IELTS Trainer 2 Academic Listening Test 1 (Online Test)

Manager: Good afternoon. First of all, I want to say thank you for your patience for the last six months. As you know, all the office staff had to move to temporary offices while the renovation work at the factory complex was taking place. But finally that work is finished, and everyone can return to the factory complex, and their new office space. We’re hoping everything will go smoothly but – there’s a couple of things we’ll need you to do during your first week back.

You’ll be pleased to know that your files and folders have been placed at your desk, so there’s no need for you to go hunting around for any records. Um, a couple of people have asked whether their old pass will still work at the security gate – or will they need to get their photo done and update their personal details. I can assure you that the old pass will still get you through the gate. No problem. Once you’ve had a chance to settle in to the new offices, please take the time to view a training video for the operating system we’re now using. We think it’s going to manage all our programmes far more efficiently. Obviously, the sooner you can get this done, the better. Also for next week, because the renovations have meant a complete redesign of some of the company’s buildings, you’ll need to attend a session on things like – what to do if you hear the fire alarm go off, and where to meet if you have to evacuate the buildings. We’ll let you know as soon as we have a definite time for that. It’s going to be a busy week for everyone, but hopefully the kind of challenge that can help bring the team together. We’ll make a time for you to report back to me on Friday.

All right, we’ve also taken some steps to improve the physical environment in your offices. Bigger windows mean that the offices are a lot brighter – and that’s better for your eyes. Inside we’ve replaced some dividing walls with coloured glass panels. They look great. We’ve also invested in some adjustable chairs. You can lower or raise them to whatever height feels right for you. What else? We’ve now got some quality insulation in the ceilings and walls that’ll make everything a lot warmer. Also – another thing – we’ve set aside several rooms for project work. That will allow a team to get together around the same table. We feel that more opportunities for face-to-face discussion will benefit the whole company. So, when you…

Manager: OK, so let’s look at a plan of the factory complex, and see how it’s changed. You can see that the main entrance is at the top of the map, Ellerslie Road is on the left-hand side, and the warehouse is at the bottom. OK, let’s start with one of the new buildings – the conference centre, perhaps. If you look at the lower half of your plan, on the right, there are two long buildings that are parallel to each other. The conference centre is the one with a view of the river. Hopefully that’s something visitors to the factory complex will appreciate – especially on a sunny day when it’s clear outside.

Now, what about the new office space? As you know, the offices used to be in that large building right alongside Ellerslie Road, and that could get a bit noisy at times. So what we’ve done is move the office space further away from the road – into the building that directly joins on to Reception. This should mean employees can benefit from a quieter working environment, as well as the other improvements I mentioned earlier. We also decided to move the Stores building, so it could be a lot closer to the warehouse.

So now, if you were going to enter the factory complex from the Ellerslie Road entrance, Stores would be the building immediately on your left. The warehouse staff have already commented that having the Stores here is much more convenient. Yes, I’m sure it’s going to save a lot of time.

Finance was another building that had to be relocated. They just didn’t have enough space before. So, you can see the main entrance on the plan. right? And below that is the roundabout. Then there’s the road that goes from the roundabout directly to reception. Well, the Finance building is about halfway along that road. On the plan, the factory’s just above it.

The café, just so you know, is in the same place as before. It’s not ideally located for the factory workers, that’s true, but it’s not too far if you’re heading down from Reception, or up from the warehouse. But what we’ve done is try to make the environment a bit more pleasant. So, whereas before you looked straight from the café onto the large car park, now there’s a line of trees separating them. I think you’ll agree that this was a good decision – putting in the trees, I mean.

It was also necessary to relocate the IT department. Of course, for some of their work, they can do it remotely, but from time to time, the IT people do need to visit the different buildings around the factory complex. For that reason, we’ve given the IT department a more central location. It’s that square building you see right in the centre of the plan – one of the closest buildings to the larger car park. Something I’d like to say about …

Lecturer: OK, we’ve looked at the history of vitamin supplements and thought about why people take them. We’ve also considered the reasons why some health professionals are critical of the vitamin supplement industry. Now work with a partner and discuss the key issues.

Lucy: Sam, shall we work together?

Sam: Sure. Let’s go over the history.

Lucy: Well, before the 1900s, when someone became weak and tired, and it wasn’t clear why, doctors assumed they were suffering from an infection – like a virus.

Sam: Or they’d been in contact with something poisonous or harmful. Something they’d handled or eaten. Doctors had no other explanation for it.

Lucy: But in the early 1900s, that changed. That researcher in the US -Joseph Goldberger, – he realised people who basically lived off corn – they were getting ill because they weren’t eating anything else.

Sam: Exactly. And other researchers were realising the same thing. Like, in places where people only ate white rice – they were suffering from a disease called beriberi.

Lucy: So the researchers concluded that there must be something missing – that the stuff some people were eating had no nutritional value. And from there, researchers began to identify vitamins – like A and B – for the first time.

Sam: A huge scientific breakthrough.

Lucy: So doctors, the public, ...everyone got to hear about vitamins – first that they existed, and second, you needed them to be healthy.

Sam: But it was governments that were really worried about vitamin deficiency. Certainly in the US and in the UK, at least.

Lucy: What do you mean?

Sam: Well, in the 1930s those governments were worried about people’s general health, because everyone was suddenly buying canned fruit, artificial butter, meat in tins...that kind of thing. It became very common. And so newspapers were featuring lots of government reports about how serious this was.

Lucy: I see.

Sam: And then, some people saw a business opportunity.

Lucy: Naturally.

Sam: In the 1940s, companies started making and selling vitamin supplements in bottles. And they decided the easiest way to market them was to target housewives.

Lucy: Why was that? Because housewives were responsible for keeping families healthy?

Sam: I’d say so. In the weekly magazines housewives read, the companies made exaggerated claims about what the supplements could do, and they showed pictures of rats in a laboratory before and after they were given vitamins. The ‘before’ pictures showed the rats looking very sick.

Lucy: So they scared the housewives into buying their product.

Sam: Apparently.

Lucy: But vitamins were still expensive, weren’t they? It wasn’t until the 1950s that more people could afford to buy them.

Sam: Why was that?

Lucy: Well manufacturers had discovered how to produce vitamins artificially and in enormous quantities in their factories.

Sam: I suppose that’s what goes on with any product. It starts expensive until manufacturers adapt their technology. Were there any developments in the 1960s?

Lucy: Companies changed their promotional strategy to increase their sales. They used movie stars to say how effective the supplements were.

Sam: That’s still true today. Celebrity endorsement really seems to work. Someone on the TV says vitamins have made them healthier and immediately more consumers go out and buy them.

Lucy: So apparently the number of Australians taking vitamin supplements has doubled in the last decade.

Sam: Incredible. I suppose so many fitness-related articles recommend them.

Lucy: I wouldn’t say that that’s the reason. According to the research I read, many Australians are just taking a more active approach to staying well. They don’t want to rely on their doctor for everything, so they’re turning to vitamins. They can take those themselves and feel they’re doing something positive.

So it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact the price has dropped because so many companies are making supplements.

Sam: I doubt it. Even people in lower socio-economic groups are buying them, apparently.

Lucy: Most of my own research has been about the US vitamin supplement industry. Did you know the industry is under no obligation to prove that their supplements actually work. I don’t think that’s right.

Sam: How do you mean?

Lucy: Well, in the US, the Food and Drug Administration department regards vitamin supplements as a food. With medicine – manufacturers have to demonstrate that their products really can improve people’s health, before they go on sale.

Sam: But you said vitamins are classed as a food.

Lucy: Yes, so the industry can sell whatever vitamin supplements they like, you know: ‘This one will improve your brain function’ - even if there’s nothing to support their claims.

Sam: That Danish experiment – thousands of people took part in that.

Lucy: Yes, the scientists wanted to see if high doses of vitamins really could prevent medical problems like heart disease. Or just reduce the chances of people getting a simple cold.

Sam: But the ‘high dose’ people were just as likely to get sick as the people not taking any vitamins. That’s not to say that scientists now know everything about vitamins.

Lucy: No. Like you say, investigations and long-term trials need to continue before they can be certain about what taking vitamin supplements can actually achieve.

Sam: But in the meantime, do we need stricter regulation of the supplement industry? Do you think people would stop buying and taking vitamins if they were told it’s a waste of time?

Lucy: Hardly. No one likes being told what they can or can’t buy… especially where health is concerned.

Sam: Fair enough. I guess if the government made it harder to get certain products, like say, fish oil with vitamin D, people would protest.

Lucy: They certainly would. What I think is that...

Student: So today I’m going to be talking about the way that different insect species are being threatened. In other words, the reasons why some insect populations are declining – and might even become extinct in the 21st century. I’ll also talk about the consequences – if extinction occurs – and some possible ways to prevent that.

Let’s start with the reasons. First of all, when we look at what’s going on in Europe, we can see a huge decline in certain species of insect. This is partly because farmers no longer allow certain plants to grow in their fields. But farmers are not entirely to blame. The gardens that people have nowadays don’t always contain the kind of plant that insects need. So perhaps we need to rethink what we’re putting there. In more tropical regions of the world, for example, the Amazon rainforest, scientists have noticed that the number of beetle and butterfly species also appears to be diminishing. They put this down to climate change, rather than say, the fragmentation of habitat – but more research has to be done. And then, there’s the use of pesticide, and of course, this happens everywhere in the world. Pesticide is designed to kill a range of insects that farmers don’t like, but it also kills bees, which they need. Pesticide might not kill bees directly, but we know that it impacts on their spatial skills – meaning they cannot make sense of what they see around them – and also their memory. This means that they cannot remember how to get back to their hive.

So why worry about whether insects become extinct? Well, the consequences would obviously be terrible not just for them, but for us. Pretty much everywhere on the planet, with the exception of Antarctica, insects are at the bottom of the food chain. They’re absolutely vital, because if there were no insects, there would also be no birds or lizards or mammals. Then there’s the role that insects play in crop production. We use them to pollinate our fruit and vegetables, and it would be impossible to manage without them. It’s also worth remembering that scientists are now studying plants to find out whether they might be a source of medicine in the future. If these plants disappear because of insect extinction, that would be another lost opportunity.

So, there’s some possible ways we could prevent insect extinction, some more controversial than others. I think it’s a given that governments have to do something about the sale of pesticides; in fact, some countries have already passed laws to ban certain products. That’s a good move forward. But ordinary people can also make a difference. If we cut down on how much meat we ate, some of the land now used for grazing could be turned back into insect-friendly environments.

I’d like to finish with a positive story. There’s a place in California called the Antioch Dunes. In the 1900s, people looked at the dunes and the sand that formed them and thought ‘that sand is a great raw material’. And because they needed to build houses, they removed tons and tons of the sand and turned it into bricks. It wasn’t really until the 1960s that biologists suddenly realised that the Antioch Dunes had actually been home to some unique species of plant and insect. But by this time, there was only one species of butterfly left. The metalmark butterfly. And a major problem for the metalmark was that it required a certain plant to survive –something called the naked-stem buckwheat. It was on this plant that it laid its eggs, so yes, you can see why the buckwheat was important. Well, in the end, the only way that the biologists could get the buckwheat to start growing properly was to replace the sand. That was a great first step, but the metalmark butterfly is still endangered.

In the last decade, a significant number of butterflies and plants have been destroyed in the Antioch Dunes by fire. So now, the biologists are limiting the number of visitors who can wander around the dunes. That’s fair enough, I think. All right, the final point I want to make about the project to restore the Antioch Dunes area is to do with how much land is required: when we think about the concept of conservation we often assume we need to set aside a large amount of it. And that might be true for some large species. But in this case, relatively little land was required. But the important thing is to leave it undisturbed. OK...