Mock 1 — Listening

Part One. You will hear three different extracts. For questions 1 to 6, choose the answer (A, B or C) which fits best according to what you hear. There are two questions for each extract.

Extract One. You will hear two architects, partners in the same practice, discussing a letter from a planning officer. Now look at questions 1 and 2.

CELIA: Have you seen the letter from the planning officer?

JONAS: I’ve seen the word. “Ambitious.” Twice.

CELIA: Twice. Once about the height and once about the timetable.

JONAS: I’d have taken once. Once is a compliment with a note attached. Twice is a note with a compliment attached.

CELIA: You’re reading too much into it. He’s a planning officer, not a novelist. Ambitious means big.

JONAS: In an email from a friend, ambitious means big. In a letter from a planning officer, on headed paper, copied to the committee, ambitious means “I am going to refuse this and I would like it on record that I was polite first.”

CELIA: So what do we do — ring him and ask what he meant?

JONAS: And make him say it? No. The whole point of the word is that he doesn’t have to say it. If we make him say it, we’ve made an enemy of the one person who could have helped us quietly.

CELIA: Then we take a floor off before he asks.

JONAS: We take a floor off before he asks, and we thank him for his encouraging letter. And then he owes us one, because we’ve heard him, and nobody had to say anything.

CELIA: I still think you’re reading too much into it.

JONAS: I’ve been reading planning letters for twenty years, Celia. “Ambitious” has never once meant big.

[Extract One is repeated.]

Extract Two. You will hear two people who write questions for a pub-quiz league discussing a complaint. Now look at questions 3 and 4.

TARA: We’ve had a complaint about question fourteen.

MAX: Which was fourteen?

TARA: “Which English city has a cathedral with three spires?” Answer: Lichfield.

MAX: And it is Lichfield.

TARA: It is Lichfield. It is also, according to the team at table six, Truro, which has three spires — two at the west end and one over the crossing — and they’ve sent a photograph.

MAX: … Truro’s in Cornwall. Cornwall’s in England.

TARA: Cornwall is, for the purposes of the quiz, in England, yes. So we’ve written a question with two right answers and marked one of them wrong.

MAX: The question was fine. The question was “which city” — they should have given the famous one.

TARA: No. That’s what I want to say and it’s exactly what we can’t say. A question that has a right answer and a more famous right answer is not a question; it’s a test of whether you think like us. And we can’t mark people down for not thinking like us.

MAX: So we give them the point.

TARA: We give them the point, and we don’t say “on this occasion”. We say the question was badly written, because it was. I wrote it.

MAX: And next time we say “the only English cathedral with three spires”?

TARA: Next time we check whether it is the only one before we say so. That’s the bit we skipped. The wording was the symptom.

[Extract Two is repeated.]

Extract Three. You will hear a poet and a radio producer in a recording studio. Now look at questions 5 and 6.

BILL: Can we do the second stanza again? Slower.

ADAORA: I did it slower.

BILL: You did it louder. That’s not the same thing. On the page there’s a gap after “lantern” — a whole line of nothing — and you went straight through it.

ADAORA: Because on the radio a whole line of nothing is a fault. Somebody in a kitchen thinks the set has broken.

BILL: Somebody in a kitchen thinks the set has broken after about four seconds. You’ve got three. That’s the whole art of this medium — three seconds is enormous, and nobody uses it.

ADAORA: I’m not an actor, Bill. I wrote it. I know where the gaps are.

BILL: That’s the problem, if you don’t mind my saying so. You know where the gaps are, so you don’t need them, so you don’t give them to anyone else. The listener has never seen the page. The pause is the only line break they get.

ADAORA: … So I’m reading it for somebody who can’t see it.

BILL: You’re reading it for somebody who can’t see it, who’s peeling potatoes, and who will not go back. Every line you give them is the only time they get it.

ADAORA: Fine. Second stanza. Three seconds after “lantern”. If it sounds like the set has broken, we’ll know who to blame.

BILL: We will. And it won’t.

[Extract Three is repeated. That is the end of Part One.]

Part Two. You will hear a man called Malcolm Reed giving a talk about his work writing the verses inside greeting cards. For questions 7 to 15, complete the sentences with a word or short phrase. You now have forty-five seconds to look at Part Two.

MALCOLM: Thank you. For twenty-two years I have written the verses inside greeting cards, and I want to start with the thing everyone says to me at parties, which is: I thought a computer did that. A computer does not do that. Four people do that, in an office above a print works in Leicester, and I have been one of the four since 1998. We are not poets. We are told this fairly often, usually by poets, and we agree.

MALCOLM: People assume the birthday verses are the bread and butter, and by volume they are. But the ones that take the time — the ones that go through nine drafts and a meeting — are the sympathy cards. A birthday verse can be pleasant and wrong and nobody minds. A sympathy verse has one reader, on the worst day of their year, and it has to say something without saying anything. The rule I was given in my first week, and it has never let me down, is that a sympathy verse must contain nothing that could be mistaken for advice. Not “time heals”. Not “be strong”. The reader has had advice. What they have not had is company.

MALCOLM: The office has a private vocabulary, as every trade does. A verse that has sold steadily for ten years and shows no sign of stopping is a warhorse, and we have about thirty of them; the oldest is from 1971 and I would not change a comma. A verse that is pulled after one season is a mayfly. And there is a list of forbidden words for each occasion, which is longer than you would think. The first one I learned was old. You may not use the word old in a birthday verse, ever, in any construction, however affectionate, because somebody will receive it on the morning of their fortieth and read it as a verdict.

MALCOLM: Now, the thing people find hardest to understand — the thing I found hardest to understand — is the rhyme. Why does it rhyme? It rhymes because rhyme is what turns a message into a ritual. A message is something you could have texted. A ritual is something that is said the same way every time, and that is what a card is for: not to inform, but to be the thing that is done. Take the rhyme away and you have a note. Leave it in and you have a small ceremony that fits in an envelope.

MALCOLM: And the test of a good verse — the only test — is this. The person reading it should feel that they are looking into a mirror. Not at me, not at the sender: at themselves, saying the thing they would have said if they had found the words. If they notice the writer, the verse has failed. My best work has been read by several million people, none of whom knows my name, and that is exactly as it should be.

MALCOLM: The verse I am proudest of, since you ask, was for a card that did not exist until we made it: a card for someone whose pet has died. The company said there was no market. There was a market. It is now a warhorse, and I wrote it in an afternoon, after our own dog, and I have never been able to read it aloud.

MALCOLM: Which brings me to the advice, since I have been asked for some. Read every verse aloud to a stranger before you send it in — not a friend, a friend will be kind — and watch their face at the last line. If the face does nothing, the verse does nothing. Faces do not lie about this, and editors, occasionally, do.

[Now you will hear Part Two again.]

Part Three. You will hear an interview with Desmond Fairlie, who wrote a daily parliamentary sketch for twenty-six years, talking about irony in print. For questions 16 to 20, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which fits best according to what you hear. You now have one minute to look at Part Three.

LOUISE: Desmond Fairlie, for twenty-six years you wrote the parliamentary sketch — eight hundred words a day in which, as one MP put it, nothing you said was what you meant.

DESMOND: He was being generous. Quite a lot of it was what I meant. The trick was that nobody could prove which bits.

LOUISE: You must have had letters.

DESMOND: Sacks. And the interesting thing about the letters — I kept a file — is who they came from. Not from the people who missed the joke. The people who missed the joke wrote occasionally, and they were rather sweet: “I think you may have made an error, the minister did not in fact say that.” The furious ones were from people who had understood every word. They understood exactly what I was doing and they wanted it stopped. Being understood was the offence.

LOUISE: You’ve always refused to call it sarcasm.

DESMOND: I have, and not out of vanity. Sarcasm has a target with a face. It is a thing you do to a person, in the room, and it wants them to flinch. What I did was aimed at an argument, or a habit, or a whole afternoon — at the thing being said rather than the person saying it. The distinction matters because one of them is a weapon and the other is a lens. I’d be the first to admit the lens was sometimes held at an unkind angle.

LOUISE: The sketches were famously deadpan. No jokes, on the surface — just an account.

DESMOND: Just an account. And here’s the thing about deadpan that nobody tells you: it only works on a reader who already knows what you think. If you don’t know me, and I describe a minister’s speech in flat, admiring prose, you assume I admire it. The irony isn’t in the words. It’s in the gap between the words and what the reader already knows about the writer. Which means deadpan is useless in a first column and lethal in a thousandth. It took me about four years to earn the right to be flat.

LOUISE: Critics said — say — that irony is a way of never committing. That you could always say “I was joking.”

DESMOND: Yes, and I think it’s precisely backwards. When you state a thing, you commit to the sentence. When you’re ironic about it, you commit to the reader — you’re betting your whole meaning on them, with nothing in writing to fall back on. If they don’t get it, you have no defence at all. That’s not less commitment. That’s more, with worse odds. The politician who says “I was joking” isn’t being ironic. He’s being caught.

LOUISE: Last thing. There’s a rule in your old paper’s style guide, which you wrote, I think: no irony in a caption, a headline or an instruction.

DESMOND: I wrote it after the one time I broke it. A caption under a photograph, six words, perfectly clear if you could hear my voice. Nobody could hear my voice. It was read straight by several hundred thousand people, and one of them was the subject’s mother. The rule is right. Irony travels on the voice — the pace, the flatness, the eyebrow — and the page strips all of that out and leaves the bare words to fend for themselves. In a sketch the reader has eight hundred words to find their feet. In six words they have nothing, and you have no right to ask it of them.

LOUISE: Do you regret it?

DESMOND: The caption? Every day. The rule? Not for a second.

[Now you will hear Part Three again. That is the end of Part Three.]

Part Four. You will hear five short extracts in which people talk about a metaphor that is used in their work. Look at Task One. For questions 21 to 25, choose from the list A to H the metaphor each speaker is talking about. Now look at Task Two. For questions 26 to 30, choose from the list A to H what each speaker has done about it. While you listen you must complete both tasks. You now have forty-five seconds to look at Part Four.

SPEAKER ONE: “Lost her battle.” “Fought bravely.” I read them in the notices and I hear them at the bedside, and for a long time I said them too, because what else is there. The first person who taught me not to was a patient — a retired maths teacher — who said, quite calmly, that she had not lost anything; that a battle implies you could have won if you’d tried harder, and she had tried as hard as anybody, and she would like that on the record. I stopped that afternoon. What I didn’t do, and what I’ve decided I’ll never do, is correct the families. If a daughter needs her mother to have been a fighter, that is not my sentence to take away. So I’ve gone quiet on it. I don’t say it. I don’t say anything about it. It’s the only vocabulary I’ve ever given up without replacing it.

SPEAKER TWO: “Delivering the curriculum.” I’d said it a thousand times before I heard it. Delivery. As though the children were addresses and I was a van. Once you’ve heard it, you can’t stop hearing it: we deliver lessons, we deliver outcomes, the material is delivered, and none of it describes anything that has ever happened in a classroom, where the material mostly arrives late and in the wrong order and the children sign for nothing. I wrote a paper about it for the subject association journal — three pages, quite cross — and I read it out at the annual conference, and the room laughed in the right places and then went back to delivering. I don’t regret it. Somebody has to say it in public, on the record, once. But I notice I still can’t offer them a better word, and until I can, the van keeps its job.

SPEAKER THREE: The customer journey. We had it on the wall, in a diagram, with a little figure walking from left to right through the touchpoints. And the trouble with a journey is that it goes one way and it ends. So when a customer rang back, that was a fault in the map — they’d left the journey and got back on. Whereas what actually happens is that people ring, and go away, and ring again, and hold a grudge, and forgive you, for years. I took the diagram down. What we say now is the conversation, which has no arrow on it and no end. It’s a small change and I can measure it: the word “still” has disappeared from our call notes — “customer still unhappy” — because in a conversation nobody is still anything; they’re just talking to you again. I’m slightly embarrassed by how proud I am of one noun.

SPEAKER FOUR: Rain “threatens”. Wind “batters”. A front “attacks” from the west. I have been reading these words for nineteen years and I know precisely why they’re there: the research says viewers stay for a forecast that sounds like a war and switch over from one that sounds like a description. I raised it once, mildly, and was told, mildly, that the weather was not the product — the audience was, and the audience liked to feel besieged. So I say them. I say them well. And I’ve made a private rule that covers the rest of my life: outside the studio, the weather does nothing on purpose. It rains. It’s windy. My children think I’m strange.

SPEAKER FIVE: A kitchen is an army. The brigade, the chef de partie, the pass, the orders called and answered — “yes, chef” — all of it borrowed from the French military a hundred-odd years ago and never given back. I trained in it, I shouted in it, and about five years ago I decided I’d had enough and I’d run a kitchen like a workshop instead. We’d discuss. We’d suggest. Nobody would say “yes, chef”. It lasted eleven days. Not because the cooks wanted to be shouted at — they didn’t — but because at ten past eight on a Saturday with sixty covers on the board, a discussion is a way of losing a table. The metaphor isn’t decoration on the job. It is the job, or at least it’s the only version of the job anyone has worked out how to do at speed. So the brigade came back, and I try to be a kind general, which is not a phrase the army would recognise either.

[Now you will hear Part Four again. That is the end of Part Four.]