Cambridge IELTS 08 Academic Listening Test 3 (Online Test)

Hello, and welcome to Focus on the Arts. I'm your host – Dave Green – and this is your very own local radio programme. Every Friday evening we put the spotlight on different arts and culture facilities, and look at the shows and events that are on offer in the coming week.

And today the focus is on The National Arts Centre. Now, if you don't already know it yourself, I'm sure you've all heard of it. It's famous throughout the world as one of the major venues for classical music.

But did you know that it is actually much more than just a place to hear concerts? The Centre itself is a huge complex that caters for a great range of arts. Under a single roof it houses concert rooms, theatres, cinemas, art galleries and a wonderful public library, as well as service facilities including three restaurants and a bookshop. So at any one time, the choice of entertainment there is simply enormous.

So, how did they manage to build such a big arts complex right in the heart of the city? Well, the area was completely destroyed by bombs during the war in 1940. So the opportunity was taken to create a cultural centre that would be, what they called: 'the City's gift to the Nation'. Of course it took a while for such a big project to get started, but it was planned in the 60s, built in the 70s and eventually opened to the public in 1983. Ever since then it has proved to be a great success. It is not privately owned, like many arts centres, but is still in public hands – it's run by the City Council. Both our National Symphony Orchestra and National Theatre Company were involved in the planning of the project, and they are now based there – giving regular performances every week – and as the Centre is open 363 days of the year, there are plenty of performances to choose from.

So, to give you some idea of what's on, and to help you choose from the many possibilities, we've made a selection of the star attractions.

If you're interested in classical music, then we recommend you go along to the National on either Monday or Tuesday evening at 7.30 for a spectacular production of 'The Magic Flute' – probably the most popular of all Mozart's operas. It's in the Garden Hall and tickets start at only £8.00, but you'll have to be early if you want to get them that cheap! And remember, it's only on for those two evenings.

For those more interested in the cinema, you might like to see the new Canadian film which is showing on Wednesday evening at 8pm in Cinema 2. And that's called 'Three Lives.' It's had fantastic reviews and tickets cost just £4.50, which is a reduction on the usual price of £5.50. So, it's really good value, especially for such a great movie.

But you can see the centre's main attraction at the weekend, because on Saturday and Sunday, 11 am to 10 pm, they're showing a wonderful new exhibition that hasn't been seen anywhere else in Europe yet. It's a collection of Chinese Art called 'Faces of China' – that's in Gallery 1 – and it has some really fascinating paintings and sculptures by leading artists from all over China – and the good news is that it is completely free, so don't miss it!

So why not go along to the National Arts Centre next week for one – or all – of these great events – and you can always pick up a programme and check out all the other performances and exhibitions on offer, or coming soon, on almost every day of the year.

Next week we'll be looking at the new Museum of Science . . .

WOMAN: I've been reading your personal statement, Paul. First, let's talk about your work experience in South America. What took you there? Was it to gain more fluency in Spanish?

PAUL: Well, as I'm combining Spanish with Latin American studies, my main idea was to find out more about the way people lived there. My spoken Spanish was already pretty good in fact.

WOMAN: So you weren't too worried about language barriers?

PAUL: No. In fact, I ended up teaching English there, although that wasn't my original choice of work.

WOMAN: I see. How did you find out about all this?

PAUL: I found an agency that runs all kinds of voluntary projects in South America.

WOMAN: What kind of work?

PAUL: Well, there were several possibilities.

WOMAN: You mean construction? Engineering work?

PAUL: Yes, getting involved in building projects was an option. Then there was tourism – taking tourists for walks around the volcanoes – which I actually chose to do, and then there was work with local farmers.

WOMAN: But you didn't continue with that project. Why not?

PAUL: Because I never really knew whether I'd be needed or not. I'd thought it might be difficult physically, but I was certainly fit enough . . . no, I wanted to do something that had more of a proper structure to it, I suppose. I get de-motivated otherwise.

WOMAN: What do you think you learned from your experience? It must have been a great opportunity to examine community life.

PAUL: Yes, but it was difficult at first to be accepted by the locals. It was a very remote village and some of them were reluctant to speak to me – although they were always interested in my clothes and how much I'd had to pay for them.

WOMAN: Well, that's understandable.

PAUL: Yes, but things soon improved. What struck me was that when people became more comfortable with me and less suspicious, we really connected with each other in a meaningful way.

WOMAN: You made good friends?

PAUL: Yes, with two of the families in particular.

WOMAN: Good. What about management. Did you have a project manager?

PAUL: Yes and he gave me lots of advice and guidance.

WOMAN: And was he good at managing too?

PAUL: That wasn't his strong point! I think he was often more interested in the academic side of things than filing reports. He was a bit of a dreamer.

WOMAN: And did you have a contract?

PAUL: I had to stay for a minimum of three months. My parents were surprised when I asked to stay longer – six months in the end. I was so happy there.

WOMAN: And did anything on the administration side of things surprise you? What was the food and lodging like?

PAUL: Simple . . . but there was plenty to eat and I only paid seven dollars a day for that which was amazing really. And they gave me all the equipment I needed . . . even a laptop.

WOMAN: You didn't expect that then?

PAUL: No.

WOMAN: Well, I'll look forward to hearing more.

WOMAN: But now let's look at these modules. You'll need to start thinking about which ones you'll definitely want to study. The first one here is Gender Studies in Latin America.

PAUL: Mmm . . .

WOMAN: It looks at how gender analysis is reconfiguring civil society in Latin America. Women are increasingly occupying positions in government and in other elected leadership positions in Latin America. I think you'd find it interesting.

PAUL: If it was to do with people in the villages rather than those in the public sphere, I would.

WOMAN: Okay. What about Second Language Acquisition?

PAUL: Do you think I'd find that useful?

WOMAN: Well, you've had some practical experience in the field, I think it would be.

PAUL: I hadn't thought about that. I'll put that down as a definite, then.

WOMAN: Okay. What about Indigenous Women's Lives. That sounds appropriate.

PAUL: I thought so too, but I looked at last year's exam questions and that changed my mind.

WOMAN: Don't judge the value of the course on that. Maybe, talk to some other students first and we can talk about it again later.

PAUL: Okay.

WOMAN: Yes. And lastly, will you sign up for Portuguese lessons?

PAUL: My Spanish is good, so would I find that module easy?

WOMAN: Not necessarily. Some people find that Spanish interferes with learning Portuguese . . . getting the accent right too. It's quite different in a lot of ways.

PAUL: Well, I'd much sooner do something else, then.

WOMAN: Alright. Now, what we need to do is . . .

Good morning, everyone. In the last few lectures I've been dealing with business finance, but now I'm going to move on to business systems. And in today's lecture I'm going to talk about what can go wrong when businesses try to copy their own best practices.

Once a business has successfully introduced a new process – managing a branch bank, say, or selling a new product – the parent organisation naturally wants to repeat that success, and capture it if possible on a bigger scale. The goal, then, is to utilise existing knowledge and not to generate new knowledge. It's a less glamorous activity than pure innovation, but it actually happens more often, as a matter of fact. However, surprisingly, getting things right the second time is not necessarily any simpler than it was the first time.

Now, there's been a lot of research into how companies can repeat their previous successes, and it certainly hasn't been confined to the United States. It seems that most large industries are trying to repeat their own successes, and manage the knowledge they've acquired – but even so it has been shown that the overwhelming majority of attempts fail. A host of studies confirm this, covering a wide range of business settings: branch banks, retail stores, real estate agencies, factories, call centres . . . to name but a few.

So why do so few managers get things right the second or third time? Let's consider one reason for failure – placing too much trust in the people who are running the successful operation, the 'experts' shall we say. Managers who want to apply existing knowledge typically start off by going to an expert – such as the person who designed and is running a successful department store – and picking their brains. Now, this approach can be used if you want to gain a rough understanding of a particular system, or understand smaller, isolated problems. The trouble is, even the expert doesn't fully grasp the whole thing because when it comes to complex systems, the individual components of the process are interwoven with one another. The expert never has complete access to the necessary information. And the situation's complicated even further by the fact that experts are usually not aware of their own ignorance. The ignorance can take various forms. For instance, a lot of details of the system are invisible to managers. Some may be difficult to describe – learned on the job and well known by workers perhaps, but impossible to describe in a way that's helpful. And there are some things that people know or do that they're not even aware of.

Now, let's consider two types of mistake that can occur when a manager actually starts to set up a duplicate system to replicate a successful process. Firstly, perhaps he forgets that he was just trying to copy another process, and starts trying to improve on it. Another mistake is trying to use the best parts of various different systems, in the hope of creating the perfect combination.

Unfortunately, attempts like these usually turn out to be misguided and lead to problems. Why? Well, for various reasons. Perhaps there weren't really any advantages after all, because the information wasn't accurate. Or perhaps the business settings weren't really comparable. More typically, the advantages are real enough, but there are also disadvantages that have been overlooked. For example, the modifications might compromise safety in some way.

So, what's the solution? Well, I don't intend to suggest that it's easy to get things right the second time . . . it's not. But the underlying problem has more to do with attitudes than the actual difficulty of the task, and there are ways of getting it right. These involve adjusting attitudes, first of all . . . being more realistic and cautious really. Secondly, they involve exerting strict controls on the organisational and operational systems. And this in turn means copying the original as closely as possible. Not merely duplicating the physical characteristics of the factory, but also duplicating the skills that the original employees had. Reliance on a template like this offers the huge advantage of built-in consistency.