Practice English Listening Tests for B1 – Listening Test 05

8 C   9 C   10 B   11 A   12 B   13 C

Audioscript

8

Girl:   Hi Frankie, how was snowboarding?

Boy:   The first few days were great! The snow was perfect and I was learning some great new tricks …

Girl:   Don’t tell me! You hit a tree and had to stop.

Boy:   That’s what happens to some people, isn’t it – a broken leg. In my case, it was a lot more boring. My stomach found it hard getting used to the local food, so I had to spend a few days in bed. Then my sister borrowed my board and managed to drop it from the ski lift. It didn’t break, but we never got it back.

Girl:   Oh, no!

9

Boy:   The new school library’s great.

Girl:   Everything being self-service takes a bit of getting used to – I found it quite useful having someone there to ask if you couldn’t find something.

Boy:   True, but the new system works well.

Girl:   It’s pretty quiet there, too. I can’t concentrate at home because of my little sister, so I always stay how, to get everything done for the next day’s lessons.

Boy:   Good idea.

Girl:   Yes, and of course I’d never have the books I needed because I always forgot to get them before I went home, which isn’t a problem if I stay.

10

Girl:   I like that new clothes shop.

Boy:   Me, too. The one I usually use is so far out of town, I hardly ever go there.

Girl:   Me, neither, and you have to get two different buses.

Boy:   The people who work at the new shop couldn’t be nicer.

Girl:   The lady who served me was a bit miserable, actually, but the others seemed OK. It’s not too expensive either.

Boy:   Maybe it’s because it’s only just opened, but I found the range of styles they had was quite narrow.

Girl:   I think the other shop definitely has a bigger variety of things for teenagers.

11

Girl:   What do you think of the new boy, Finnian?

Boy:   He seems pretty cool to me. He certainly knows lots of jokes and funny stories – we could hardly stop him talking at break time, not that we really wanted him to. And he answered at least twice as many questions as I did during the maths class.

Girl:   You’re really good at maths too.

Boy:   Maybe … but he also knew a lot about what we were discussing in our groups in the history class. I tried to get him to come to training for the school football team, but I didn’t manage to persuade him.

12

Boy:   Has your brother gone away to college yet?

Girl:   Yeah, he left yesterday. I thought I’d be relieved not to have to listen to music coming from his bedroom all evening. I couldn’t believe it when tears actually started running down my cheeks last night, and this morning, too, when he wasn’t at breakfast.

Boy:   I never knew you two were so close.

Girl:   We weren’t. You just get used to someone being there, though, and when they’re suddenly not, it’s strange, even though I know he hasn’t gone hundreds of kilometres away like some students do. He’ll probably be back most weekends.

13

Girl:   Are you still having tennis coaching?

Boy:   Yes, but I’m progressing really slowly. The teacher wants me to learn each skill well before we move onto the next. Does your coach do that?

Girl:   Pretty much, yes.

Boy:   Even though I practise between the sessions with my family, I’m sure I’d improve more quickly if someone showed me a few other skills. That’s why I need your help. When I watch you play, I can see you doing loads of things I’d like to be able to do, but I forget how you do them as soon as I go home.

20 A   21 C   22 A   23 B   24 B   25 C

Audioscript

Man:   Lin, you’re what’s called a vlogger – you put videos that you’ve made online for people to watch, in your case about environmental issues. How did you learn to do that?

Lin:   One of my old school friends was already a vlogger, but her videos were about travel, so she wasn’t really at home enough to help. I’m still at university and my department was running these sessions for helping people become vloggers, so I went along to those. There’s so much stuff about it online, but I just found it confusing.

Man:   Why did you choose to focus on environmental issues?

Lin:   It’s just something that I’ve believed is important for ages and think too little is being done, so I wanted to help. It’s not connected to what I’m studying at university, so it wasn’t like I got advice from any of my classmates. There were already plenty of people uploading videos about these issues, which was really helpful.

Man:   How did you feel when your video first became successful?

Lin:   I was expecting to only have a few people watching regularly for years. I couldn’t believe how wrong I was about this, even though I knew that many people felt strongly about the subject. Making videos for one person or a hundred thousand is the same process, so having such a big following didn’t worry me as much as I thought.

Man:   How often should people upload videos if they want to become successful?

Lin:   If you’re putting videos online daily, then people will soon become bored. It’ll also be hard for you to keep coming up with new ideas. If you’re uploading them so rarely that people never get interested in the first place, say once a month, that’s not going to work either, so aiming for weekly is probably frequent enough.

Man:   What’s your latest video about?

Lin:   I’ve just finished a series encouraging more people to use buses and trains rather than their cars, but I’ll be moving on to how and why the world is becoming warmer in the next few videos. The most popular ones so far gave people ideas on how to re-use things they usually throw away, like glass and plastic.

Man:   Apart from vlogging, is there anything else you’d like to try?

Lin:   I still love what I do, especially finding out more about environmental topics for new videos, but it’s only one way of telling the public about these things. Moving into TV would greatly increase the audience, which of course means more people would then be talking about these important issues.

Man:   Thanks, Lin!