IELTS Listening full test 5

Sarah: Good morning, Harbour Line Trains lost property, Sarah speaking. How can I help?

James: Hi. I left my bag on one of your trains on Tuesday evening, and I'm hoping someone's handed it in.

Sarah: I'm sorry to hear that. I'll take some details and check our system. Can I start with your name?

James: Yes, it's James Okafor.

Sarah: Could you spell your surname for me?

James: Sure. It's O-K-A-F-O-R.

Sarah: Thanks, James. Which train were you on?

James: It was the train from Central to Maple Bay. I usually catch the six ten, but I missed it on Tuesday, so I got the six forty.

Sarah: The six forty pm. And can you describe the bag?

James: It's a backpack, a medium-sized one. It's dark green. A lot of people think it's black, actually, because it's quite dark, but it's definitely green.

Sarah: OK. And what was inside it?

James: That's the problem. My laptop's in there, which is why I'm so worried. There's also a water bottle and a couple of books.

Sarah: Is there anything that would help us identify it? A name tag, for example?

James: There's no name tag, but there's a keyring on the zip of the front pocket. It's a little toy koala. My niece gave it to me.

Sarah: That's very helpful. Do you remember where you left it on the train?

James: I thought at first I'd put it on the rack above the seat, but no, the rack was full, so I put it under my seat. Then I got off in a hurry and forgot about it.

Sarah: That happens a lot. Now, can I take your address, in case we need to post you anything?

James: It's twenty-seven Lindsay Street, Maple Bay. Lindsay is L-I-N-D-S-A-Y.

Sarah: And the postcode?

James: Two-oh-four-six.

Sarah: Thanks. Right, I'm just checking the system now. Yes, a dark green backpack with a koala keyring was handed in by a cleaner at Maple Bay station on Tuesday night.

James: Oh, that's fantastic! Can I pick it up from Maple Bay? That's my local station.

Sarah: Unfortunately not. All items are sent to our main lost property office in the city, and it arrived there this morning. The office is on the ground floor of the Central station building, near the taxi rank.

James: OK. What do I need to bring with me?

Sarah: Just some photo ID, such as a driver's licence or a passport. There's no fee. Because there's a laptop in the bag, a member of staff will ask you to switch it on and log in, to show that it's yours. You don't need to bring a receipt.

James: That's easy enough. When is the office open?

Sarah: From eight am to six pm on weekdays. We're closed on weekends. And we keep items for thirty days, so there's no need to rush, but I'd come soon.

James: I'll come in tomorrow at lunchtime. Thanks so much, Sarah.

Sarah: You're welcome. Your reference number is on its way to you by text.

Good morning, and welcome back to the community noticeboard here on Coast FM. This is Emma Clarke, and this morning I'm going to tell you all about the Harbour Lights Festival, which returns to Port Ellis this weekend for its twelfth year.

Each year the festival has a different theme. Many of you will remember last year's theme, which was recycling, and the giant sculptures made from plastic bottles. This year the theme is the town's history as a fishing port, and you'll see old photographs, boats and fishing nets on display all around the harbour.

Let me run through the main events. Things begin on Friday night with the lantern parade. Please note that this year the parade will set off from the town hall, not from the surf club as it did in the past, because the surf club building is being repaired. The parade still finishes at the harbour, and anyone can join in with a lantern.

The night market will be open on Friday and Saturday, with food from more than forty local stalls. The stallholders asked for a slightly shorter evening this year, so the market will close at nine o'clock instead of ten.

If you'd like to see the harbour from the water, there are kayak tours at sunset on both Saturday and Sunday. They cost twenty-five dollars, and there are only twenty places on each tour, so you must reserve your place on the festival website before the weekend. You won't be able to just turn up on the day. Children over twelve are welcome, as long as they're with an adult.

Something we've never had at the festival before is an outdoor cinema. On Saturday night, there'll be a family film on the big screen on the lawn next to the lighthouse. Bring a folding chair or a rug to sit on.

For younger visitors, the children's craft tent will be open all weekend. Kids can make their own lantern or a paper fish, and it won't cost you a cent, because all the materials are donated by local businesses.

And of course, the festival ends with fireworks over the harbour at nine o'clock on Sunday night. Please be aware that if the wind is too strong, the fireworks will have to be called off for safety reasons. If that happens, we'll announce it here on Coast FM by six pm.

Now, getting there. Parking in the town centre will be very limited, and the school car park that was used last year isn't available because of building works. So the best way to get there is the free shuttle bus, which runs every fifteen minutes from the railway station.

A couple of rules. Dogs on a lead are welcome everywhere except the market area. And please leave glass at home, because glass bottles aren't allowed anywhere on the festival site.

Finally, the organisers are still looking for volunteers to help with setting up and with the information stands. Please don't ring us here at the station about that. The easiest way is to fill in the form on the festival website.

Tutor: Come in, Sofia and Ben. Have a seat. So, how's the oral history project going?

Sofia: Pretty well, thanks. We've finished most of the interviews, and we've written a first draft of the report.

Tutor: Good. Remind me why you chose Elm Park for your study.

Ben: Well, at first we were going to look at the city centre, but so much has already been written about it. Then Sofia found out that Elm Park was mostly farmland until the nineteen-fifties, when the railway line was extended there, and it changed very quickly after that. So a lot of the change happened within living memory, and there are still people around who saw it.

Sofia: Neither of us actually knows the area, which we thought might be an advantage, because we don't have our own opinions about it.

Tutor: Fair enough. And how did you find people to interview?

Sofia: We put a notice in the local newspaper, but only one person replied. In the end, most of our interviewees came through the community centre. The manager there introduced us to a group of older residents who meet every week for lunch.

Tutor: That's often the best way. How did you record the interviews?

Ben: We started with an app on my phone, but the first interview was in a noisy room, and when we played it back, the sound quality was so bad we could hardly hear anything. So we borrowed a proper recorder from the university library.

Tutor: Sensible. Was there anything that surprised you in the interviews?

Sofia: For me, it was how positive people were. I expected them to complain about all the new housing and traffic, but most of them said the changes had made life much better, with more shops and better transport. The one thing they really missed was the old cinema, which closed in the nineteen-eighties.

Ben: What surprised me was how often people's memories of dates didn't match the official records. One man was sure the station opened in nineteen fifty-five, but it was actually nineteen fifty-two.

Tutor: That's very common, and it's worth discussing in your report. Now, I've read your draft, so let me go through it section by section. The introduction is clear, but it's nearly two pages. It only needs to be half a page, so cut it down.

Ben: We wondered whether we should join the introduction and the background section together.

Tutor: No, I'd keep them separate. The background section is interesting, but you've included a lot of facts about the railway and the population without saying where they come from. You need to add references for those.

Sofia: OK. What about the methods section?

Tutor: The content is fine, but at the moment you've put it after the findings. It should come before them, straight after the background, so readers know how you collected your data.

Ben: Right. And the findings?

Tutor: That's the best part of the report. The quotations from your interviewees really bring it to life, so I wouldn't change much there at all. The conclusion, though, is rather thin. It's only one paragraph, and it doesn't really explain what the interviews show overall. Expand it and say what you've learned.

Sofia: We will. One more thing. What should we do with the recordings when the project's finished?

Ben: We thought we could put them online.

Tutor: Not without written permission, and some of your interviewees may not want that. But the local historical society would probably love to keep copies, as long as your interviewees agree. Why don't you contact them?

Sofia: That's a great idea. We'll ask everyone first.

Good morning. My name's James Porter, and I'm taking today's lecture in our series on materials in history. Today's topic is one of the most important building materials ever developed, Roman concrete.

Concrete is so common today that it's easy to forget how remarkable some ancient examples are. Roman harbour walls built two thousand years ago are still standing in the sea, while some modern concrete structures begin to crumble after only a few decades. So what did the Romans do differently?

Let's begin with the ingredients. The Romans started using concrete on a large scale from around the second century BC. Their concrete was made from lime, which they produced by heating limestone in a kiln, mixed with volcanic ash. To this they added chunks of rock or broken brick to give it bulk. The best ash came from the area around the Bay of Naples, near the town of Pozzuoli, and this is why similar materials are still called pozzolans today. The Roman engineer Vitruvius, writing in the first century BC, described this ash and the strength it gave to buildings.

The volcanic ash is the key. When it's mixed with lime and water, a chemical reaction takes place that binds everything together into a material as hard as stone. Remarkably, the Romans found that this concrete would even set underwater, which allowed them to build harbours and piers directly in the sea.

And this brings us to one of the most interesting discoveries of recent years. Scientists studying samples from Roman harbours found that seawater had slowly reacted with the ash and lime over many centuries. This reaction produced new minerals, which grew into the tiny cracks and spaces inside the concrete. In other words, rather than being weakened by the sea, the concrete actually became stronger over time.

The most famous Roman concrete building is probably the Pantheon in Rome, which was completed under the Emperor Hadrian around AD one hundred and twenty-five. Its dome is still the largest dome of unreinforced concrete in the world. The builders were very clever about weight. At the bottom of the dome, they used heavy pieces of stone in the mix, but towards the top they used much lighter volcanic rock. The dome itself is also much thicker at its base than near the top. This reduced the load on the lower parts of the building.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, large-scale concrete construction largely died out in western Europe, and for centuries builders relied mainly on stone, brick and timber. Modern concrete has a different history. It's based on Portland cement, which was patented by a British builder, Joseph Aspdin, in eighteen twenty-four. He named it after Portland stone, a building stone that it was said to resemble.

One major difference between modern and Roman concrete is that a great deal of modern concrete is reinforced with bars of steel. This makes it much stronger and allows us to build bridges and tall buildings. The problem is that when water gets into the concrete, the steel can rust. Rust takes up more space than the original steel, so it pushes outwards and cracks the concrete from the inside. Roman concrete contained no steel, so it never faced this problem.

Finally, a recent study, published in twenty twenty-three, looked at the small white lumps of lime that are found in Roman concrete. These had long been seen as a sign of poor mixing. However, the researchers suggested they may have helped the concrete repair itself. When a crack forms and water gets in, some of the lime dissolves and then forms new crystals that can fill the crack.

So should we simply go back to Roman methods? Not quite. Roman concrete is much weaker in compression than modern concrete, and it's slow to harden, which would make modern construction far slower. But engineers are now studying Roman techniques to make modern concrete last longer.