Four parts, thirty questions, in the shape and the order of the real paper. Each part is heard twice. Do a part, check it, and if it did not go well open the support — the transcript opens with it — do the part again, then clear it and do it once more on your own.
You will hear three different extracts. For each question, choose the answer (A, B or C) which fits best according to what you hear. There are two questions for each extract. You hear each extract twice.
Extract One — you will hear two theatre professionals, a director and a designer, discussing a revival of a play written in 1959. Questions 1 and 2.
Extract Two — you will hear two people who work at a museum discussing the wording of a new audio guide. Questions 3 and 4.
Extract Three — you will hear a novelist and her editor discussing the opening pages of a new book. Questions 5 and 6.
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 theatre professionals, a director and a designer, discussing a revival of a play written in 1959. Now look at questions 1 and 2.
HELENA: The trouble isn’t that the language has dated. Dated is easy — you lean into it. The trouble is that half the lines were written to be understood by people who would never say what they meant, and the modern audience hears them as small talk.
RAVI: Because nothing is stated.
HELENA: Because nothing is stated. There’s a scene in act two where a woman is told her marriage is over in about eleven words, none of which is about a marriage. In 1959 that landed like a slap. Last week in the rehearsal room three of my own cast asked me what had just happened.
RAVI: You could cut it.
HELENA: I could cut it, and then I’d be directing a play about a woman who is told things. That isn’t the play.
RAVI: So you slow it down.
HELENA: I’m slowing everything around it down. If the line can’t carry the weight, the silence after it has to. Which is a terrible sentence to say out loud, and it is nevertheless what I am doing.
RAVI: It isn’t nostalgia, though, is it. I keep hearing people say audiences then were more sophisticated.
HELENA: They weren’t more sophisticated. They were more practised. It’s a different thing entirely — they’d had the same conversation at home that morning. We haven’t. We’ve had a different one, and we are extremely good at ours.
[Extract One is repeated.]
Extract Two. You will hear two people who work at a museum discussing the wording of a new audio guide. Now look at questions 3 and 4.
JUNE: The complaints are all about one room, and they are not about the room.
MARTIN: Go on.
JUNE: The Egyptian gallery script says the objects were “acquired in 1802”. Nobody objects to the date. What they object to is “acquired”, and they’re right to, because the word is doing a job. It’s the only verb in the whole guide that doesn’t tell you who did what.
MARTIN: We were advised to use it.
JUNE: We were advised to use it precisely because it doesn’t tell you who did what. That was the point of the advice. I’m not saying the advice was dishonest. I’m saying it has stopped working. Ten years ago “acquired” passed. Now half the visitors under thirty hear it as a confession.
MARTIN: And the older ones?
JUNE: The older ones don’t notice — which is the awkward part, because if we change it, they will. The moment you replace a neutral word you have announced that the neutral word wasn’t neutral.
MARTIN: So we’re stuck either way.
JUNE: We’re not stuck. We just have to stop pretending there’s a wording that offends nobody, and choose the one we can defend in twenty years. That’s a different question from the one the committee has been asking, which is which wording generates fewest emails.
[Extract Two is repeated.]
Extract Three. You will hear a novelist and her editor discussing the opening pages of a new book. Now look at questions 5 and 6.
KEN: I want to talk about page one, and I want to say first that I don’t think it’s wrong.
AYESHA: That is the sentence editors say immediately before telling you it’s wrong.
KEN: It’s the sentence I say before I tell you it’s expensive. Your first paragraph asks the reader to do a lot of work for no reward yet. Nobody is named. Nothing is happening. It is beautiful, and it costs you four pages of goodwill you haven’t earned.
AYESHA: The withholding is the book.
KEN: I know it is. I’m not asking you to explain anything. I am asking whether the reader gets one signal that you know what you are doing. A joke would do it. A concrete noun would do it.
AYESHA: A concrete noun.
KEN: Something you could photograph. At the moment the first photographable object arrives on page five, and it is a chair.
AYESHA: … All right. That’s fair, and I’d like it on record that I agreed with you slowly.
KEN: Noted.
AYESHA: What I won’t do is move the revelation. If it comes earlier, the whole second half is just waiting.
KEN: I have never once asked you to move the revelation. I have asked you twice for a chair.
[Extract Three is repeated. That is the end of Part One.]
How to read this part. Part 1 gives you two questions on about ninety seconds of speech, so there is no time to listen for everything. Read both questions before the extract starts and hold the two things you are hunting. The first hearing is for the answer; the second is only for checking the one you were unsure of.
Do it in this order.
The wrong options in this part are built from words that are genuinely in the recording: sophisticated, the date, fewest emails. Every one of them is spoken aloud and every one is either dismissed by the speaker or attributed to somebody else. Hearing a word is not evidence; hearing who owns it is.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
You will hear a woman called Frances Hale giving a talk about her work as an obituaries editor on a national newspaper. For each question, complete the sentence with a word or short phrase. Write the words you actually hear — this part does not want a paraphrase.
You will hear the talk twice. The sentences below follow the order of what she says. Most answers are one or two words; none is longer than three.
Part Two. You will hear a woman called Frances Hale giving a talk about her work as an obituaries editor on a national newspaper. 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.
FRANCES: Thank you. I ran the obituaries desk of a national newspaper for nineteen years, and I want to begin by clearing away the two things everybody believes about the job.
FRANCES: The first is that it is morbid. It is not. It is the only page in the paper that is entirely about what people did, rather than about what has just gone wrong, and after a week on the news desk you would take it gratefully.
FRANCES: The second is that we write them in advance. We do — about eleven hundred of ours are written and waiting at any one time — but the belief people have is that this is a matter of efficiency, of getting ahead. It isn’t. It is a matter of accuracy. An obituary written under deadline is a summary of the last thing somebody did. An obituary written eight years earlier, by somebody with time, is a summary of a life. The word we use internally for the stored ones is “the fridge”, which I have never liked, and which I never managed to change.
FRANCES: Now, the craft. One rule governs everything, and it is this: an obituary is not a tribute. A tribute is written for the family; an obituary is written for the reader, and the reader has usually never met the subject. That distinction sounds small and it decides every sentence. The moment you write for the family you begin to inflate, and inflation is the one fault a reader detects instantly and never forgives.
FRANCES: Which brings me to the euphemisms, because people always ask. Yes, the trade has a private vocabulary. “He did not suffer fools gladly” means he was rude. “He was a convivial companion” means he drank. “He never married” once meant something it no longer needs to mean, and we retired it in 1998, which I count among the better decisions I was involved in. What I would say in defence of the code is that it was never for the writers’ amusement. It was a way of telling the truth in a form the widow could have on the kitchen table.
FRANCES: The hardest part of the job was none of that. It was the telephone. Every obituary begins with ringing people who have just been bereaved and asking them for facts, and there is no version of that call that is comfortable. My own rule, arrived at slowly, was to ask first for a story and not for a date — dates make people feel they are being processed. And I would always say at the start how long the call would take, and then finish early.
FRANCES: If I have one piece of advice for anybody thinking about this work, it is this. Read the ones you disagree with. A desk that reads only its own obituaries develops a house voice inside about two years, and a house voice is the beginning of not noticing anybody.
[Now you will hear Part Two again.]
How to read this part. Sentence completion is a dictation with a frame. The sentence on the page is a paraphrase; the answer is not. Write down the words you hear, in the form the sentence needs, and change nothing else. One to three words, and it must be grammatical in the printed sentence.
Do it in this order.
The traps here are all words that really are in the recording — accuracy, the family, facts, rude — sitting one or two sentences away from the one you want. The order of the sentences is the order of the talk, so if you find yourself hunting backwards, you have missed a gap and should move forward, not back.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
You will hear an interview with the actress Vivian Alder, who is talking about silence on stage. For each question, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which fits best according to what you hear. The questions follow the order of the interview.
Vivian Alder is one of the two voices of Between the Lines. Here she is being interviewed for a radio arts programme about the thing she is most often asked about: a pause.
Part Three. You will hear an interview with the actress Vivian Alder, who is talking about silence on stage. 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.
NADIM: Vivian Alder, you have spent sixty years on the British stage, and the thing you are most often asked about is not a speech but a pause.
VIVIAN: The pause in the Pinter, yes. Forty seconds, allegedly. It was never forty seconds. It was eleven, and it felt like forty to the people counting, which is the only measurement that matters.
NADIM: Why do you think it is remembered?
VIVIAN: Because it was doing something the audience could feel and could not name. That is the whole of it. If they had been able to name it they would have forgotten it by the interval.
NADIM: Is a pause an effect, then? A technique?
VIVIAN: It becomes one, in bad hands. What it is, properly, is a transfer of work. Everything I say, I do for you. Everything I don’t say, you do for me. And the moment the audience is doing the work, they own the scene — you cannot take it back off them, and you should not want to.
NADIM: You have said elsewhere that young actors hold pauses too long.
VIVIAN: I’ve said young actors hold them for the wrong reason, which is a different complaint. They hold them because somebody told them a pause is powerful. It is not powerful. It is a hole, and it is only powerful if the audience wants to fill it. If they don’t, you are simply standing there being interesting at people, and there is nothing an English audience punishes faster.
NADIM: How does one know which is happening?
VIVIAN: You listen to the house. A house that is filling the pause is silent in a particular way — a sort of forward silence, everybody leaning very slightly. A house that has been left behind coughs. That is not a joke; the cough is data. Sixty years, and I have never known it to be wrong.
NADIM: Does any of this work outside the theatre? People do talk about a British national habit of the pause.
VIVIAN: They do, and I am suspicious of it. Not because it isn’t real — it is, obviously — but because the theatre version is rehearsed to the half-second and the national version is mostly just embarrassment. I have sat in enough English drawing rooms to know that a great deal of what gets called eloquent restraint is two people hoping the other one will speak first. Let us not gild that.
NADIM: That is rather severe.
VIVIAN: It is affectionate. I am one of them. I simply decline to write a thesis about it.
NADIM: One instruction to an actor about silence?
VIVIAN: Don’t play the silence. Play the thing you have decided not to say. And if you have not decided what it is, precisely, in words, the audience will see an actor waiting — and they will be right, because that is what you are.
[Now you will hear Part Three again. That is the end of Part Three.]
How to read this part. Part 3 is the part where the words of the right answer are almost never the words of the recording. Every question is about a position: what she claims, what she refuses, what she concedes. So listen for the shape of the move, not for matching vocabulary.
Do it in this order.
The characteristic trap here is the interviewer’s option: a statement put to the speaker, refused by her, and then offered to you as an answer. Too long, sophisticated, it isn’t real — all spoken, none of them hers. Attribute every option to a mouth before you choose it.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
You will hear five short extracts in which people talk about a moment that changed the way they use language. Task One (21–25): choose from the list A–H what first made each speaker change. Task Two (26–30): choose from the list A–H what each speaker says they have gained. While you listen you must complete both tasks. There are three extra options in each list. You hear the extracts twice.
Speaker One is a hospital doctor · Speaker Two is a subtitler · Speaker Three is a union negotiator · Speaker Four is a comedian who now trains people in offices · Speaker Five is a head teacher.
In the real paper both lists are on the page at once and the extracts run without a break. Do the same here: on the first hearing answer whichever task you can, and use the second hearing for the other.
Part Four. You will hear five short extracts in which people talk about a moment that changed the way they use language. Look at Task One. For questions 21 to 25, choose from the list A to H what first made each speaker change. Now look at Task Two. For questions 26 to 30, choose from the list A to H what each speaker says they have gained. While you listen you must complete both tasks. You now have forty-five seconds to look at Part Four.
SPEAKER ONE: I wrote what I thought was a careful letter to a family. Every fact in it was correct and I had chosen every word. The daughter rang me two days later and read one sentence back to me, and in her mouth it meant something I had not intended and could not un-mean. Nothing was wrong with the letter. Everything was wrong with what I had assumed she would supply. Since then I have got much slower, and the change that surprised me is that I now say less in the room, not more. I used to fill the gap after bad news within about a second and a half. I don’t any more. I can sit in it now, and it turns out that is the useful part.
SPEAKER TWO: Two years in Lisbon did it. I went out with what I thought was decent Portuguese and I spent the first six months being told, very kindly, that I was extremely direct. I wasn’t being direct. I was being unable to be anything else. And when I came back to subtitling I found I could no longer write the tidy English version of a vague line — I had started to hear the vagueness as content. There is a kind of sentence that does not commit to anything, and I used to sharpen those. Now I leave them blunt. My editors say it reads as lazy. Some of it probably is. But I’ve stopped assuming that a person who won’t say the thing has failed to say it.
SPEAKER THREE: I heard it through a door, which is the worst way to hear anything. Someone from the other side of the table said, “He’s good, but he needs to win the sentence.” Needs to win the sentence. I have thought about that for eleven years. I was treating every exchange as a small contest, and winning them, and losing the room. So I changed one thing only: I stopped making the other person wrong out loud. Same positions, same red lines, entirely different verbs. Concede the framing, keep the money — that is the whole of it. I close more agreements now and I enjoy the meetings a great deal less, which I think is probably the correct trade.
SPEAKER FOUR: A club sent me the audio of a set I’d been very pleased with. Twenty-two minutes, and I listened to all of it, and what I heard was somebody doing an impression of a comedian. Not badly — that was the problem. It was a competent impression. Every rhythm was borrowed and I could name whose. I stopped gigging for a year. What I do now is teach people in offices how to speak in front of other people, and I am good at it, and I have become almost unbearable about my old trade. I sit in comedy clubs and hear the borrowed rhythms and I can’t unhear them. It has cost me most of my friends in the business.
SPEAKER FIVE: My first term as a head, a woman four years from retirement took me aside and said: “You have been talking to them as though they will remember what you meant. They will only remember what you said.” That was the entire conversation. She never mentioned it again. It took me a year to understand it as a practical instruction rather than a rebuke. Now I write out anything that matters, word for word, including the parts I intend to sound spontaneous, and I read it back asking what a tired person at the end of a long day would take from each sentence. The preparation has roughly tripled. The number of misunderstandings has not fallen by two thirds, but it has fallen.
[Now you will hear Part Four again. That is the end of Part Four.]
How to read this part. Two tasks, one hearing each way. Do not try to do both tasks at once on the first play. Answer Task One on the first hearing — the trigger is nearly always in the speaker’s first two sentences — and Task Two on the second, because the gain is nearly always in the last two.
Do it in this order.
The extra options in each list are not random: they are built from something each speaker genuinely mentions but does not claim. Speaker Four does have a new source of income; Speaker Three does close more deals; Speaker Two’s editors do give her a reputation. All true, none of them the answer. Ask every time: is this what the speaker says they gained, or just something that happens to be in the extract?
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
The marks below are your best unaided attempt on each part — the one you did after the support, not the one you did with it open.
At C2, a part you lost is almost never a part you failed to hear. Go back to the transcript and mark the line that carried each answer: if the words in the line and the words in the question have nothing in common, the problem is paraphrase, and paraphrase is trainable.