A complete timed IELTS test

You will hear a conversation between a man called Tom at Lakeside Cottages and a woman called Mrs Patterson, who is enquiring about booking a holiday cottage. First you have some time to look at questions 1 to 7.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 1 to 7.

RECEPTIONIST: Good morning, Lakeside Cottages, Tom speaking. How can I help you today? CALLER: Oh, good morning. I found your website last night and the cottages look absolutely lovely. I would like to enquire about booking one for the summer, if I may. RECEPTIONIST: Of course, I would be happy to help with that. Could I start by taking your surname? CALLER: Yes, it is Patterson. RECEPTIONIST: Is that with two Ts? CALLER: It is, yes. P-A-T-T-E-R-S-O-N. Patterson. RECEPTIONIST: Perfect, thank you. Now, just so you know, we have three types of accommodation on the site. There are the log cabins, which are quite small and cosy, really designed for couples. Then there are the lodges, which are more modern, open-plan buildings up on the hillside. And finally there are the traditional stone cottages down near the water, which are the oldest buildings and have the most character. Which were you thinking of? CALLER: Well, I have to say I was torn between a cabin and a lodge when I was looking at the photos, but the cabins are really too small for us, and my husband thinks the lodges look a bit modern. So I think a cottage suits us best, to be honest. RECEPTIONIST: A cottage, lovely choice, they are the most popular for a reason. And how many guests will there be? CALLER: There will be four of us altogether. Myself, my husband and our two teenagers. RECEPTIONIST: Four guests, that is fine, the cottages sleep up to six, so you will have plenty of space. And how many nights were you thinking of staying? CALLER: Seven nights, please. We would like a full week if possible. RECEPTIONIST: Seven nights, certainly. And when would you like to arrive? CALLER: We were hoping to come on the twelfth of August, if you have anything free then. RECEPTIONIST: The twelfth of August. Let me just check the calendar for you. That is our busiest month, of course... yes, you are in luck. Willow Cottage is available for that whole week. CALLER: Oh wonderful. And what would the cost be? RECEPTIONIST: In August the cottages are at the peak rate, so the cost is eighty-five pounds per night. That includes heating, electricity and all your bed linen. CALLER: Eighty-five per night. Yes, that is about what I expected for the school holidays. RECEPTIONIST: One thing I should mention, because it catches people out: please bring your own towels. We provide all the bed linen, as I say, and tea towels for the kitchen, but not bath towels, I am afraid. CALLER: Right, our own towels. I will write that down, because that is exactly the sort of thing we would forget.

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 a few practical questions? First of all, what is the parking situation? We may actually come in two cars, because my son has just passed his test and wants to drive up separately. RECEPTIONIST: That is no problem at all. Parking is completely free for all guests. There is a large gravel car park just behind the cottages, and there is no limit on the number of vehicles, so even with two or three cars per group there is always plenty of room. CALLER: Free parking, and room for both cars. That is great. And is there Wi-Fi? My daughter will ask me before anything else. RECEPTIONIST: There is indeed. A few years ago it only worked in the main lounge by reception, and guests used to huddle in there with their laptops, but we upgraded everything last spring, so now the Wi-Fi is free throughout the cottage itself, and it is fast enough for streaming. CALLER: Free through the whole cottage, she will be delighted. Well, you have answered everything, really. RECEPTIONIST: So, would you like some time to think it over, or perhaps come and view the cottages first? Some guests do like to visit before committing. CALLER: You know what, we have been going round in circles about this holiday for weeks. The date works, the price works. I will book it right now, if that is all right. RECEPTIONIST: Wonderful, I will take the rest of your details and send you a confirmation email straight away.

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 the organiser welcoming visitors to the Greenfield Charity Garden Festival. First you have some time to look at questions 11 to 15.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 11 to 15.

SPEAKER: Good afternoon, everyone, and a very warm welcome to the Greenfield Charity Garden Festival. My name is Ruth, I am the festival organiser, and it is my job this afternoon to tell you what is on, where everything is, and how to make the most of your day. First, a little bit of history for those of you who are new. The festival was first held in 2007, when a group of local gardeners opened their allotments to the public for a single afternoon and raised a few hundred pounds. It has run every single year since, growing each time, and this is now our seventeenth festival, which I find rather hard to believe. What has never changed is the cause. All of the money raised, every single penny from tickets, teas and plant sales, goes to the local hospice, which cares for families right across this district. Last year, thanks to visitors like you, we passed forty thousand pounds for the first time, and we would love to beat that today. Now, what is new this year? Well, quite a lot, but the thing everyone is talking about is that we have added a silent disco in the evening, starting at seven o'clock on the main lawn. If you have never tried one, you wear headphones, you choose your own music channel, and you dance under the stars while the garden around you stays completely quiet. It is enormous fun for adults and children alike, and I promise nobody looks silly, because everybody looks silly. A couple of practical points before I let you go. If you came by train, or if you are planning to, please make use of our free shuttle bus, which leaves from the railway station every fifteen minutes throughout the day, and drops you right at the gates. It really is much easier than trying to park in the village. And do keep an eye on the time: last entry to the festival is at six in the evening. If you are already inside you are very welcome to stay on for the disco and the evening food, but no new tickets are sold after six, so do tell any friends who are thinking of joining you later.

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.

SPEAKER: Right, let me walk you round the site in your imagination, so that you can find everything when you set off. The festival is laid out around the big lake, and honestly the setting does half the work for us. Down by the lake, right at the edge of the water where the bank flattens out, we have put the music stage. There are local bands playing all afternoon, the sound carries beautifully across the water, and there are deckchairs on the grass, so do go and claim one. Near the main entrance, immediately on your right as you come through the gates, is the information desk. If you lose your friends, lose your children, or simply lose your bearings, that is your first stop, and the volunteers there have maps, programmes and a remarkable supply of patience. If you carry on up the path you will come to the old walled garden, which is looking absolutely beautiful at this time of year, and in the walled garden we have set up the craft market. There are about thirty stalls this year, all local makers, selling pottery, woodwork, jewellery and textiles, and everything is handmade within twenty miles of where you are standing. Beyond that, the ground rises, and at the top of the meadow, just past the long rose bed, you will find the food stalls. We have everything from wood-fired pizza to Caribbean food to a very good local cheese van, and there are hay bales to sit on with a view right back down over the whole festival. And finally, for those of you with little ones, beside the car park we have put the children's area, with garden games, a storytelling tent and face-painting all afternoon. We put it there quite deliberately, because it means you can drop the children off as soon as you arrive, and collect them, repainted and exhausted, on your way home. Two last things: the first-aid tent is halfway along the main path, on the left, with a big white flag, and there is a lost-and-found point just behind the information desk. Right, that is quite enough from me. Enjoy the gardens, spend generously, it is all for the hospice, and I hope to see every one of you dancing in headphones at seven o'clock.

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, Sam and Olivia, discussing a marketing project 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, come in, both of you, take a seat. So, it has been a few weeks. How is the marketing project going, and remind me exactly what your focus is now. SAM: Pretty well, actually, thanks. So, when we first talked, we had three possible topics, if you remember. We looked at paper food packaging, and we also briefly considered those plastic clothing tags that shops attach to everything. But in the end our topic is reusable coffee cups, and specifically whether the small discounts that cafes offer, you know, twenty or thirty pence off if you bring your own cup, whether those discounts genuinely persuade customers to change their behaviour, or whether the same people would have brought a cup anyway. TUTOR: Good, that is a nicely focused question, much better than packaging in general. And how is it going in practice? Any concerns? OLIVIA: Some, yes. Although, actually, let me start with what is fine. The budget is fine, we have hardly spent anything, printing costs and bus fares mostly. And I think our sample size is okay too, we have nearly two hundred survey responses now, which surprised us both. My real concern, honestly, is the timeline. The write-up is due in five weeks, and between Sam's part-time job and my exams we are cutting it very close. TUTOR: Right. Timeline pressure is completely normal at this stage, every group sits in that chair and says the same thing, so I would not panic about that. But before we tackle the schedule, let me tell you my main recommendation, because I think it changes your plan slightly. You should interview a few more cafes. At the moment you have spoken to two, and two is simply not enough to make any claim about what cafe owners think. Aim for five or six. They can be short conversations, fifteen minutes each. SAM: Okay. We did wonder about that. And should we cut the survey down at the same time? A couple of people said it felt long. TUTOR: No, I would not simplify the survey at this stage, you have already collected most of your responses with the current version, and changing it now would make the two halves of your data harder to compare. And before you ask, because someone always does, I do not think a full literature review is necessary for this kind of project either. A short background section is plenty. OLIVIA: That is a relief, to be honest. And how will we present the findings at the end? Is it the poster session again like last year? TUTOR: Not this year, no. The department has changed the format. It will be a ten-minute talk, please, with slides, followed by questions, rather than a poster or a long written report. You submit the slides and a two-page summary. SAM: A ten-minute talk. Okay, that actually suits us better, I think. TUTOR: Now, tell me about your sources. What has been most useful so far? OLIVIA: Honestly, the industry reports. The coffee shop trade publishes surprisingly detailed annual reports, and they are far more up-to-date than the academic articles we found, most of which are five or six years old now. And the government data we tried was patchy, it covers plastic bags in detail but barely mentions cups. TUTOR: That is a very sensible assessment, and do say exactly that in your talk, examiners love to hear students evaluate their sources.

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: Right, last thing, and then I will let you go. Let us pin down exactly who is doing what, because vague plans are where group projects go wrong. First, the extra cafe interviews we talked about. Who is contacting the cafes? SAM: I will contact the cafes, that makes sense as me. I already know two of the owners from the first round, and my shifts mean I am in town most mornings anyway. OLIVIA: And I will design the survey, the final version I mean, the follow-up one we send to people who agreed to be contacted again. I built the first questionnaire, so I have all the files and the formatting ready to go. TUTOR: Good. And the analysis, when all the data is in? That is the biggest single job. SAM: We talked about that on the way here, and we think we should analyse the results together. There is honestly too much data for one person, and we each know our own half of it best. OLIVIA: Yes, both of us on the analysis, we have already booked a library room for two afternoons a week. TUTOR: Very good, a joint analysis it is. And the writing tasks? SAM: I will write the introduction. I have already drafted the background section, so the introduction follows on naturally from that. OLIVIA: And I will build the slides for the talk. I enjoy that side of things, and Sam has many talents, but design is not one of them. SAM: I can confirm that. TUTOR: Excellent, that is a very clear division of labour. Send me the interview questions before you approach the new cafes, and I will turn them around within a couple of days.

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 the bicycle. First you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40.

LECTURER: Good morning. Today we are going to trace the surprisingly short and surprisingly dramatic history of a machine most of you probably rode as children: the bicycle. It feels ancient, somehow, like the wheel itself, but in fact the first bicycles appeared in the early nineteenth century, which makes the bicycle younger than the steam engine and roughly the same age as the railway. And those first machines would look very strange to us indeed. The earliest machines had no pedals at all. The rider sat astride a wooden frame with two wheels, and simply pushed along the ground with their feet, striding and then gliding, striding and then gliding. Contemporaries called it the running machine or the hobby horse, and it enjoyed a brief fashionable craze among wealthy young men before being banned from many pavements for knocking down pedestrians. Progress after that came in bursts. Pedals were eventually added, first driving the front wheel directly, and this created a mechanical problem: with the pedals fixed to the wheel, the only way to go faster was to make that wheel bigger. The logical conclusion was the machine everybody recognises from old photographs, the penny-farthing, famous for its enormous front wheel, sometimes a metre and a half across, with a tiny trailing wheel behind. Riders perched a full head height above the traffic, mounting was an acrobatic feat, and falls, which riders grimly called headers, were frequent and serious. It was fast, but it was a young athletic man's machine and nobody else's. The true breakthrough came in the eighteen-eighties with what its makers proudly called the safety bicycle, and it is essentially the bicycle you own today. The safety bicycle had two wheels of equal size, a low diamond-shaped frame, and a chain transferring power from the pedals to the back wheel, so the wheel no longer needed to be huge. Add the air-filled rubber tyre, which arrived shortly afterwards, and suddenly cycling was comfortable, stable and safe. And this mattered socially as much as mechanically, because crucially the new design became accessible to women. The penny-farthing had excluded them entirely, but on a safety bicycle women could travel independently, without a chaperone, further than they could walk, and campaigners for women's rights at the time explicitly celebrated the bicycle as an instrument of emancipation. It even changed fashion, since cycling in a heavy Victorian dress was impractical, and simpler, more rational clothing followed. Economically, the effects were just as large. Bicycle factories employed many skilled workers, in metalworking, precision engineering and assembly, particularly in cities like Coventry in England, and those same skills and factories later fed directly into the motor and aircraft industries. Cycling boomed in the eighteen-nineties. By the middle of that decade, cycling clubs organised rides of thousands of people, newspapers ran cycling pages, and for a brief period the bicycle outsold almost every other consumer product. Then, of course, came the disruption: the motor car. Across much of the twentieth century, and especially after the Second World War, the car reduced bicycle use sharply in most Western countries. Roads were redesigned for cars, suburbs spread beyond cycling distance, and in places like North America the bicycle was demoted to a child's toy. But the wheel, as I like to say, has turned again. Today, cities all over the world promote cycling for very practical reasons, chiefly to reduce pollution, but also congestion, noise and the health costs of inactivity, and protected bike lanes are spreading through capital cities from Paris to Bogota. Bicycle production today far exceeds car production worldwide. So let me end with the argument I want you to take away. The bicycle remains, above all, a tool of freedom: it is cheap, it is simple, it can be repaired with basic tools by its owner, and it extends the reach of almost any human being, regardless of income, by a factor of three or four. Very few technologies in history can claim as much.

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: 3 “four” · 4 “seven” · 5 “12” / “twelfth” · 15 “six” / “6pm”. 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.

Passage 1 — How seeds travel: the science of dispersal

Passage 2 — How forests communicate underground

Passage 3 — Why some languages disappear

Selected notes: 2 FALSE — “Wind works best when seeds are light”. 5 NOT GIVEN — birds vs. mammals are not compared. 6 “parent plant” also accepted. 21 NOT GIVEN — passage describes older-to-younger flow only. 30 NO — “cannot be bought with money alone”. 33 “10,000” / “10000” also accepted.

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: clear overview (reversal, crossover in 2010); accurate figures; varied comparison language (“ten times”, “swapped roles”, “matching exactly”); approx. 195 words.

Why this is Band 9: both views developed with specific reasoning and example; clear personal position from paragraph 1; precise language (“differ in scope rather than in legitimacy”); approx. 305 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?

Direct opening, one concrete reason (walkability), specific examples (coffee, books, park), and a small personal observation at the end — natural and not memorised.

Planning notes: book = a popular-science book about sleep · about = how sleep shapes memory, mood and health · why I read it = a friend recommended it · why I enjoyed = clear writing, surprising research, changed my own habits.

All four bullet points addressed, the planning notes are used loosely (not read out), and the answer runs to roughly 1 min 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…”