A complete timed IELTS test

You will hear a conversation between a receptionist at Pomodoro Cookery and a caller called Mrs Whitfield, who is enquiring about a cooking class. First you have some time to look at questions 1 to 7.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 1 to 7.

RECEPTIONIST: Good morning, Pomodoro Cookery, this is Marco. How can I help? CALLER: Oh, hello. I would like to enrol in one of your evening cooking classes. It is actually a present to myself, I have just retired and I promised I would finally learn to cook properly. RECEPTIONIST: What a lovely reason, we get a lot of new retirees, and they are often our best students. Let me take some details. Could I start with your surname? CALLER: Yes, it is Whitfield. Shall I spell it? It gets misspelt constantly. RECEPTIONIST: Please do. CALLER: W-H-I-T-F-I-E-L-D. Whitfield. RECEPTIONIST: Whitfield, lovely, thank you. Now, we run several different courses, each focused on a different cuisine. We have a French course, an Indian one that is very popular, a Thai course, and of course, given our name, our flagship Italian course. Which cuisine appeals to you? CALLER: Well, my late husband and I honeymooned in Italy forty years ago, so it has to be the Italian course, really. That is the food I have always wanted to make from scratch. RECEPTIONIST: The Italian course, a wonderful choice, and our head tutor trained in Bologna, so you are in good hands. Let me tell you how it is structured. The course runs for six sessions in total, one evening a week, and it builds up week by week, so you start with fresh pasta and sauces and finish with a full three-course dinner that you cook and then eat together. CALLER: Six sessions, that sounds perfect, not so many that I lose heart. And when does it begin? RECEPTIONIST: The next Italian course begins in October, the first full week. We did have a September one but it filled up back in July, I am afraid. CALLER: October is actually better for me, so that is fine. And which evening of the week is it? RECEPTIONIST: This particular course runs on Tuesdays, from seven until about nine thirty. We do also run a Thursday French course, if the day matters, but the Italian one is Tuesdays. CALLER: Tuesdays suit me very well, I have nothing on Tuesdays. And, the important question, how much is it altogether? RECEPTIONIST: The total cost for the full six-session course is two hundred and ten pounds, and that includes all your ingredients, all the equipment, and the meal you cook each week, so there is nothing more to pay once you are enrolled. CALLER: Two hundred and ten pounds, and that includes the food, that seems very reasonable actually. RECEPTIONIST: It works out at thirty-five pounds an evening for a hands-on class and a dinner, so people do feel they get their money's worth. There is just one thing we ask you to bring yourself. CALLER: Oh yes? RECEPTIONIST: Please bring your own apron. We provide absolutely everything else, knives, pans, ingredients, even recipe booklets to take home, but aprons are the one thing we ask people to supply, mostly for hygiene reasons. CALLER: My own apron, I will write that down. I have about six of them, all unused, so that is no hardship at all.

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: Now, whereabouts are the classes held? Your website mentioned the college kitchens, but that was a while ago. RECEPTIONIST: Ah, I am glad you asked, because that has changed and the website is out of date, I keep meaning to fix it. For years we did run the classes at the college kitchen, but this year we have moved. The classes are now held in a local restaurant, Antonelli's on the high street, which very kindly lets us use their professional kitchen on Tuesday evenings when they are closed. It is honestly a big upgrade, proper restaurant equipment. CALLER: Oh, a real restaurant kitchen, that sounds much nicer than a college. And how many people are in each class? I would rather it was not enormous. RECEPTIONIST: You will be pleased. Each class is limited to a maximum of ten students, so that everybody gets individual attention from the tutor and their own workstation. We used to allow twelve, but ten works far better. CALLER: Ten is perfect, small enough to actually learn. Right, I am completely sold. RECEPTIONIST: Wonderful. So, would you like to pay online today to secure your place, come and visit the restaurant first to see the kitchen, or take the evening to think it over and call back tomorrow? CALLER: Oh, no thinking required. I will pay online today, please, before the October course fills up like the September one did. RECEPTIONIST: Very wise. I will send you a secure payment link by email right now, and a confirmation with the full timetable.

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 welcoming visitors to Birchwood Nature Reserve. First you have some time to look at questions 11 to 13.

Now listen carefully and answer questions 11 to 13.

GUIDE: Hello everyone, and a very warm welcome to Birchwood Nature Reserve. My name is Priya, I am the senior warden here, and I will give you a short introduction before you head out onto the trails. Let me start with a few basic facts that surprise most first-time visitors. The reserve is bigger than people expect. It covers about a hundred hectares, so it is neither one of the tiny pocket reserves you find in the city, which might be fifty hectares, nor one of the vast two-hundred-hectare wetland reserves further down the coast. A hundred hectares means you could easily spend a whole day here, so do pace yourselves and take water. On opening, we are lucky: we are open seven days a week, from sunrise to sunset, all year round. Some reserves close one day a week for maintenance, often a Monday, but we do not, so whatever day you have come, you have chosen well. And a word about photography, since somebody always asks and half of you have serious cameras. Photography is welcome everywhere in the reserve, with no restrictions at all. For years we asked people not to use flash inside the bird hide, for fear of startling the birds, but we removed that restriction last year after our own research showed it genuinely made very little difference to the birds' behaviour. So snap away, even in the hide.

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

Now listen and answer questions 14 to 20.

GUIDE: Right, let me describe the layout, because Birchwood is a genuine maze of paths and it is easy to get turned around, so do follow the map in your leaflet as I talk. You all came in along the main entrance road, which runs up from the south, and the first thing to know is that the car park, where you left your cars, is actually the only feature that sits outside the reserve boundary, just south of the entrance gate, so it is not numbered on the reserve map itself. Now, as you came through the gate, right where the entrance road meets the start of the trail, you will have passed our visitor centre. That is the building with the green roof, and on your map that is point fourteen. It has the toilets, the shop and a very good cafe, so remember where it is for later. From the visitor centre, the main trail loops away to the north. If you follow it round to the west, the left-hand branch, you will very soon reach the bird hide, and that is point fifteen on your map. It is the best spot in the whole reserve first thing in the morning, so serious birdwatchers, go there first. Carry on north along that same western path and you will come to a small pond, which is point sixteen. In summer it is alive with dragonflies and damselflies, dozens of species, and children love it. Now, right in the centre of the trail loop, more or less in the middle of the map, at point seventeen, we have set up the picnic area, with several wooden tables and a large awning for shade or shelter, depending on our famous weather. At the very top of the reserve, the northernmost point, which is point eighteen, you will find our observation tower. It is a bit of a climb up the wooden steps, I will not pretend otherwise, but the view out across the whole tree canopy from the top is genuinely spectacular, and worth every step. Now the trail turns and comes back down the eastern side. Turning east from the tower, at point nineteen, you will find the butterfly garden, a sunny sheltered clearing planted specially to attract them, and I would ask you please to move slowly and quietly through it, both for the butterflies and for the photographers crouching in the flowerbeds. And finally, further down that eastern path on your way back south, at point twenty, there is a compost toilet, which is very useful to know about, given how far it is from the visitor centre. So, that is the tour in advance. Off you go, and do call in at the centre on your way out to tell us what you spotted.

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, Tom and Lisa, discussing their study habits research 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, both of you. So, the study habits project. I have read your interim data and there is some genuinely interesting material in there. Talk me through it. How is it going? TOM: Really well, actually, better than we expected. Just to recap the design: we compared three groups of students, first-year undergraduates, second-year undergraduates, and postgraduates, looking at how they actually study, when, where, how long, and how stressed they get. LISA: And the clearest single pattern was about hours. It was not even close. The postgraduates reported by far the longest study hours per day, often eight or nine hours, far more than either undergraduate group. Partly it is the workload, partly it is that research just expands to fill the day. TUTOR: That fits the wider literature. Were there clear differences in how the groups study, as opposed to how long? TOM: Yes, and this was my favourite finding. The first-years are extremely social about their studying. They were, by quite a margin, the group most likely to study together in groups, in the library, in cafes, in each other's rooms. By the postgraduate stage, almost everyone works alone. LISA: And, perhaps not surprisingly given the pressure and the newness of it all, the first-years also showed the highest stress levels at exam time. They have not yet learned that most exams are survivable, I think. TUTOR: That rings true. What about activities beyond the core programme? Anything there? TOM: Yes. The postgraduates spent the most time on online courses outside their main programme, things like statistics tutorials, coding courses, language apps. They are constantly picking up extra tools their research demands. LISA: And here is the one that made us laugh. The second-years, uniquely, were the group most likely to take an afternoon nap. Not the exhausted postgraduates, not the anxious first-years, but the comfortable, settled second-years. We are still not entirely sure why.

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: So, stepping back from the detail, was there a single biggest surprise in the whole study? Something that genuinely made you sit up? TOM: There was, and it was not any of the things we expected to be shocked by. We assumed the headline would be sleep loss, everyone talks about students not sleeping, but actually sleep was fairly normal. We thought library use might be dramatically low, it was not. We even wondered about part-time jobs, but most students in our sample did not have one. No, the real surprise, the finding that genuinely startled us, was how few students took regular exercise. It was embarrassingly low across all three groups, well under a third exercising even once a week. TUTOR: That is a strong and slightly worrying finding, and worth foregrounding. Now, practicalities. When is your presentation? LISA: It is six weeks from now, so we have a bit of breathing room, though not as much as it sounds. TUTOR: Good. My main piece of advice, looking at your data, is this: add a focus group. Not more interviews, you have enough individual voices, and definitely not another survey, you have plenty of numbers. But five or six students discussing these findings together in a room would give you the depth and the why that your statistics simply cannot capture. Especially on that exercise finding. TOM: That is a really good idea, a focus group. We had not considered it. LISA: And there is one more thing we would like to do, if there is time. We would love to compare our results with another university, the same year groups but a very different kind of campus, to see how much is universal and how much is local to us. TUTOR: That is ambitious but achievable, and it would strengthen the work considerably. I know someone at a university up north who might collaborate. Last question: what has been the hardest part of the whole project so far? LISA: Honestly? The coding of the open-ended answers, by a mile. The numerical data was straightforward, we knew what to do with it. But turning hundreds of free-text answers into themes we could count, that was genuinely difficult, and we argued about how to categorise things for days. TOM: I never want to see the word other again as long as I live.

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 how birds navigate during migration. 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 I want to talk about one of the genuine wonders of the natural world, something that, the more we learn about it, the more astonishing it becomes: how birds navigate during migration. Let me begin with the sheer scale of the problem, because it is easy to underestimate. Some species migrate more than eleven thousand kilometres each year, one way, and the truly remarkable thing is the precision. An Arctic tern, or a swallow, will often return not just to the same country, not just to the same village, but to the very same barn or nesting site it used the year before, sometimes within a few metres, after a round trip of tens of thousands of kilometres. So the central question of this lecture is simply: how on earth do they find their way? The short answer is that birds do not rely on a single method. They use multiple cues at once, and cross-check them, rather like a sailor using several instruments. Let us take them in turn. First, the sky. By day, birds use the position of the sun, compensating cleverly for the fact that the sun moves across the sky as the hours pass. By night, many species use the stars, and specifically, experiments have shown, the rotation of the night sky around the celestial pole, the fixed point the other stars appear to circle. Young birds raised under an artificial planetarium sky will orient to whatever star pattern they were shown. But the sky is not always visible, and this is where it gets truly strange. Beyond these visual cues, many species can also detect the Earth's magnetic field. They possess, in effect, an internal magnetic compass that senses direction, and possibly even latitude, from the planet's field. And here is a crucial point for young birds: on their very first migration, with no experienced adult to follow, young birds inherit a basic compass heading from their parents, an innate programme of direction and distance that gets them, roughly, to the right place, where experience then fine-tunes the route in later years. Now, what is the evidence for this magnetic sense, since you cannot simply ask a bird? The strongest evidence comes from laboratory experiments with magnetic coils. Researchers place captive migratory birds inside large electric coils that allow them to rotate or reverse the magnetic field artificially, and the birds obligingly change the direction in which they try to depart, even with no view of the sky at all. That is about as direct as biological evidence gets. Let me turn now to threats, because this navigation, refined over millions of years, faces new challenges. Predators, of course, have always been part of the picture. But one major modern threat is light pollution. Brightly lit buildings and cities disorient night-migrating birds, drawing them off course, causing them to circle exhausted, and sometimes to collide with structures, occasionally in catastrophic numbers on a single foggy night. And the larger, slower threat is climate change. My own view, and it is increasingly the consensus, is that climate change will make migration harder for many species, not easier. The problem is timing. Spring is now arriving earlier than the inherited migration schedule has adjusted to, so birds risk reaching their breeding grounds after the peak of the food they depend on has already passed. Let me leave you with three specific points for your notes, and then an open question. First, light pollution affects birds most strongly in cities, for obvious reasons, so urban lighting policy is now a genuine conservation issue. Second, many species follow the same fixed routes year after year, generation after generation, which means the loss of a single key stopover site, a particular wetland or estuary where they rest and feed, can be devastating for an entire population. And third, the honest admission: the biggest gap in our current research is birds' use of smell. We now know for certain that birds can smell, field experiments have settled that old argument, but exactly how much they rely on smell for navigation, following scent maps across the landscape, is still fiercely debated and very much an open frontier. And that, I think, is a wonderful place for the next generation of researchers, some of you perhaps, to begin.

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 “six” · 5 “Tuesdays” · 31 “11,000” / “eleven thousand”.

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 disappearing night sky

Passage 2 — How a volcano works

Passage 3 — Three theories of why we dream

Selected notes: 5 NOT GIVEN — the passage does not compare wealth and light pollution. 10 “eighty per cent” / “80 per cent” / “80” also accepted. 17 “side channel” also accepted. 26 NOT GIVEN — the long-term fate of hot spots is not discussed.

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 (more commercial; station unchanged in location, expanded); accurate, specific changes; varied comparative language (“had been reduced to”, “divided into”, “shifted decisively”); approx. 205 words.

Why this is Band 9: clear position from paragraph 1; both sides developed with specific reasoning and example; precise language (“tax-funded core”, “mark of a civilised society”); approx. 290 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, one concrete plan, a personal reason at the end — natural and not rehearsed.

Planning notes: person = my old maths teacher · how I know = secondary school, age 14–16 · what kind = patient, demanding but kind · influence = taught me to think clearly, choose a career using maths.

All four bullet points addressed, notes used loosely (not read out), a small reflective ending — approximately 2 minutes.

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…”