Audioscripts
Test 1 number of incidents in the past year. I eat lunch in
I manage a low-cost hotel that mainly caters for
lorry drivers and motorists who have decided to
break a long journey with an overnight stay. It’s
not a huge hotel – we have about 50 rooms – but
everyone has to work hard, because we’re quite a
small team. My working day officially begins at 9,
but I’m usually in the office an hour before that,
because I like to get in early and have time to plan
my day. So, I get up at six thirty, have a quick
shower and some breakfast and leave home at
half past seven. The first thing I do is find out if
any problems arose overnight. The night staff log
any complaints they receive, and I think it’s
important to look at them and deal with them as
soon as possible. If a guest has complained about
something major, I at least let them know the next
day that I’m aware of their complaint and that I will
investigate it. After dealing with guest-related
issues, I move on to the financial side of things. I
need to check that guests’ bills have been settled,
that the staff have been paid, and what payments
the hotel needs to make to suppliers of things like
towels and toiletries. Next, I have a meeting with
all the staff. I tell them, for example, how busy the
hotel is going to be that day, whether we have any
events like conferences taking place and who isn’t
at work due to illness or holiday and how we’re
going to cover their absence. During the meeting I
also like to give the cleaning staff a task for the
day that's in addition to their everyday duties of
changing sheets and tidying rooms. The extra
task for the day might be vacuuming under the
beds or washing the shower curtains. For the rest
of the morning I inspect all the rooms. I need to
check that everything’s working and nothing’s
missing. Guests don’t always report broken TVs
or showers, and of course things like clothes
hangers and hairdryers occasionally disappear
from rooms! I also check that everything’s safe
and secure. In fact I can’t relax unless I know all
the windows in unoccupied rooms are closed.
That’s my main concern, in fact, as we’ve had a
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the office at about half past one. As the manager,
I think it’s important for me to be on site at all
times during my shift in case there’s an
emergency. At 2 o’clock, I normally go onto the
reception desk for the rest of the day, which
involves taking bookings over the phone, dealing
with online queries and welcoming people to the
hotel. I think it’s the part of the job I most enjoy,
actually. This week my schedule’s a bit different,
though, because we’re recruiting staff for our new
breakfast café. We’ve never had a restaurant, but
a lot of our guests have said they’d like to have a
cooked breakfast before they go sightseeing and
souvenir shopping! So, we’ve decided to introduce
that service. We advertised for kitchen and waiting
staff last month and we’re interviewing candidates
every afternoon at the moment. It makes things
busier than usual, but it’ll be worth it in the end!
Test 2
Good morning everyone, and thank you for
coming to this seminar. Or perhaps I should say
congratulations for choosing to attend it, because
the advice I’m going to give you could make the
difference between unemployment and getting
your dream job. It will certainly help you to make a
good impression at interviews, as well as when
you meet new people. One thing you should
always remember in those situations is that most
communication between people is non-verbal.
That’s to say, we express far more with our body
language, both consciously and unconsciously,
than we do through speech. So you need to be
aware of your body language at all times in job
interviews to make sure you’re not sending out
negative messages. Let me ask you a question. Is
it a good idea to make more eye contact than
usual during an interview? Of course, making lots
of eye contact is better than moving your eyes
around the room constantly, which makes you
look frightened or even dishonest. It’s also better
than looking at the floor, which makes you look
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bored. But using an abnormally high amount of
eye contact definitely won’t improve your chances
of success. So what’s a normal amount? Well,
you should be looking into the interviewer’s eyes
around 70% of the time. Any more than, say, 80%
is too intense, and 100% eye contact will certainly
make you seem odd. It’s a good idea to imagine a
triangle on the head of the interviewer, with the
bottom of the triangle just under the eyes. Aim to
keep your eyes inside this triangle rather than
directly on the person’s eyes all the time. Also, try
to blink normally. If you don’t blink enough, you
might seem aggressive, and blinking more than
usual is a sign of emotional distress. Now I’m sure
a lot of you get nervous at job interviews, which is
normal, of course, and can actually be helpful.
The important thing is not to let your nervousness
cause you to move your hands, arms and legs
around a lot for no reason. You can deliver an
excellent answer to a question, but if you shake
your legs the whole time, your interviewer won’t
be able to concentrate on what you’re saying. It’s
even worse to touch your face. Children cover
their mouths when telling lies, and in adults this
becomes nose-scratching, and cheek- and chin-
stroking. So if you keep bringing your hand to your
face you will look dishonest, even if it’s just
nervousness. Try keeping your hands locked
together in your lap. But if you still feel the need to
move your hands around, try to make elegant
hand gestures that emphasise what you say.
You’ll look like you know exactly what you’re
talking about. One positive hand gesture is to hold
your hands out with the palms facing the ceiling.
This makes you look open and giving. That
reminds me, avoid crossing your arms, which
creates a barrier. It’s a defensive gesture.
Crossing your legs is a different matter. It can
make you look agreeable. But make sure you
have your knees facing your interviewer to
achieve the ideal posture.
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Test 3
I think it’s fair to say that chilli peppers are a food
people either really love or truly hate – but not
here at the Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'm surrounded by
fans of the spiciest foods. This celebration of the
hottest of fruits – that's right, it's not a vegetable –
has been attracting thousands of people every
year since it started in the 1980s. There are
people here who are such big fans of chillies that
they are willing to travel hundreds or even
thousands of miles to be here. Today I met a
group of German guys who told me they don't
cook with chillies, but put chilli powder in their
coffee in the mornings and in their hot chocolate
in the evenings. They even like chilli beer. So why
do people come? Well, this event gives visitors
the chance to try hundreds of products that
contain chillies – mainly sauces, mustards and
ketchups, but also unexpected foods like
chocolate and other confectionery. Farmers, food
companies and amateur sauce makers from 40
US states and a number of countries all come
here to give people the chance to sample and buy
their products. There's one sauce called Stupid
Hot! Even if you don’t like eating chillies yourself,
it’s great fun to watch people’s reactions to the
super-hot foods on offer, which bring tears to
many eyes. It’s also an educational experience for
people like me who come here not knowing much
about the chilli pepper. Did you know, for
example, that there are hundreds of varieties of
chilli pepper in the world? Some of them,
apparently, are much fruitier than the ones
everybody knows about. There’s one that smells
like apricots, and one that tastes like raisins!
Something else that I’ve learned is that there’s an
official scale that measures how hot each variety
of chilli is. It’s called the Scoville Scale, and to
give you a sense of it, the kind of bell peppers that
I enjoy on my pizza a few times a week measure
zero on the scale. The jalapeño peppers that
come with nachos score 3,000. The hottest chilli
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pepper in the world, which comes from India, has
a Scoville Scale score of a million! So it’s
definitely only for the very brave! But there are
plenty of people out there who can handle a chilli
pepper’s heat. In fact, jalapeño pepper-eating
competitions are quite common in this part of the
United States in Mexican restaurants, and there
are often quite big prizes, such as TVs, for the
winners. In an average restaurant, eating eight or
nine jalapeño peppers in a minute might be
enough to win, but the world record is 16 in a
minute! I think I’ll need to do a lot of practising
before I come anywhere close to that.
Test 4
You’re now looking at the oldest preserved human
body ever found in Europe. He’s known as Ötzi
the Ice Man, and he was discovered by some
German tourists who were hiking in the mountains
between Italy and Austria in 1991. Because the
body is so well-preserved, people didn’t
immediately realise just how old it is. Ötzi lived
5,300 years ago, and the reason his body stayed
intact is that is was covered by ice shortly after he
died. So unlike the mummies of Egypt, here we
have a body that was preserved completely
naturally, and it gives us a lot of information about
how the average man lived 5,000 years ago – a
period known as the Copper Age. For example, as
we can see from his hands, he would have been
used to doing hard physical work. His teeth reveal
that his diet included a lot of plant material that
was quite hard to chew. And it might surprise you
to learn that he had a haircut shortly before he
died and he had lines painted on his skin which
we think were tattoos! But what really excited
scientists was that Ötzi was carrying a lot of
objects with him when he died, and they were
perfectly preserved too, so they can tell us how
people in the Copper Age made tools and also
suggest how they used them. Perhaps Ötzi’s most
amazing piece of equipment is his bow and
arrows. He took good care of this hunting
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equipment. He used fat on the bow to protect the
string from the dry cold, and he kept his arrows in
a container made from deerskin. Ötzi also had
with him a tool-making kit and equipment for
making fire, which suggests he moved around a
lot. His fire-making tools include a knife that would
have been useful for cutting through trees at high
altitudes. He also used it to gather certain plants,
which we believe he used to clean his body. He
wore tight leather trousers, a fur cap and an
animal skin jacket. This was warm clothing that
was also easy to repair. Even so, scientists in the
1990s decided that Ötzi died through exposure to
the cold. But when the body was examined again
in the early 21st century, when scanning and X-
ray technology was of course much better, the
mystery of his death was solved. The images
revealed an arrow head in Ötzi’s shoulder and a
hole in his skin near it. So Ötzi was in fact killed
by someone. We can only guess why. Was he a
criminal trying to get away from somebody he had
wronged? Was there some kind of war taking
place in the area? We just can’t say for sure. But
Ötzi does teach us one very important lesson – in
science it always makes sense to reconsider your
conclusions when better research techniques
become available!
Exit Test
There are many great books which seem
impossible to film. This could be because what the
characters think is more important than what they
say or do for much of the book, so there's little
interesting dialogue or action for a film director to
use. Some books seem “unfilmable” for the
opposite reason – the author describes scenarios
that are so fantastical that it's difficult to recreate
them in the real world. Perhaps because this is all
true of the prize-winning and bestselling book Life
of Pi, it has not been an easy novel to bring to the
screen. Several directors and screenwriters came
and went during the project, and it took nearly 10
years to complete the movie. The plot of Life of Pi
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is simple enough. The teenage son of a
zookeeper survives the sinking of a ship in the
Pacific Ocean, and finds himself on a lifeboat with
no companions other than several animals –
including a zebra and a tiger. With a narrative that
involves only one human character for the most
part plus a dangerous beast, it's not hard to see
why this was a challenging film to make. The
problem of the tiger has been solved via CGI, or
computer-generated imagery technology. Not all
the film was designed on a machine, however.
The movie blends live action with CGI perhaps
more ambitiously than any film ever has. The
director who accepted the challenge in the end is
Ang Lee, the man who made the successful sci-fi
film Hulk as well as the Oscar-winning martial arts
film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He made
the job even more difficult for himself by filming
Life of Pi in 3D. Ang Lee himself has joked:
“Water, kids, animals and 3D. Everything you
should avoid in the movie business. I thought it
was unmakeable, even though it's very inspiring.”
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The result of his bravery is a special kind of
adventure film which seems to take place
somewhere between the real world and a fantasy
one. With no fight scenes or even many changes
of location, it's the wonders of nature, such as a
storm at sea, a whale and a beautiful sunset that
provide the spectacular moments of the film. It's a
visually stunning film, with bright colours that
seem almost magical. The film succeeded in one
way even before it was released. The organisers
of the New York Film Festival chose it to be the
film to open the 50th festival in 2012 – making it
the first 3D film to be given that honour. Thanks to
Life of Pi, we may see 3D being used for a lot
more than superhero movies in future.
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