IELTS Listening Test 7 (2026) with Answers

Teacher section. Do not give this to learners before they take the test.

Original IELTS-style practice material. Not produced or endorsed by IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

Note: A script alone does not reproduce a timed audio test. In the real test, candidates hear each recording once, at natural speed, with fixed pauses. If you read these scripts aloud, keep to the pause lengths shown and do not repeat anything.

Pause markers: [PAUSE 30s] means 30 seconds of silence. In the actual recording, each pause is silence only.

Answer locations: In this teacher copy, the words that give each answer are marked like this: ⟦Q1⟧. Remove these markers before recording.

PART 1

Speakers: NARRATOR; RUTH (female, receptionist at a campsite, friendly, British accent); GARETH (male, caller, British accent)

NARRATOR: Part 1. You will hear a man phoning a campsite to book a family holiday. First, you have some time to look at questions 1 to 5.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen carefully and answer questions 1 to 5.

RUTH: Good morning, Oakdale Farm Campsite. Ruth speaking.

GARETH: Oh, hello. I'm hoping to book a pitch for a tent in August. Is there still any space?

RUTH: August is busy, but let's have a look. Can I start with your name?

GARETH: Yes, it's Gareth Kenning.

RUTH: Is that K-E-N-I-N-G?

GARETH: Almost. There's a double N in the middle. ⟦Q1⟧ K-E-N-N-I-N-G.

RUTH: Thanks. And how many of you will there be?

GARETH: Well, I'd originally said there'd be four children, because my sister's two were going to come with us. But she's decided to take them to Spain instead, so it'll be just my wife and me, and ⟦Q2⟧ our three. One of them is only a baby, though.

RUTH: That's fine. Under-twos are free anyway. And when would you like to come?

GARETH: We'd arrive on Friday the fourteenth of August. We were planning to leave on the nineteenth, but my wife's just reminded me that the kids don't go back to school until September, so we may as well make the most of it. Could we stay until the ⟦Q3⟧ twentieth?

RUTH: Let me check. Yes, we can do the fourteenth to the twentieth. Now, we've got three fields. The river field is the most popular, because children love paddling in the river, but I'm afraid it's fully booked that week. There's space in the top field, which has the best views, but it's quite exposed when it's windy. Or there's the ⟦Q4⟧ orchard, which is sheltered by the trees and is close to the toilet block.

GARETH: With a baby, being near the toilets sounds like a good idea. Let's go for the orchard.

RUTH: Lovely. And will you be bringing any pets?

GARETH: We thought about bringing the cat, but our neighbour's offered to feed her. So it'll just be the ⟦Q5⟧ dog. He's very well behaved.

RUTH: That's no problem, as long as he's kept on a lead.

NARRATOR: Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions 6 to 10.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen and answer questions 6 to 10.

GARETH: Could I ask about the facilities? Is there a shop on site?

RUTH: Yes, there's a small shop in the old barn. It sells milk, eggs and basic groceries, but what people really come for is the fresh ⟦Q6⟧ bread. My husband bakes it every morning, and it's usually sold out by nine o'clock.

GARETH: That sounds wonderful. What about campfires? The children were hoping to toast marshmallows.

RUTH: Campfires are allowed, but only in the metal fire pits that we provide. You can borrow one from the barn. We have a quiet time from ten o'clock, but fires don't have to be put out until ⟦Q7⟧ eleven.

GARETH: Great. So what will the total cost be?

RUTH: A pitch in the orchard is twenty-two pounds a night. You'd be with us for six nights, so that's one hundred and thirty-two pounds. Would you like an electric hook-up? That's an extra four pounds a night.

GARETH: No, I don't think we need one.

RUTH: Then there's the dog, which is three pounds a night, so eighteen pounds. So the total comes to ⟦Q8⟧ one hundred and fifty pounds.

GARETH: That's fine. How do I pay?

RUTH: We ask for a deposit of fifty pounds to secure the booking. We used to send a link by text message, but people kept losing them, so now I'll send you an ⟦Q9⟧ email with a link, and you can pay the deposit through that. The rest is paid when you arrive.

GARETH: Okay. And where do we go when we arrive?

RUTH: Normally you'd check in at the reception hut by the gate, but it's being rebuilt this summer. So please come to the ⟦Q10⟧ farmhouse instead. It's the white building on the left as you come up the drive. You can check in any time after two o'clock.

GARETH: Perfect. Thank you very much.

RUTH: You're welcome. We'll see you in August.

NARRATOR: That is the end of Part 1. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

[PAUSE 30s]

PART 2

Speakers: NARRATOR; JOANNE (female, volunteer manager at a music festival, energetic, British accent)

NARRATOR: Part 2. You will hear the manager of a music festival giving a briefing to people who will be helping at the event. First, you have some time to look at questions 11 to 15.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen carefully and answer questions 11 to 15.

JOANNE: Hello, everyone, and thank you all for coming along this evening. My name's Joanne, and I'm in charge of the volunteers at the Westmere Folk Festival. Some of you have helped us before, but most of you are new, so I'll start with a few basics.

As many of you will know, the festival has been held in Westmere Park for the past twenty years. But this year there's a big change. The park is being redeveloped, so we've ⟦Q11⟧ moved to Hollins Farm, about two miles north of the town. It's still a three-day festival, from Friday to Sunday, and I'm pleased to say that tickets have sold out, just as they did last year.

So, what do you get in return for your time? Each volunteer works three shifts of six hours, and in exchange you get a ⟦Q12⟧ free ticket for the whole weekend, which normally costs a hundred and twenty pounds. In previous years we also gave out meal vouchers, but I'm afraid the budget doesn't allow that any more. Instead, there's a discount of ten per cent at all the food stalls. You'll also be given a volunteer T-shirt, which you must wear on every shift, and which you'll need to hand back at the end of the weekend.

Now, I can't stress this enough: if you're unable to do a shift, you must let us know. Please don't just ask a friend to cover for you, because we need to know exactly who's working. And don't send a message to your team leader either, because they're often too busy to check their phones. What you must do is ⟦Q13⟧ ring the volunteer office. The number is on the back of your volunteer pass.

A word about the weather. The long-range forecast is uncertain at the moment, so we can't promise sunshine. Hollins Farm is lovely, but the ground gets very wet after rain, and some of the fields turn to mud. So please ⟦Q14⟧ bring proper waterproof boots. Trainers really won't do. The shifts will go ahead whatever the weather.

Finally, training. There's an online course about the festival, which you'll find on our website. It's useful, but it isn't compulsory. What every single volunteer must do, without exception, is attend the ⟦Q15⟧ safety briefing, which will take place at nine o'clock on the Friday morning, before the gates open. Anyone who misses it won't be able to work.

NARRATOR: Before you hear the rest of the talk, you have some time to look at questions 16 to 20.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen and answer questions 16 to 20.

JOANNE: Now I'd like to explain what you'll be doing in the different parts of the site.

Let's start at the main entrance. In the past, volunteers checked people's wristbands there, but this year that's being done by a professional security company. So the volunteers at the entrance will each have a hand-held clicker, and their job is to ⟦Q16⟧ keep a count of everyone coming in. We need accurate numbers for our licence.

In the car park, the parking attendants are all professionals too, so you won't be directing cars. But the car park is quite a long way from the main arena, so we're running an electric buggy for ⟦Q17⟧ anyone who finds walking difficult, and volunteers will be helping those visitors on and off the buggy.

At the Lakeside Stage, you might expect to be selling programmes, but we stopped printing programmes last year. Everything's on the festival app now. So the volunteers at Lakeside will be ⟦Q18⟧ keeping the area clean, picking up rubbish between performances.

Then there's the information tent. Visitors often go there for a map, but we don't hand out maps of the main arena any more. Instead, there are large map boards all around the site. The main job in the information tent is dealing with ⟦Q19⟧ lost property. Anything that's handed in has to be recorded carefully, so that we can return it to its owner.

And finally, the campsite. The campsite at Hollins Farm is quite confusing, especially in the dark, so this is the one place where we do have printed maps. Volunteers will be at the campsite entrance ⟦Q20⟧ handing out maps to everyone as they arrive.

Right. Are there any questions so far?

NARRATOR: That is the end of Part 2. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

[PAUSE 30s]

PART 3

Speakers: NARRATOR; IMOGEN (female, architecture student, British accent); KIERAN (male, architecture student, Irish accent)

NARRATOR: Part 3. You will hear two architecture students, Imogen and Kieran, discussing a case study about a car park that was converted into homes. First, you have some time to look at questions 21 to 25.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen carefully and answer questions 21 to 25.

IMOGEN: So, Kieran, we need to explain in our introduction why we chose the Fenner Street car park as our case study.

KIERAN: Well, Doctor Ellis suggested a couple of office conversions, but we wanted something more unusual. And it isn't the first car park to be turned into flats. There were a few earlier projects abroad.

IMOGEN: No, I think the main reason was that we could actually ⟦Q21⟧ go inside the building and talk to the architect. That made a huge difference.

KIERAN: True. Okay, next we need to explain why the car park closed. A lot of people assume it was because the new shopping centre opened with its own car park.

IMOGEN: Yes, but the council's figures don't support that. The number of people ⟦Q22⟧ driving into the city centre had halved since the tram line opened, so the car park was half empty long before the shopping centre was built.

KIERAN: And the structure itself was fine, wasn't it? The engineers' report said the concrete was in good condition.

IMOGEN: Yes. Then there's the main difficulty with the conversion. I expected it to be the sloping floors, but in fact there were only ramps at one end, and the rest of each floor was flat.

KIERAN: And the ceilings were higher than you'd think, because the car park was designed for vans as well as cars.

IMOGEN: Right. The real problem was that the building was so wide that ⟦Q23⟧ no daylight could reach the middle of each floor. That's why the architects cut a courtyard right through the centre.

KIERAN: What about the cost? I read that it went over budget.

IMOGEN: Only slightly. And even so, it cost about a fifth less than ⟦Q24⟧ knocking the car park down and putting up a new building. The council didn't pay for it, by the way. It was a private developer.

KIERAN: And for the environmental argument, I think we should focus on the concrete. People talk about the green roof, but it's a small area.

IMOGEN: And the fact that residents don't need cars is true of any building in the city centre. No, the strongest argument is that keeping the concrete frame ⟦Q25⟧ avoided the carbon emissions that producing new concrete would have caused.

KIERAN: Agreed.

NARRATOR: Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions 26 to 30.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen and answer questions 26 to 30.

KIERAN: Now, for the main section, let's go through the features of the building. First, the ramps.

IMOGEN: Well, there's nothing left of them. They ⟦Q26⟧ were demolished, and the space was used for the main staircase and the lifts.

KIERAN: Then the rooftop garden. Everyone who lives there seems to love it, but it's only open to residents, not the public.

IMOGEN: The architect told us it was going to cover the whole roof, but the engineers worked out that the soil would be too heavy, so it ended up ⟦Q27⟧ about half the size they'd intended.

KIERAN: Okay. What about the ground floor?

IMOGEN: That's the bit I like most. There's a café and a workshop space, and they're ⟦Q28⟧ used mainly by people from the surrounding streets, not by the residents.

KIERAN: And the bicycle store. That wasn't in the original plans, was it?

IMOGEN: No. The plans had storage lockers there. But at the public meetings, ⟦Q29⟧ the people who'd bought flats asked for somewhere to keep their bikes, so the architects changed it.

KIERAN: And last, the wooden panels on the outside. I've read that other developers have copied them.

IMOGEN: I haven't seen any evidence of that. But what I do know is that halfway through the project, the fire regulations changed, and the first panels had to be replaced with a fire-resistant type. That ⟦Q30⟧ held up the work for about six months.

KIERAN: Right. I think we've got enough for the main section now.

NARRATOR: That is the end of Part 3. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

[PAUSE 30s]

PART 4

Speakers: NARRATOR; LECTURER (male, clear academic delivery, British accent)

NARRATOR: Part 4. You will hear a lecture about the concrete used by the ancient Romans. First, you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40.

[PAUSE 45s]

NARRATOR: Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40.

LECTURER: Good morning, everyone. This morning I want to talk about a material that we usually think of as thoroughly modern: concrete. In fact, the Romans were using concrete on a large scale over two millennia ago, and some of their structures are still standing. In this lecture I'll explain what made Roman concrete so durable, and what modern engineers might learn from it.

The basic recipe was simple. The Romans mixed lime with water and with pieces of rock or broken brick. But the key ingredient was volcanic ⟦Q31⟧ ash, which they found in large quantities around the Bay of Naples. When it was mixed with lime, it produced a material that set hard, even under water. We know a good deal about how the Romans made concrete, because their methods were described by Vitruvius, an ⟦Q32⟧ architect who dedicated a work on building, in ten books, to the emperor Augustus.

The most famous example of Roman concrete is the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, which was completed around the year one hundred and twenty-five AD. Around nineteen hundred years later, it's still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, measuring about forty-three metres across. One reason it has survived is that the builders were very careful about weight. Near the bottom of the dome, they used heavy pieces of stone in the concrete, but near the top they used a light volcanic rock called ⟦Q33⟧ pumice, which is so full of air that it can float on water.

Even more remarkable are the harbour walls that the Romans built in the sea. You might expect seawater to destroy concrete over time, and with modern concrete, it often does. But research led by the geologist Marie Jackson has shown that in Roman harbour structures, contact with water from the ⟦Q34⟧ sea actually caused rare minerals to grow inside the concrete, and these minerals have made it stronger over the centuries rather than weaker.

There's one more piece of the puzzle. If you look closely at Roman concrete, you'll often see small white lumps of ⟦Q35⟧ lime scattered through it. For a long time, researchers assumed that these lumps were simply a sign of poor-quality mixing. But in twenty twenty-three, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggested a different explanation. They argued that the Romans added quicklime directly to the mixture, which made it very hot, and that the lumps were a product of this hot mixing. When ⟦Q36⟧ cracks form in the concrete and water gets in, the lime in the lumps dissolves and then hardens again, filling the gaps. In other words, the concrete can repair itself.

So why don't we simply make concrete the Roman way? Part of the answer lies in the way modern buildings are designed. Modern concrete is usually reinforced with steel bars, which allow it to be used for long, thin beams and tall towers. But the steel can ⟦Q37⟧ rust, and when it does, it expands and breaks the concrete around it. This is why many modern structures need major repairs after fifty or a hundred years. Roman concrete had no steel, so it didn't have this problem. On the other hand, Roman concrete can't carry nearly as much ⟦Q38⟧ weight as modern concrete, so we couldn't build skyscrapers with it.

There's also an environmental reason to be interested. The production of cement, the ingredient that binds concrete together, is responsible for around eight per cent of global carbon dioxide ⟦Q39⟧ emissions. That's mainly because the raw materials have to be heated to about one thousand four hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. The lime used by the Romans was produced at much lower temperatures, so researchers are now looking at whether Roman methods could help reduce the industry's impact.

Finally, a word about why this knowledge was lost. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, large-scale concrete construction largely disappeared in Europe for many centuries. The name Portland cement was first used in a patent taken out in eighteen twenty-four by Joseph Aspdin, a bricklayer from Leeds. He chose the name because, when his cement set, it looked like the ⟦Q40⟧ stone quarried on the Isle of Portland, which was a fashionable building material at the time.

Next week, we'll look at the history of glass, and how it changed the way buildings were lit.

NARRATOR: That is the end of Part 4. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: That is the end of the Listening test. You now have ten minutes to transfer your answers to the answer sheet.