Succeed in IELTS Academic Listening Test 3 (Online Test)

As Charity-Water's Water Project Manager, I travel to some of the most desperate places on earth in search of clean water. And while the landscape changes, there's always one thing that remains the same: the women are always walking. Whether I'm in the mountains of Haiti, in rural Liberia, or the jungles of the Central African Republic, the women are always carrying water. To give you an idea of the work that Charity-Water does, I'll tell you the story of one of these women.

Driving down a bumpy road in the middle of Northern Uganda, our truck suddenly swerves off the road and up over an embankment. We usually prefer to surprise communities by our arrival because it makes it easier to monitor how our water points are functioning without hundreds of people watching. But once you visit a few communities in the neighbourhood, rumours of your presence spread like wildfire. We jump out of the truck and walk into a party.

This is when I met Helen Apis. She told me about the new freshwater well in her village. "I am happy now," Helen beamed. "I have time to eat, my children can go to school. And I can even work in my garden, take a shower and then come back for more water if I want! I am bathing so well."

A few of the men chuckled to hear a woman talk about bathing. But all I noticed was Helen's glowing face, the fresh flowers in her hair, and the lovely green dress she wore for special occasions. Touching her forearm, I replied, "Well, you look great." "Yes," she paused. Placing both hands on my shoulders and smiling, she said, "Now, I am beautiful."

That really hit me. My job is to focus on sustainable development, health, hygiene and sanitation; to make sure Charity-Water's projects are working in 20 years. But nowhere on any of my surveys or evaluations was a place to write, "Today we made someone feel beautiful."

Before she had clean water, Helen would wake up before dawn, take her only two 5-gallon Jerry Cans, and walk almost a mile and a half to the nearest water point, which happens to be at a school. Because there simply wasn't enough water for the area's population, she'd wait in line with hundreds of other women who also valued clean water. Helen's only other option was to skip the wait and collect contaminated water from a pond.

Helen spent most of her day walking and waiting. She told me each day she'd say to herself, "How should I use this water today? Should I water my garden so we can grow food? Should I wash my children's uniforms? Should I use it to cook a meal? Should we drink this water?" With two children, one husband and 10 gallons, Helen had to make choices. I saw the shame in her eyes when she described how she would return from her long trek to find her two young children waiting for her. They were often sent home from school because their uniforms were dirty.

With the new well in her village, her life was transformed.

She now had choices; free time; options. Also, Helen had been chosen to be the Water Committee Treasurer, collecting nominal fees from 51 households to use for the maintenance of their well. Water Committees are often the first time women ever get elected to leadership positions in villages. Last month, Helen was standing in line waiting for water. This month, she's standing up for her community. And now, she is beautiful.

J = Jessica

K = Dr. Kitching

J: Hello Dr. Kitching, my name's Jessica. I work for the student newspaper. I called you last week to ask if I could interview you for an article about how to ask for references.

K: Oh, yes; I remember! Come in. Have a seat.

J: Thank you. Do you have a few minutes now to do the interview?

K: Yes, that's fine.

J: Great! I got the idea to do this article because, well, every-one I know is rather puzzled about how to get references from professors when they need them for applications for jobs or postgraduate studies. And I thought, since you're a professor, and you've been working as a student advisor for many years also, what better person to ask.

K: Yes, I have got some advice I can share on this topic. Where shall we begin?

J: First of all, do you mind if I record our conversation?

K: No, I don't mind.

J: Thanks. Do you write many references yourself?

K: Oh yes, I certainly do! Let's see, it's variable of course, but I'd say I average at least 50 per year.

J: My goodness! That's nearly five per month! It's more than one per week!

K: Yes, it's a lot. And of course, most of the requests are made in the spring or early summer, when students are starting to think seriously about where they will be heading after they graduate in June.

J: Do most professors do so many?

K: Yes, it's part of the job. Of course, because I'm an advisor, students probably feel like I know them rather better than some professors, so I probably get a few more than I would otherwise.

J: Alright, so what do we students need to know in terms of asking for references or letters of recommendation? It's incredibly daunting, actually, particularly since we have such large classes. I'm not sure if my professors even know who I am!

K: Yes, that's probably the biggest issue students face in getting references. You will invariably have to contact former Professors even if you have never spoken to them outside of class. Following on this, if I were giving a first-year student advice, I would say to make sure you've had contact with several Professors outside of class so you won't be a stranger. All it takes is visiting during office hours, even if it's just to say "Hello, I'm enjoying your lectures".

J: But what if we didn't do that?

K: Then you'll just have to contact your professor anyway.

Make a telephone call; tell him or her who you are, and what classes you attended, this sort of thing. Remember, for your professor, recalling an average student out of hundreds and hundreds isn't easy. So tell him or her what course you took, and what semester and year it was. Include what grade you got and anything memorable. Perhaps you spilled your coffee. Though at the time it wasn't funny it might be enough for Professor Brown to remember you and it won't shed any negative light on you; it was an accident. Or perhaps, although you never spoke outside of class, you went up and asked a question that was a great one. Any information you can give to identify yourself is going to help you out.

J: Should I visit Professor Brown in person?

K: Yes, that would be ideal. I would suggest giving the information first over the phone, then follow up by e-mailing it to your professor. During the phone conversation, ask if you could meet briefly. This will be both a physical reminder of who you are and also another chance to make a good impression.

J: Isn't it very difficult to write references for all these students you've never spoken to or really even met?

K: Yes; for example, I was recently called by a student from 20 years ago! He lived in another country. I really didn't recall him. He told me a little about himself and I looked back at his records. I told him that all I could do was verify that he was in my class, that he showed up for all the classes and that he received a 3.4 in my class. Sometimes I'm very surprised that students who did very poorly in my class ask me for a reference.

J: What do you do in that case? Give a poor reference?

K: I, like most Professors I know, never say anything negative about the student; however it is what is unsaid that can say it all. So you really want to make sure you're remembered in a positive way and have left a good impression.

J: Ok, thanks very much for all this information. The story should come out in our next printing, so if you're interested I'll drop one copy over to you.

K: I'll be looking forward to seeing it.

Good morning; today's lecture will be about primate behaviour. Up until now I've talked mostly about physical features: how they apply to living primates; how we use them for classification; how they apply to the fossil record. But human evolution isn't simply about how we've changed physically over the last 70 million years; it's also about how our behaviour has changed.

Now, if I asked you to define what is meant by the term "human", you could probably, hopefully, give me a list of characteristics that physically define us. But at a philosophical level, I would hope that what you'd be really proud of is not that we normally walk on two legs, but that we can reason and imagine. Descartes put it succinctly: "I think, therefore I am" although, admittedly, not quite in this context.

This lecture isn't about human behaviour per se, but about primate behaviour in general, and animal behaviour too, since just as we can use the physical characteristics of living primates to give us clues and insights into the physical characteristics of human ancestors, so we hope that the behaviours of non-human primates will be similarly enlightening for the behaviour of our ancestors.

To begin, let's talk a bit about primate cognitive abilities. I don't want to mention a lot of different behaviours without first mentioning cognition. Cognition is the amount of thought that goes into a behaviour. There is a world of difference between an animal hitting a nut with a rock and cracking it by accident, and an animal thinking to itself: "I can't bite into this nut. I know, I need something to use as a hammer to crack it." However, it can be very difficult coming up with experiments to differentiate these two.

We can easily test mental skills, such as recall and discrimination, using methods such as the Wisconsin general test apparatus and various training experiments. But it's much harder to work out the degree of thought required. This is still a big problem in evaluating the status of great apes. Just how nearly "sentient" are they? Sentient, for those of you who don't remember, means there is the presence of conscious thought.

There are various behaviours that could be seen to support the presence of conscious thought in primates. Various sorts of altruism, or helping others without directly benefiting, can be found in certain great apes. The animals team up to achieve various goals: for example, hunting, in chimps. This would seem to require a degree of cognition. Another feature that has come to light recently is "Machiavellian intelligence". Work, especially with baboons, seems to indicate that there is a lot of deliberate social deception going on: sneaky mating; passing the blame onto others; using infants for defence. At first glance, this seems very complicated behaviourally, but again, it can, just about, be explained in a fairly minimally cognitive way. Highly trained chimps, such as the signing chimp, Washoe, and the computer-aided communication of Kanzi also indicate a high level of intelligence. An interesting fact is that these language-trained chimps do much better in the standardised intelligence tests too, indicating that we probably underestimate primate intelligence in our traditional experiments. It seems that primates are not all that interested in the colour of pencils; they want to know the latest gossip about their friends - sound familiar?

And of course, cognition and intelligence in primates is a thorny problem, with deep moral and political ramifications.