IELTS Recent Actual Test 5 General Training Listening Test 6 (Online Test)

Hello, welcome you all to Pine Garden. My name is Manuel. Before you wander off and begin your exploration of the garden, I am going to keep all of you informed of several things about this building. I know you are eager to start your wandering and exploring, so I will try to keep this as short as possible.

At the very first, I think I should explain to you something that you can do with your ticket. If you would like to be much more into nature, the optimal section is our planting area, where all the visitors can plant small flowers and bulbs on their own. These plants will gradually grow and then become part of our garden. The activities of planting are totally free. However, if your hands are sensitive, we strongly recommend you to buy a pair of garden gloves in order to protect your skin.

Also, here at Pine Garden, we use wooden materials from the trees that have been felled in our very own pine forest to make carved goods! If you are interested and want to get involved and try by yourself, you can join one of our bush timbering lessons for free, where you will have the opportunity to make your own key ring with the help of a skilled craftsman.

Our aviary is the most popular attraction, where you can see a whole range of bird species. More surprisingly, it is free to enter this section, yet you should pay a small amount of supplement for the entry to the hummingbird section. Also, the insect section that is not far from the aviary might arouse your interest. There you will find a number of interesting insects, such as butterflies, pocket ladybugs, dragonflies and so on, and no extra fee for it will be paid.

Unfortunately, some areas are now temporarily limited to visitors today. For example, the gift shop that has been closed earlier this year will remain out of boundary for another month or so. As I have said before, the restaurant still offers free food and snacks for you, and if you do feel like purchasing a gift, why not buy that special potted bush or orchid from our plant care centre? What's more, our new treetop cafe is now in the process of construction; it will be very compelling when it's finished. Actually, our model town has already opened in advance, and that is such great interest to the public. Also, our tourist office is ordinarily available to give tourists many aids. But the officer is sick at home. Please do not be disappointed by this, since our opening visiting areas also provide quite an experience!

I'd also like to introduce our plant experts responsible for the wonderful plant exhibitions here at Pine Garden. Mrs. Mary is one of our specialists, who is personally in charge of our awesome displays that can all be found in the local wild nature. Mr. Berson is responsible for looking after some varieties of plants that grow in much drier and hotter climates than ours with difficult tasks, which means there is no need to conserve much water for it on site. If you go into the glass house, there are a large number of plants that he has managed to grow without any need for raining or irrigation. Mr. Smith is in charge of keeping all the visitors fed at our restaurant, which contains some of the varieties that grow under the ground and those that on trees and bushes. Now, Mr. Nunee here is our specialist on the most universally growing plant in the world: grass! You may have noticed how beautifully green and lush our grounds are thanks to his specialist knowledge. Mr. Acanlan guarantees our soil is compiled with nutrients; all the specialists' habitat is hence supported and encouraged. He succeeded in doing this by fertilizing the earth with his special formula that originally constructed by himself. At last, I'd like to invite you all to meet Dr. Mandelson, the manager of our landscaping team, who works closely with all other experts to make sure everybody works together to create a landscape that is pretty as well as sustainable.

Well, that just about rounds it up. Now, if anyone has any questions...

Professor: Good morning, Lorna and Ian! I'm glad that you both chose to make it. You're the only two who take the names down for this literature test. So let's get started, shall we? I would like to go through some aspects of the novel, The Secret Garden, with you before the test next week. Do take some notes and feel free to interrupt me if you have questions.

Ian: Hey Lorna, have you got a spare pen?

Lorna: Yeah, here you are.

Professor: All right, so, the story follows two key characters. You should refer to them as protagonists who go by the names of Mary Lennox and Colin Craven. The story is set shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, and the narrative tracks the development of the protagonists as they learn to overcome their own personal troubles together.

Lorna: That's quite a common storyline, isn't it?

Professor: Yes, you're right, Lorna. So could you share something you've already known about the character of Mary?

Lorna: Well, in the beginning, she is an angry and rude child who is orphaned after a cholera outbreak and forces to leave India for the United Kingdom to her uncle's house in Yorkshire.

Professor: Exactly, and there she comes across Colin who spends his days in an isolated room, believing himself to be permanently crippled with no hope of being ever possible of walking. The two strike up a friendship and gradually learn by encouraging each other that both of them can have a healthy, happy and fulfilled life.

Ian: Is there any need for us to remember these details for the exam?

Professor: Just the fundamental structure. Examiners don't want to read a plot summary. They know what the book is about. Focus on narrative techniques instead, such as point of view.

Lorna: What does that mean?

Professor: It's all about how we see the story. For example, it's written based on what is called an 'omniscient narrator', which means all-knowing. So, readers can feel the same as how all the characters do about things, including what they like and don't like, and what their motivations are in the story.

Ian: Won't it be that difficult to perform a technical analysis? After all, it's a kid's book.

Professor: Well, it was initially pitched at adults, you know, but over the years it has shifted to a more youth-orientated work. In this case, your understanding is correct in some way. The simple lexical items and absence of foreshadowing make the story relatively easy to follow and supposedly suited for children. But that doesn't mean there isn't much to analyse. Look at the symbolism, for instance.

Lorna: Symbols are things, right? Material things like objects that stand for abstract ideas.

Professor: Absolutely right. The author also uses many of them. There's the robin redbreast, for example, which symbolises the wise and gentle nature that Mary will soon adopt. Note that the robin is regarded as 'not at all like the birds in India'. Roses are treated as well as a personal symbol for Mistress Craven. You'll see they're always mentioned alongside her name. And Mistress Craven's portrait can also be interpreted as a symbol of her spirit.

Ian: Are symbols just another name for motifs?

Professor: No, motifs are a bit different. They don't have a direct connection with something the way a symbol does. Motifs are simply recurring elements of the story that support the mood.

Lorna: Are there any in this novel?

Professor: Yes, two very key ones. The Garden of Eden is a motif, which comes up a few times in association with the garden of the story. And then you've got the role that secrets play in the story. At the very beginning, everything is steeped in secrecy, and slowly the characters share their secrets and in the process move from darkness to lightness, metaphorically, but also in the case of Colin, quite literally. His room used to have the curtains drawn, but in the end, he appears in the brightness of the garden.

Ian: Anything else needed to know about?

Professor: Yes. Nearly all novels explore universal concepts that everyone has witnessed, things like love, family, loneliness, friendship. These are called themes. The Secret Garden has a few themes that all concentrate on the idea of connections. The novel explores, for example, the way that health can determine and be determined by our outlook on life. As Colin's health conditions get improved, so do his perceptions of his strength and possibility. The author also examines the relationship between our surroundings and our physical and spiritual prosperity. The dark, cramped rooms of the manor house stifle the development of our protagonists; the garden and natural environments allow them to blossom, just as the flowers do. Finally, this book looks at the connections between individuals, namely Mary and Colin. This necessity of human companionship is the novel's most important theme because none of their development as individuals would have appeared without their knowing each other. Well, that about sums it up, I think.

Lorna: That's a great help, thanks.

Ian: Yes, thanks very much.

Hello, everyone! Today, I would like to talk about an assignment that I did recently. The brief of my presentation was to analyse the methods used in a small survey about job satisfaction and then to put forward some suggestions for further researches in the similar field. The correlation between differences in gender and differences in working hours, and levels of job satisfaction among employees have been investigated in the study I conducted. For this reason, employees at a call centre had been interviewed by filling in a questionnaire about their work. Now, I'll briefly introduce the summary of the study findings.

One primary conclusion I've got is female full-time workers gained slightly higher levels of job satisfaction than male ones. More interestingly, among all the female workers, female workers on a part-time basis reported somewhat higher levels of satisfaction than the full-time ones did. On the contrary, from the perspective of male employees, part-time male workers held slightly less job satisfaction than how much the full-time ones felt. Although it seemed these results sounded interesting and capable of explanation, perhaps the most crucial thing to mention here is that in statistical terms they were inconclusive.

I was personally shocked at the fact that the results hadn't been more definite, because I would have predicted to see both men and women, as well as full and part-time workers, would go into various levels of satisfaction. Therefore, I can pay higher attention to the methodology applied by the researchers, to figure out where problems may have aroused. So, the next part of the presentation today is detailed aspects of what I found.

First, it is probable that the sample size was too small since the total number of workers who did the questionnaire in the survey was 223, which perhaps sounds quite a lot. But they had to be divided up into several subgroups. Also, between those separate subgroups, the numbers were unequal. For instance, in the full-time group there were 154 samples, but only 69 in the part-time group. And only 10 of them in the part-time group were male, compared to the rest of 59 who were female. In addition, although quite a large quantity of workers were interviewed in the survey, the response has been disappointingly low, with a couple of them just ignoring the invitation. And workers who did respond may have differed in important perspectives from those who didn't. Also, as the questionnaires had been posted to the call centre for distribution, the researchers had had minimal control over the conditions in which participants completed them. For example, their responses to questions may have caused the results to be biased.

In the last part of my assignment, there were some possible suggestions made for a similar study, which attempts to remove the problems that I've just mentioned before. First, a target sample size should be much larger, and consideration should be taken to make sure equal numbers of both genders and both full-time and part-time workers are surveyed. Second, the researchers should recheck that they are present to administer the questionnaires to the workers themselves. And they should require the workers to complete the questionnaire under supervised conditions so that the likelihood of the impacts from other colleagues is eliminated. Finally, as workers may be unwilling to mention the details of their job satisfaction, when they are on work premises, it's critical that the researchers reassure their responses will keep confidential, and also that they have the right to withdraw from the study at any time if they want to. In this case, it is possible that the responses to the questionnaires get increasing reliability and any comparisons that are made are more valid.

Well, that was a summary of my assignment, does anyone have any questions?