Four parts, thirty questions, under exam conditions: the transcripts are hidden, nothing is checked, and the clock starts on your first answer. Play each part twice — as the real paper does — answer, and hand in. Every part is marked at once, and only then do the transcripts and the support open for the debrief.
This is the exam-conditions mock: nothing is checked until you hand in. The clock starts when you answer your first question. After you hand in, every part is marked at once and the support opens for the debrief.
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 speechwriters discussing a draft. Questions 1 and 2.
Extract Two — you will hear two people who work for a railway discussing the wording of a platform announcement. Questions 3 and 4.
Extract Three — you will hear two comedy writers discussing an actor’s delivery of a line. 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 speechwriters discussing a draft. Now look at questions 1 and 2.
GRACE: I’ve read the draft. Page four. “We did not come this far to come only this far.”
OSCAR: You don’t like it.
GRACE: I think it’s the only line in the speech anyone will remember, and I think that’s the problem with it.
OSCAR: That’s the point of it. It’s the clip. It’s the line under the photograph.
GRACE: It’s a line that was built to be the clip, and you can hear the scaffolding. It has that shape — the repeat, the turn — that the room recognises as “here is where you applaud”. They’ll applaud. And half of them will feel handled.
OSCAR: Everybody feels handled. That’s what a speech is.
GRACE: No — a good speech is one where they feel handled and don’t mind. The line I’d keep is the one on page two, the one about the bus. It’s flat, it’s specific, nobody’s going to embroider it on a cushion — and it’s the only sentence in here that sounds like her rather than like us.
OSCAR: The bus line won’t get quoted.
GRACE: It’ll get believed. I’ve stopped thinking those are the same job. Keep your line if you want — she’ll say it, it’ll work — but put the bus first, so the room has met her before she performs.
OSCAR: … Bus first, then the clip.
GRACE: Bus first. Then let them applaud with a clear conscience.
[Extract One is repeated.]
Extract Two. You will hear two people who work for a railway discussing the wording of a platform announcement. Now look at questions 3 and 4.
NKEM: The new announcement. “Please stand behind the yellow line as this train is not stopping here.”
PAUL: What’s wrong with it? It’s clear.
NKEM: It’s clear on paper. Play it on a platform in the wind and the only words that survive are the stressed ones — “stand”, “line”, “train”, “stopping”. Which is the opposite of the message. People hear “train stopping” and step forward.
PAUL: Nobody listens to the words anyway. They listen to the tune.
NKEM: Exactly — so give the tune the meaning. Put the important word where the voice lands. “This train will not stop. Please stand back.” The “not” is on the beat now and it’s got a full stop after it; nothing else can bury it.
PAUL: It’s abrupt.
NKEM: It’s an announcement, not a letter. The old one is polite and it’s killing the information. Nine words, two sentences, the negative on the stress. Then, if you want, “Thank you.” Politeness goes at the end, after the fact has landed.
PAUL: The operators will say we’ve made it rude.
NKEM: The operators can stand on platform three in February and listen to their own version. I did. I stepped forward.
[Extract Two is repeated.]
Extract Three. You will hear two comedy writers discussing an actor’s delivery of a line. Now look at questions 5 and 6.
LEN: She won’t do the line flat.
MIRA: Which line?
LEN: “I’m sure it’ll be lovely.” She’s doing it with a face. The eyebrow. The little pause. She’s telling the audience it’s ironic.
MIRA: And it is ironic.
LEN: Of course it’s ironic. The whole scene is ironic. But the moment she signals it, the audience stops doing the work — they don’t get to notice it, they get told. And the character wouldn’t signal it. The character means the audience to wonder, for a second, whether she means it.
MIRA: Have you told her that?
LEN: I’ve told her three times. She says flat reads as bad acting. She says the audience will think she’s forgotten to act.
MIRA: She’s not wrong, you know. On the first night, in a house that doesn’t know her, flat does read as nothing.
LEN: Then we lose the joke on the first night and keep it for the run. That’s the trade. The eyebrow gets a laugh tonight, and the flat line gets the laugh every night from the second week, because by then they’ll trust that she knows what she’s doing.
MIRA: You’ll have to say that to her, not to me.
LEN: I know. I’m rehearsing on you. I want to say it flat.
[Extract Three is repeated. That is the end of Part One.]
How to read this part. If this part went badly, here is what usually happened: you heard a word that is in the option — repeat, polite, pause — and took it as the answer. In all three extracts the wrong options are built from words that are genuinely spoken, and each of those words is either the other speaker’s or is said and then withdrawn. Open the transcript, find the line for each miss, and check whose mouth it came from.
Do it in this order.
Every extract here contains one idea that is put forward by one speaker and replaced by the other — Oscar’s “that’s what a speech is”, Paul’s “it’s abrupt”, the actor’s “flat reads as bad acting”. The replaced idea is in the options every time. 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 Diana Ferris giving a talk about her work writing the catalogues of a London auction house. For each question, complete the sentence with a word or short phrase. Write the words you actually hear.
You will hear the talk twice. The sentences below follow the order of what she says. Answers are one or two words.
Part Two. You will hear a woman called Diana Ferris giving a talk about her work writing the catalogues of a London auction house. 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.
DIANA: Good evening. I spent thirty years writing and editing the catalogues of a London auction house, and I want to talk about a language most people never notice, because it is designed not to be noticed. The catalogue is not there to sell. Everyone assumes it is. Its job is to be accurate rather than persuasive, and the reason is simple: every word in it can be quoted back at us in court, and a good many have been.
DIANA: Which is why the trade developed its ladder of phrases. Take a picture that looks like the work of a known painter. If we are sure, we print the name and nothing else. If we believe it is his but cannot be certain, we print “attributed to”, and those two words take about a third off the price. If we think it was painted by someone unknown who worked around him, in his lifetime and his style, the phrase is “circle of”. If it is a copy of a known picture, made later by someone else, the word is “after”. Four rungs, and the gap between each of them is a great deal of money. A dealer reads the rungs before the picture.
DIANA: Now, the forbidden words, because every trade has them. The one I banned from my own department, in my first year as head, was “important”. An important portrait, an important pair of vases. It had been used so often, for so long, about so many things, that it had stopped meaning anything at all, and a word that means nothing takes up room a fact could have had. I would rather say who owned it.
DIANA: Which brings me to the word that does the real work, and it is not a word about the object. It is “provenance”. Where has this thing been? Whose house, whose sale, whose inventory, for how long, with what gaps? A picture with a perfect provenance and a doubtful attribution will outsell a picture with a perfect attribution and no history, every time, because a history is something you can check and a brushstroke is something you can argue about.
DIANA: And when a lot fails — when it does not reach its reserve and the hammer does not fall — we do not say it failed. We say it was “bought in”, which sounds like a transaction and is in fact the absence of one. I have never liked the phrase, and I have used it a thousand times, because the alternative is telling a client in a full room that nobody wanted their grandmother’s clock.
DIANA: There is, I should say, one word in the saleroom that cannot be softened, and that is “sold”. The hammer falls, the word is said, and there is no attributed-to, no circle-of, no bought-in about it. For a trade that lives on qualification, it is a strange relief to have one sentence a day that is exactly what it says.
DIANA: My advice to anyone starting out is the advice I was given, and it is this. Write every entry as if it will be read aloud by the buyer’s lawyer. Not the buyer — the buyer is in love. The lawyer is not, and the lawyer will read the word “attributed” in a very different voice from the one you wrote it in.
[Now you will hear Part Two again.]
How to read this part. If this part went badly, it was probably one of two things, and the transcript will tell you which. Either you wrote the paraphrase — history for provenance, unsold for bought in, selling for persuasive — which is the commonest C2 listening error and is fixed by trusting the words you hear over the words you would use; or you lost your place in the ladder of four phrases in paragraph two, which is fixed by reading the four sentences in the pause and knowing they will come fast.
Do it in this order.
Three of the nine answers here were words she rejects or contrasts a moment later — sell against persuasive, failed against bought in, buyer against lawyer. When a speaker says “not X — Y”, the exam will usually want Y, and it will put X in the sentence before to see whether you were still listening.
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 lexicographer Marcus Bell, who is talking about the language of British school reports. For each question, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which fits best according to what you hear.
Marcus Bell is one of the two voices of Between the Lines. Here he is being interviewed for a radio programme about a study he has just completed: three years spent reading other people’s school reports.
Part Three. You will hear an interview with the lexicographer Marcus Bell, who is talking about the language of British school reports. 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.
HUGH: Marcus Bell, you’ve spent three years reading other people’s school reports.
MARCUS: Eleven thousand of them, from 1952 to last summer. Donated, anonymised, and — this is the part that surprised me — very largely unchanged in their vocabulary. A teacher in 1955 and a teacher in 2019 reach for the same forty adjectives.
HUGH: And the adjectives are not what they seem.
MARCUS: The adjectives are exactly what they seem to anybody who was educated here, and completely opaque to anybody who wasn’t. “Lively” means disruptive. “Tries hard” means fails. “A pleasure to teach” means I have nothing to say about him. Parents raised in the system decode them without noticing they’re decoding; parents from elsewhere read them as praise and turn up at parents’ evening baffled by the grades.
HUGH: Is that unkind? The code, I mean.
MARCUS: I went in thinking it was cowardice and came out thinking it was something more interesting. A report is read by three people — the child, the parent and the next school — and the code lets the teacher say three different things in one sentence. The child reads “lively” and is not crushed. The parent, if they know the code, gets the warning. The next school gets the truth in a form that can’t be quoted as an insult. That’s not evasion. It’s a kind of engineering.
HUGH: You found a word that changed, though. One that stopped working.
MARCUS: “Satisfactory”. In 1960 “satisfactory” meant what it says — the work satisfies, no complaints. By 1990 every parent knew that “satisfactory” was the lowest word a teacher could use without triggering a meeting, and so it had become an insult, and by 2010 it had gone. Not banned — abandoned. A euphemism can only carry a meaning for about a generation before the meaning catches up with it and the word has to be retired.
HUGH: Does the code do harm?
MARCUS: Yes, in one specific case, and I’d want to be precise about it. It does harm to the child whose parents don’t know the code. That child gets ten years of “lively” and “tries hard” read as compliments, and is never told, by anyone, in words they can hear, what the problem is. The code is fair to insiders and it is quietly, structurally unfair to everyone else. I’d keep it — I think it’s a remarkable instrument — but I’d print the key.
HUGH: Print the key?
MARCUS: A glossary. On the back of the report. “Lively: talks too much.” Every parent gets the same information. The teachers I’ve said this to are horrified, and I understand why: the moment you print the key, the code stops being a code and becomes a set of insults with a translation. But that’s a problem for the teachers. The alternative is a problem for the children, and I know which I’d rather have.
HUGH: Last question. Your favourite?
MARCUS: “Has a great deal to offer.” I’ve never once seen it on the report of a child who was offering any of it.
[Now you will hear Part Three again. That is the end of Part Three.]
How to read this part. If this part went badly, the usual cause at C2 is that you answered with the first half of a two-part move. Marcus says “I went in thinking… and came out thinking…”; he says “parents raised here… parents from elsewhere…”; he says “not banned — abandoned”. Every one of those has a wrong option built from its first half. Open the transcript, find the line for each miss, and see whether the option you chose was the half he set up in order to knock down.
Do it in this order.
Two of the options here are inferences that are probably true — parents might complain if the key were printed; the code could be called cowardice — and neither is what he says. The exam rewards what the speaker states, not what a sensible person could conclude. When an option sounds reasonable but you cannot hear him saying it, it is a distractor.
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 sentence they live by. Task One (21–25): choose from the list A–H where each speaker’s sentence came from. Task Two (26–30): choose from the list A–H what each speaker says the sentence does for them now. 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 surgeon · Speaker Two is the head gardener of a Cambridge college · Speaker Three is a local councillor · Speaker Four is a bookseller · Speaker Five is a midwife.
In the real paper both lists are on the page at once and the extracts run without a break.
Part Four. You will hear five short extracts in which people talk about a sentence they live by. Look at Task One. For questions 21 to 25, choose from the list A to H where each speaker’s sentence came from. Now look at Task Two. For questions 26 to 30, choose from the list A to H what each speaker says the sentence does for them now. While you listen you must complete both tasks. You now have forty-five seconds to look at Part Four.
SPEAKER ONE: “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” My first consultant said it to me once, across a table, when I was twenty-six and hurrying a suture because the list was running late, and he never said it again, because he didn’t need to. It was not his — I’ve since found it in books about soldiers, about pilots, about almost anyone who works with their hands under pressure — but I got it from him, and I hear it in his voice. What it does, thirty years on, is stop the first thing I want to do, which is always to go faster. Every emergency wants speed and almost none of them needs it. So I say it, under my breath, and my registrars have learned that when I go quiet it is not because something is wrong.
SPEAKER TWO: It’s cut into the stone over the door from the college into the garden, and I walked under it for six years before I read it: “The garden is for those who walk in it.” Nobody knows who put it there. The archives have nothing. And it changed the job for me, because a head gardener’s temptation is to make a garden for gardeners — for the visiting expert who knows what a good border costs — and the stone says no. It’s for the student with a book on the grass, and the porter on his break, and the professor who has never once looked at a plant and comes out here to think. I plant for them now. It’s a smaller garden, in a way. It’s a much better one.
SPEAKER THREE: A man at a public meeting — an opponent, I should say; he was there to stop the scheme and he did — put his hand up after I’d spoken for ten minutes and said, “Councillor, you’ve answered the question you wish I’d asked.” The room laughed. I went home and played it back and he was completely right. I’d been asked whether the road would be closed and I’d explained why the road was necessary. I’ve had that sentence on a card in my wallet for nine years. Before I answer anything now, in a meeting or an interview or my own kitchen, I say the question back, out loud, in their words. It’s slower. People find it strange. But I’ve not been caught by it since, and he still comes to the meetings, and I still don’t know his name.
SPEAKER FOUR: “A shelf is finished when you stop touching it.” I was certain it was in a novel — I could see the page — and I spent an embarrassing amount of one winter looking for it. It isn’t there. My husband thinks it’s from a film. It isn’t there either. I think I made it up and gave it to somebody more famous, which is apparently a common thing to do. Anyway, it’s true, and I need it, because the disease of my trade is fiddling: the shelf is never right, there’s always one spine to move, and you can lose an afternoon to it. So now I do the shelf, and I stop, and if I find my hand going back to it I say the line and walk away. It’s the only rule I have that tells me when something is done rather than how to do it.
SPEAKER FIVE: “Say you don’t know before they find out.” That’s my mother, who was a bus conductor, and had no idea she was giving me the most useful sentence of my professional life. She meant it about the buses — about people asking her the way. I use it in a delivery room. A frightened person can tell, within a second, when you’re guessing, and the moment they catch you at it they stop believing anything else you say, including the true things. So when I don’t know, I say so, first, before I say what I’m going to do about it. It cost me a lot to learn to do that at twenty-three, when I thought a midwife who said “I don’t know” was a midwife who’d be reported. Turns out it’s the sentence that makes them trust you with the rest.
[Now you will hear Part Four again. That is the end of Part Four.]
How to read this part. If this part went badly, the diagnosis is usually one of two. Either you tried to do both tasks on the first hearing and ended up with neither — Task One is answered in each speaker’s first two sentences, Task Two after a turn (“What it does, thirty years on”, “Before I answer anything now”), so they want different hearings — or you took a true thing about the wrong task: Speaker Three did learn from a mistake, Speaker One’s consultant was correcting an error, Speaker Four’s husband said “film”. Open the transcript and check which.
Do it in this order.
The extra options in each list are built from something a speaker genuinely says: Speaker Three does not know the man’s name (a stranger); Speaker Two calls the garden better (enjoy the work more); Speaker One was corrected for an error (a past mistake). Each is true and none is the answer to the question asked. Read the task heading again before you commit a letter.
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 the paper you handed in — and, if you then redid a part with the support and cleared it, the clean attempt in its place.
At C2, a part you lost is almost never a part you failed to hear. Open the transcript and mark the line that carried each answer you missed: if the words in the line and the words in the option have nothing in common, the problem is paraphrase; if the line was spoken by the other speaker, the problem is attribution. Both are trainable, and they are trained differently.