A complete timed IELTS test

You will hear a conversation between a man called Ben at Marlow Photo Studio and a caller enquiring about wedding photography. First you have some time to look at questions 1 to 6.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 1 to 6.

RECEPTIONIST: Good afternoon, Marlow Photo Studio, Ben speaking. How can I help? CALLER: Oh, hello. I am ringing to enquire about wedding photography. It is actually for my sister, I am helping her with the arrangements because she is completely snowed under at work at the moment. RECEPTIONIST: Of course, we get a lot of calls from helpful sisters, you would be surprised. Let me take a few details and I can tell you exactly what we offer. First of all, what is the bride's surname? CALLER: It is Alvarez. Shall I spell that? RECEPTIONIST: Please do. CALLER: A-L-V-A-R-E-Z. Alvarez. RECEPTIONIST: Lovely, thank you. And when is the happy day? CALLER: The eighth of September, so we have left it a little late, I know. RECEPTIONIST: The eighth of September. Actually you are fine, we still have availability that weekend. And where will the wedding be held? CALLER: The ceremony itself is at St Mary's Church in the old town, the one with the tall spire, and then the reception afterwards is at a place called the Hollyhock Hotel, which is about twenty minutes away out in the countryside. RECEPTIONIST: The Hollyhock, yes, we know it well, we photographed three weddings there last summer. The gardens are wonderful for group shots if the weather behaves. And how many guests are you expecting? CALLER: Around a hundred and twenty, give or take a few cousins. RECEPTIONIST: A hundred and twenty, that is a good size. Now, we offer three packages. Bronze is four hours of coverage, so usually the ceremony and the start of the reception, with one hundred edited photos. Silver is six hours and two hundred edited photos, which takes you right through the speeches. And Gold is the full day, from the bridal preparations in the morning until the first dance, with four hundred photos and a second photographer. CALLER: We talked about this last night, actually. The Bronze feels too short, because she really wants the speeches covered, and the Gold is lovely but a bit beyond the budget. So we would like the Silver package, please. RECEPTIONIST: The Silver package, a very popular choice. That one is twelve hundred pounds, and just to repeat, that is six hours of coverage and two hundred fully edited photos in an online gallery. CALLER: Perfect. RECEPTIONIST: And would you like a printed album as well? We offer a standard linen album, or a leather one, which is hand-bound. CALLER: Oh, definitely the leather album. My sister saw one at a friend's house and has not stopped talking about it since. RECEPTIONIST: A leather album, noted. They really are beautiful, she will not be disappointed.

Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions 7 to 10.

Now listen and answer questions 7 to 10.

CALLER: Can I ask who would actually take the photos? Is it Mr Marlow himself? RECEPTIONIST: A good question. James Marlow founded the studio and still does a handful of weddings a year, but he is semi-retired now and September is fully booked for him. Your lead photographer will be Sarah Lewis. She has been with us for nine years and has photographed well over a hundred weddings, and honestly, her album work is the best in the studio. Our junior photographer, Tom Reid, may assist her with equipment, but Sarah leads on the day. CALLER: Sarah Lewis, wonderful, I will tell my sister to look at her work on your website. And how does the day itself usually run? RECEPTIONIST: Our standard practice is that the photographer arrives first at the bride's home, about two hours before the ceremony, to capture the preparations, the dress, the flowers, all those natural moments. Then she travels to the church ahead of the bride, and stays with you through to the reception. CALLER: So the bride's home first, then the church, that makes sense. And how long do the photos take afterwards? Her friend waited absolutely ages for hers. RECEPTIONIST: We are quite honest about this. You will get a small preview gallery within a few days, and some studios do promise everything in four or even six weeks, but with full editing done properly, your final edited photos will be delivered within eight weeks of the wedding. We would rather quote eight and deliver early than promise six and disappoint you. CALLER: Eight weeks, and a preview straight away, that seems fair. RECEPTIONIST: So, would you like to take some time to think it over, or perhaps come in and see some sample albums first? CALLER: Do you know what, we have already looked at half the photographers in the county. I would like to book it right now, please, before that date goes. RECEPTIONIST: Wonderful. Let me take a few more details and I will reserve the eighth of September for Miss Alvarez right 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 a volunteer welcoming visitors to Riverside Botanic Garden. First you have some time to look at questions 11 to 13.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 11 to 13.

GUIDE: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Riverside Botanic Garden. My name is Margaret, I am one of the volunteer guides here, and before you wander off among the flowerbeds, let me give you a little background and a few pointers, because the garden is larger than most people expect. A little history first. The land here was originally laid out in 1955 as the private garden of the Harrington family, who collected plants from their travels. But the family opened it to everyone ten years later, so we have been a public garden since 1965, which makes this our sixtieth anniversary year, and you will see some special displays celebrating that. The great glasshouse, by the way, came later still, in 1975. The gardens cover twelve hectares in total, and the collection has grown enormously over the decades. When the garden first opened to the public it held about two thousand plant species, and by the nineteen-nineties that had grown to roughly three thousand. Today, I am proud to say, the garden currently holds over four thousand plant species, from tiny alpine flowers to trees that are older than the garden itself. Now, three quick practical points before you set off. First, the garden is divided into themed zones connected by gravel paths. Wheelchairs and pushchairs can manage all of the main paths without any trouble, but a few of the smaller side trails are steep and can be slippery after rain, so do check the signs. Second, you will find a small lake right at the centre of the garden, and yes, there are ducks, and yes, they will look hungry. Please do not throw food to them, they are on a managed diet and bread genuinely harms them. And third, about photography. You are very welcome to take photographs everywhere in the garden, including the water garden and the butterfly tunnel, which are both wonderfully photogenic. The one exception is inside the orchid house, where photography is not allowed, because repeated camera flashes damage those very delicate plants. The orchids are also, frankly, the most tempting thing here to photograph, so we do have to remind people.

Before you hear the rest of the talk, you have some time to look at questions 14 to 20.

Now listen and answer questions 14 to 20.

GUIDE: Right, let me describe the layout so you do not get lost, and I suggest you open the little map in your leaflet as I talk. We are standing just inside the gates. As you came in, near the main entrance on your right-hand side, you passed the gift shop. That is where all the guided tours start, and it is also where you will find guidebooks, seeds from our own collection, and rather good fudge, in my opinion. Just to the left of the path, a few steps further on from where we are now, is the cafe. It does hot lunches between twelve and two, and cream teas all afternoon, and the courtyard tables fill up fast on a day like today. Now, the heart of the place. The lake is right at the centre of the garden, all the main paths lead to it eventually, so if you ever feel lost, simply walk downhill and you will find the water. The glasshouse, which is our pride and joy and one of the largest Victorian-style glasshouses in the region, stands at the north end of the garden, that is straight ahead of you and up the long avenue of lime trees. Inside it you will find the tropical collection, and it is beautifully warm in there on a cool morning. The rose garden runs all along the east side of the grounds, following the old brick wall, and this month it is at its absolute peak, you will smell it before you see it. Right next to the lake, on its southern shore, you will find the orchid house, the low white building, and again, do go in, but cameras away, please. And finally, tucked behind the cafe and rather deliberately out of sight, is the compost area, where all our garden waste is recycled. It is a working area with machinery moving about, so we ask visitors not to go beyond the sign there, although the keen gardeners among you can see it on the special Tuesday tour. Right, that is quite enough from me. Enjoy the garden, and do find me if you have questions, I am the one in the green sash.

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, Priya and Tom, discussing their urban birds project with their tutor. First you have some time to look at questions 21 to 28.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 21 to 28.

TUTOR: Come in, both of you. So, the urban birds project. Last time we spoke you were still deciding on the exact focus. Where has it landed? PRIYA: It is going well, actually. So, the project counts bird species in a city park, or rather in several city parks, and the basic question is how the number of different species varies from park to park, and why. We have permission from the council for all five parks now. TUTOR: Good, that is nicely specific, and five sites gives you something real to compare. Tell me about your recording method, because that is where these projects usually stand or fall. PRIYA: We visit each park at four different times of day, so dawn, mid-morning, mid-afternoon and dusk, and we repeat that cycle every week. Each visit is exactly forty minutes, we walk the same fixed route, and we note every species we see or hear. TUTOR: That is a properly systematic design, well done. One thing I would add, though, and it is a small thing that makes a big difference: please also record the weather on every visit. Temperature, wind, rain. Bird activity changes enormously with conditions, and if one park was always surveyed in the rain, your comparison would be meaningless without that information. TOM: Noted, we will add a weather line to the recording sheet tonight. It is funny you say that, because we have already noticed the wind makes a huge difference to what we hear. TUTOR: Exactly. So, what are you finding so far? Any surprises? TOM: Not a huge surprise, but the most common bird we have recorded so far has been the pigeon, by a very long way. In the two city-centre parks, pigeons are sometimes half of everything we count. TUTOR: And have you noticed where they concentrate? TOM: Yes, and this did surprise us. They gather mainly around the bins. We assumed they would spread out across the grass, but they cluster near the litter bins and the cafe kiosks, feeding on scraps. It says something slightly sad about their diet, really. PRIYA: And that observation actually feeds our main hypothesis. We want to test whether parks with more trees have more species, the idea being that a bigger canopy offers more food types and nesting places, so you get variety rather than just huge numbers of one or two street species. TUTOR: That is a good, testable question, and the pigeon data will make a nice contrast in your discussion. Now, how do you plan to present all this at the end? PRIYA: The presentation will include a map showing the five parks, with the species counts marked on each one, and shading for tree cover. We think that one image will carry most of the argument. TUTOR: I agree, a good map is worth pages of tables. And remind me of your deadline? TOM: The deadline for the report is the end of the term, so we have about seven weeks, and honestly we will need every one of them, because the counting itself eats so much time.

Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions 29 and 30.

Now listen and answer questions 29 and 30.

TUTOR: All right, last thing, and be honest with me. What has been the hardest part so far? PRIYA: Honestly? It has not been finding willing parks, the council was surprisingly helpful, and even the dawn starts are bearable once you have coffee. The genuinely hard part has been identifying the birds. Some species look almost identical at a distance, especially the small brown ones, and we argue about them constantly. TOM: Agreed. We lost twenty minutes last Tuesday over one warbler. TUTOR: That is the most common complaint in field projects, and there is a simple fix. My advice is this: rather than changing the topic, which some students panic into, or adding a literature review, which would not help your eyes at all, just go to the department office and borrow a better pair of binoculars. We have two professional pairs that students hardly ever ask for, and the difference they make to identification is remarkable. That alone will solve most of your arguments. TOM: I did not even know the department had binoculars. We will go this afternoon.

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 paper money. First you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40.

LECTURER: Good morning. Take a note out of your wallet, if you still carry one, and look at it. It is, materially speaking, almost worthless, a small printed slip of cotton and linen. And yet you can exchange it for lunch. Today I want to trace how that extraordinary trick was invented, so, the history of paper money. The story begins, as so many stories of invention do, in China. The earliest paper money appeared in eleventh-century China, under the Song dynasty, in the great merchant cities of Sichuan. And it was born of a very practical problem. Chinese coins at the time were low in value and had holes in the middle, so merchants carried them in heavy strings of a thousand, and a large transaction might require a wheelbarrow. Carrying metal over long distances was slow, exhausting and dangerous. Paper notes, issued first by trusted merchant houses and then taken over by the state, removed the need to transport all those coins. A merchant could deposit his metal in one city, carry a light paper receipt across the country, and redeem it in another. The state soon realised the power of the idea, and by the twelfth century, government-issued notes circulated across the empire, backed, at least in theory, by reserves. Word of this innovation reached Europe only slowly, and when it did, Europeans frankly did not believe it. The Italian traveller Marco Polo devoted a whole chapter to paper money in his famous book about his years in Asia, describing with amazement how the Great Khan's printed paper passed as readily as gold, and many of his readers took it as proof that the whole book was invented. It took Europe several more centuries to catch up. In the seventeenth century, the first European banknotes were issued, notably by private banks in Sweden, whose depositors received elegant printed notes they could exchange back for metal at any time. And that phrase, exchange back, is the key to understanding the whole early system. Those early notes were not money in themselves. They were promises, printed promises to pay the bearer a specific amount of gold, or in some countries silver, on demand. The paper was trusted precisely because the metal sat in the vault. That principle, the anchoring of paper to precious metal, grew into what we call the gold standard, which by the late nineteenth century linked the world's major currencies together. And it is worth pausing on how recent its end is: the gold standard was abandoned in the twentieth century, in stages, finishing only in the nineteen-seventies. Since then, the value of the note in your wallet has rested on nothing physical at all, only on trust in governments and central banks, which is, when you think about it, a remarkable act of collective faith. Now, why did paper win? Compared with coins, the key advantage of paper money is simple: it is lighter to carry. A fortune fits in an envelope. It is not more durable, notes wear out in a year or two while coins last decades, and it is certainly not harder to lose. Portability is the whole point. The biggest disadvantage, from the very first Chinese notes onwards, is the risk of forgery. A coin's metal is its own guarantee, but paper invites imitation, and the contest between counterfeiters and issuers has now run for a thousand years. Early Chinese notes carried dire warnings that forgers would lose their heads. Modern central banks use subtler weapons: today's banknotes typically include holograms, those shifting silver images that are extremely difficult to reproduce, along with watermarks, embedded threads and raised printing, and several countries have moved from paper to plastic polymer notes entirely. So where does the story go next? I would argue, and the evidence points firmly this way, that the future of paper money is becoming digital. Card and phone payments already outnumber cash payments in many countries, several central banks are piloting official digital currencies, and the banknote may end its thousand-year story as a backup, kept for emergencies and remembered with a certain affection. From a wheelbarrow of coins to a tap of a phone, it has been quite a journey.

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: 2 “8” / “eighth” · 34 “Swedish” · 35 “silver”. 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 — The history of fingerprints

Passage 2 — Three approaches to museum design

Passage 3 — Three theories of how children learn language

Selected notes: 9 FALSE — ridges “remain essentially unchanged through life”. 11 NOT GIVEN — Galton classified prints, but the passage does not say he used them in court. 13 FALSE — the Mayfield case shows fingerprint matching is not error-free. 14 NOT GIVEN — the passage does not claim DNA has replaced fingerprints entirely.

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 (technical fields up, Arts down); accurate figures throughout; varied comparative language (“nearly quadrupled”, “hovered around”); approx. 195 words.

Why this is Band 9: both sides developed with specific reasoning and example; clear personal position from paragraph 1; precise language (“quiet loss”, “casual conversations that build trust”); approx. 300 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 answer, then/now contrast, two concrete reasons (cost, sleep), and a small qualifier at the end — natural, not memorised.

Planning notes: skill = baking bread (sourdough) · when = lockdown, at home · difficult? = yes at first · why matters = patience, calm, sharing with friends.

All four bullet points addressed, notes used loosely (not read out), with a small personal insight at the end — approximately 1 min 50.

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…”