthy households might own elaborate lamps in bronze, but for ordinary people clay was the standard material, and archaeologists find these little clay lamps in enormous numbers right across the former empire, from Britain to North Africa. Interestingly, for more than a thousand years after Rome, lighting barely improved at all. Candles made of tallow or beeswax, and simple oil lamps, remained the norm through the entire medieval period and beyond. If you could travel back and visit a home in the year 800 and another in the year 1700, the lighting would look remarkably similar. The next real revolution came with gas. In the early nineteenth century, gas lighting first appeared in city streets, beginning in London, and within a few decades most large European cities had followed. It is hard to overstate the effect. For the first time in history, public space was usable, and relatively safe, after dark. Shops stayed open later, theatres and restaurants flourished, and cities began to develop a genuine night-time economy. A whole profession of lamplighters appeared, walking their routes at dusk with long poles. Then, towards the end of the nineteenth century, came electricity. The early electric bulbs used a thin carbon filament sealed inside a glass bulb, heated by the current until it glowed white-hot. Later designs replaced carbon with metal, but the principle was the same. Now, why did electric light spread so quickly, even though it was initially more expensive than gas? The main advantage over any kind of flame was greater safety. An open flame is always a fire risk. Theatres, factories and crowded tenements burned down with terrible regularity in the gaslight era, and an enclosed electric bulb dramatically reduced fires in homes and, crucially, in workplaces. And that had a huge economic consequence: with safe, bright, reliable lighting, factories could now operate during the night, running shifts around the clock, which completely reshaped industry, labour patterns and, ultimately, the modern working day. But artificial light is not without its costs, and this is where current research comes in. The first issue is light pollution, the orange or white glow that hangs over our cities and washes out the stars. Around one third of humanity can no longer see the Milky Way from where they live. And it is more than an aesthetic loss. Artificial light at night can seriously disturb the migration of birds, many of which navigate at night using natural light from the moon and stars, and become disoriented around brightly lit buildings, sometimes with fatal results. Newly hatched sea turtles, similarly, can head towards beachfront hotels instead of the sea. It also affects insects, and there is growing evidence that it disrupts human sleep as well. On the positive side, technology is responding. Compared with the older incandescent and even fluorescent bulbs, modern LEDs save an enormous amount of energy, typically around eighty per cent, and they last many times longer, which is why cities all over the world are converting their street lighting. And looking ahead, I would predict that lighting will become much more intelligent: systems that dim automatically when a room is empty, that adjust to the level of daylight outside, and that gradually shift colour through the evening to match our natural body rhythms. So the story of artificial light is not finished. It is simply entering its next chapter.

That is the end of section 4. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

That is the end of the listening test. In the real exam you would now have ten minutes to transfer your answers to your answer sheet.

Accepted variants: 4 “fourteenth”; 6 “sixty”; 15 “eleven” / “11am”. Spelling must be correct.

Score guide (out of 40): 36–40 ≈ Band 8.5+ · 30–35 ≈ Band 7–8 · 23–29 ≈ Band 6–6.5 · 16–22 ≈ Band 5–5.5.

Notes: 1 FALSE — they were also medicines, preservatives and status symbols. 3 FALSE — “ordinary and inexpensive” at source. 5 NOT GIVEN — no war between two countries is mentioned. 8 “middlemen” also accepted.

Notes: 21 NOT GIVEN — the passage never compares the cost of the two methods. 19 FALSE — city centres are hotter, not cooler.

Notes: 31 NO — the writer argues people underestimate environment and overrate discipline. 27 NO — “not the product of conscious decision at all”.

Reading score guide (out of 40): 37–40 ≈ Band 9 · 33–36 ≈ Band 8 · 30–32 ≈ Band 7.5 · 27–29 ≈ Band 7 · 23–26 ≈ Band 6.5.

Why this is Band 9: a clear overview (all rose; developed lead, developing grew fastest); accurate figures and comparisons; varied language (“more than doubled”, “rising fivefold”, “from a far lower base”); approx. 175 words.

Why this is Band 9: both questions fully answered; causes and effects clearly separated; ideas developed with reasoning, not lists; precise language (“economic insecurity”, “blurred the line”); 276 words.

• Did I answer every part of the question?

• Is my position or structure clear from the first paragraph?

• Does each body paragraph develop one clear idea with a reason or example?

• Did I write at least 250 words (Task 2) / 150 words (Task 1)?

• Did I leave 3–4 minutes to check grammar, spelling and punctuation?

It answers directly, draws a clear then/now contrast, and finishes with a short reflective comment — natural, not memorised.

Planning notes: decision = move to a new city for a course · when = two years ago, felt stuck · felt = nervous + excited · why good = better opportunities, more independent, lasting friendships.

All four bullet points are covered, the notes are used loosely rather than read out, and the answer runs to roughly 1 minute 50 seconds.

1 Use the pattern opinion → reason → example every time.

2 Show range with phrases like “it largely depends on”, “broadly speaking”, “there’s a strong argument that…”

3 Acknowledge both sides before you conclude.

4 Buy thinking time naturally: “That’s an interesting question — I’d say…”