IELTS Listening Test 9 (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; GAVIN (male, membership secretary at a sailing club, cheerful, British accent); NADINE (female, caller, British accent)

NARRATOR: Part 1. You will hear a woman phoning a sailing club to book a course for beginners. First, you have some time to look at questions 1 to 6.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen carefully and answer questions 1 to 6.

GAVIN: Good morning, Claymere Sailing Club. Gavin speaking.

NADINE: Oh, hello. I'm calling about your courses for beginners. I'd like to book a place, if there are any left.

GAVIN: There are, yes. Let me take a few details first. Can I have your name?

NADINE: It's Nadine Oduya. That's O-D-U-Y-A.

GAVIN: Thank you. And your address?

NADINE: It's Flat 3, Copley House, on Fenton Street.

GAVIN: Is that C-O-P-P-L-E-Y?

NADINE: No, there's only one P. ⟦Q1⟧ C-O-P-L-E-Y.

GAVIN: Got it. Flat 3, Copley House, Fenton Street. And can I ask how you heard about us? Was it through our website?

NADINE: I did look at the website later, but I first found out about the club from a ⟦Q2⟧ leaflet. Someone had left one in the waiting room at my dentist's.

GAVIN: Oh good, so people do read them! Now, have you done any sailing before?

NADINE: Not really. I went out on a friend's yacht once, years ago, but I was only a passenger, and I spent most of the time feeling seasick. I've done quite a lot of ⟦Q3⟧ canoeing, though, mostly on holiday in France.

GAVIN: That's useful. At least you'll be used to being on the water. Now, we run two kinds of course for beginners. There's the evening course, which is one evening a week for six weeks, and there's the weekend course, which is two full weekends.

NADINE: I was going to say the evening one, because it'd be easier to fit in. But I often have to stay late at work, and I'd hate to miss a session. So I'd better go for the ⟦Q4⟧ weekend course.

GAVIN: Right. The next weekend course starts on the seventh of May, but I'm afraid that one's already full. The one after that starts on the ⟦Q5⟧ fourteenth.

NADINE: The fourteenth is fine.

GAVIN: And as for the cost, the full price is two hundred and ten pounds. But if you book before the end of March, there's a discount, so it would be ⟦Q6⟧ a hundred and eighty-five.

NADINE: Oh, good. It's only the tenth of March today, so I'll definitely book now.

NARRATOR: Before you hear the rest of the conversation, you have some time to look at questions 7 to 10.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen and answer questions 7 to 10.

GAVIN: The price includes all the teaching and the use of the boats, and we lend everyone a life jacket.

NADINE: What should I wear?

GAVIN: Clothes you don't mind getting wet, and old trainers. Please don't wear boots, because they're dangerous if you fall in. And bring a complete ⟦Q7⟧ change of clothes. Even on a dry day, almost everybody ends up in the lake at some point.

NADINE: That doesn't surprise me! Do I need a wetsuit? I haven't got one.

GAVIN: In May the water's still quite cold, so I'd recommend one. But there's no need to buy one. They can be ⟦Q8⟧ hired from the club for five pounds a day.

NADINE: That's a relief. Is there anything I need to be able to do before I start?

GAVIN: Just one thing. You'll need to be able to swim. We used to ask for twenty-five metres, but our insurers have changed the rules, so now everyone has to be able to swim ⟦Q9⟧ fifty metres. You don't have to prove it. You just sign a form to say you can.

NADINE: That's fine. And one last thing: is there anywhere to park?

GAVIN: There is a car park at the club, but it's quite small, and on course days it fills up very early. So we ask course members to use the car park next to the ⟦Q10⟧ church, on Quarry Lane. It's free, and it's only a five-minute walk from the lake.

NADINE: Great. Thanks very much.

GAVIN: You're welcome. I'll email you a booking form this morning, Ms Oduya.

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

[PAUSE 30s]

PART 2

Speakers: NARRATOR; DUNCAN (male, council transport officer, friendly, Northern English accent)

NARRATOR: Part 2. You will hear a council transport officer talking on local radio about a new bike-share scheme. First, you have some time to look at questions 11 to 14.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen carefully and answer questions 11 to 14.

DUNCAN: Thanks for having me. As many of your listeners will know, Halsworth's new bike-share scheme, Halsworth Wheels, starts next Monday, so I'd like to explain how it's going to work.

First of all, why are we doing it? People often assume that the scheme is mainly about air quality, and of course cleaner air is a welcome benefit. Others think it's about reducing traffic in the town centre, but in fact traffic there has already fallen a lot since the new bus lanes opened. What really made the council act was ⟦Q11⟧ a survey of residents last year. Almost sixty per cent of the people who replied said they'd cycle more often if they could easily get hold of a bike, and that was enough to persuade the council to go ahead.

At the start, there'll be three hundred bikes at forty docking stations around the town. I read in one newspaper that half of them are electric, but that isn't right. It's about a third. Anyone aged sixteen or over can use any of the bikes, electric or not, once they've registered on the app. The only difference is ⟦Q12⟧ the price. The ordinary bikes cost ten pence a minute, and the electric ones cost fifteen.

When you've finished your ride, you simply put the bike back in any docking station, and the charge stops as soon as it clicks into place. Please don't leave bikes lying around in the street. We know this has been a problem in other cities, so if you leave a bike anywhere other than a docking station, ⟦Q13⟧ you'll have to pay twenty pounds. That's a single charge. We won't close your account, and we won't keep charging you by the minute, but twenty pounds is enough to make most people think twice.

Now, helmets. We did think about providing a helmet with each bike, and we tried it during a trial in the spring, but most of the helmets disappeared within a fortnight. So we won't be supplying them. Wearing a helmet isn't a legal requirement, but ⟦Q14⟧ we'd strongly advise everyone to wear one. If you haven't got one, you can buy one at a reduced price from the cycle hub at the railway station.

NARRATOR: Before you hear the rest of the talk, you have some time to look at questions 15 to 20.

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen and answer questions 15 to 20.

DUNCAN: Now, I know many of you will have the map from our website in front of you, so let me tell you where some of the docking stations are. We'll start at the railway station. The largest docking station is right outside the main entrance, and it's marked with a star on the map.

If you walk north from there, up Station Road, you'll come to a roundabout. Just before you reach it, on the left-hand side of the road, ⟦Q15⟧ is the docking station for the swimming pool. The pool itself is a short walk down the side street.

At the roundabout, if you turn right into East Road, you'll find the docking station for the hospital. Some people have assumed it would be at the near end of East Road, but in fact ⟦Q16⟧ it's right at the far end, opposite the hospital's main entrance.

Students have asked for a docking station close to the college, which is actually just behind the railway station. So ⟦Q17⟧ if you come out of the station and turn right, you'll find it at the far end of the station car park.

Now let's go up to the Market Square. There are two docking stations there, one in each of the top corners of the square. ⟦Q18⟧ The one in the north-east corner is the one for the cinema, and ⟦Q19⟧ the one in the north-west corner is nearest to the museum, so make sure you choose the right one on the app.

Finally, the castle. We'd hoped to put a docking station right by the castle gate, but there simply wasn't room. So ⟦Q20⟧ it's on this side of the river instead, on the left, just before you cross the Old Bridge. It's only a two-minute walk from there to the castle.

There'll also be a docking station at the main gate of Halsworth Park, but that one won't open until June, when the building work in the park is finished. You'll find a full list of docking stations on the app. Thank you.

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

[PAUSE 30s]

PART 3

Speakers: NARRATOR; HELENA (female, geography student, British accent); KWAME (male, geography student, British accent with a Ghanaian background)

NARRATOR: Part 3. You will hear two geography students, Helena and Kwame, discussing the fieldwork they did for a project on coastal erosion. First, you have some time to look at questions 21 to 25.

[PAUSE 30s]

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

HELENA: So, Kwame, shall we go through what we got from Kelsey Bay before we start writing it up?

KWAME: Good idea. I think the report should begin by explaining why we chose it.

HELENA: Well, it wasn't because it was easy to get to, was it? Two buses each way!

KWAME: No. And Dr Mason did suggest we go to Selcombe instead, because she's done research there herself. But the deciding factor for me was that ⟦Q21⟧ the council has measured the position of the cliff top at Kelsey Bay every year since 1995. There's nowhere else on that coast with records like that, so we could compare our measurements with theirs.

HELENA: Yes, that's what we should put. And what about what we actually found? What struck you most?

KWAME: You go first.

HELENA: Well, I'd expected the big storm in February to have done a lot of damage, and it had. But what really surprised me was the section by the caravan park. ⟦Q22⟧ The cliff there has moved back nearly four metres in a single year, when the average for the bay is less than one.

KWAME: That was extraordinary. Still, nobody's actually lost a house yet, which is something.

HELENA: True. And then there's the sea wall at the northern end.

KWAME: Well, the council built it to protect the harbour, and it's certainly done that.

HELENA: Yes, but it seems to have moved the problem somewhere else. ⟦Q23⟧ The beach just to the south of the wall is losing sand much faster than it used to, because the waves hit it harder now.

KWAME: Mm. A few people we spoke to thought the wall was a waste of the town's money, but most of the cost was actually paid by the government. And the beach next to it still looks very busy in summer.

HELENA: Talking of the people we spoke to, I'm not sure how much we can use the interviews.

KWAME: Why not? Nearly everyone agreed to talk to us. I think there were only three refusals.

HELENA: That's true. But we went in August, and when I went through the forms, I realised that ⟦Q24⟧ more than half the people we interviewed were tourists. Most of them had only been there a few days, so they couldn't really tell us how the coast has changed.

KWAME: I suppose so. We should have gone during term time. At least the questions themselves worked well. Nobody seemed confused by any of them.

HELENA: And we can still use the answers from the residents, even if there are only about twenty of them. What did you find most interesting there?

KWAME: Well, I expected the older people to be the most worried, but there wasn't much difference between the age groups. And most of them supported the council's plans, which surprised me a little. No, for me the most interesting thing was that when we asked how far they thought the cliff had moved in the last ten years, ⟦Q25⟧ almost everyone guessed much less than the real figure.

HELENA: Yes, they all seemed to think it was a very slow process.

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

[PAUSE 30s]

NARRATOR: Now listen and answer questions 26 to 30.

HELENA: Right. Now, the sources. We need to say something about each one in the methods section. Let's start with the council's survey reports.

KWAME: They're the most important ones, obviously. But honestly, ⟦Q26⟧ getting hold of them was a nightmare. They're not online, so we had to make a formal request, and it was three weeks before they arrived.

HELENA: But they're very clear once you've got them, and they're completely up to date. Then there are the aerial photographs.

KWAME: Those were free to download from the national archive, so there was no problem there. And ⟦Q27⟧ the earliest one was taken in 1962, so we can see how the coastline has changed over more than sixty years.

HELENA: Exactly. We should include two or three of them in the report. Now, the newspaper articles.

KWAME: I enjoyed reading those, but I don't think we can rely on them. ⟦Q28⟧ Every one of them talks about the town "falling into the sea", when even the worst section is moving four metres a year, and most of the cliff far less than that.

HELENA: Yes, they make it sound much more dramatic than it is. What about the project that the students did in 2015? I was hoping we could use their measurements for comparison. Should we ask Dr Mason whether they're reliable?

KWAME: She's already been through it. She said it's a good piece of work in a lot of ways, but ⟦Q29⟧ she found several mistakes in their calculations, so we'd have to be careful.

HELENA: OK. And finally, the government's report on the national coastline.

KWAME: I thought that would be really useful, but ⟦Q30⟧ it covers the whole country, so there's just one paragraph about our part of the coast, and nothing about Kelsey Bay itself.

HELENA: So we'll just mention it briefly in the introduction. Right, shall we start writing?

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 history of the pineapple in Europe. 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. In this series on food history, we've looked at how ordinary foods such as sugar became luxuries and then everyday items again. Today, I'd like to look at a fruit with a particularly strange history in Europe: the pineapple.

The pineapple comes originally from South America, and by the time Europeans arrived, it had been spread by local people through much of the Caribbean. The first Europeans to see one were the crew of Christopher Columbus, who came across the fruit on the island of Guadeloupe in fourteen ninety-three. The Spanish called it "piña", because they thought it looked like a pine cone. In fact, the English word "pineapple" already existed, but it didn't mean a fruit. It was the old name for the ⟦Q31⟧ cone of a pine tree, and only later did it come to mean the tropical fruit.

Columbus took pineapples back to Spain, and for the next two hundred years, people in Europe kept trying to do the same. But the voyage across the Atlantic took several weeks, and a ripe pineapple doesn't last long. A few arrived in good condition, but most of the fruit was ⟦Q32⟧ rotten by the time the ships reached port. That rarity is the key to everything that followed.

Because pineapples were so hard to obtain, they became a symbol of wealth, and also of welcome and hospitality. They appeared everywhere in decoration. Wealthy families had them carved in stone above doorways and on ⟦Q33⟧ gateposts, and they were painted on china and woven into tablecloths. Even if you couldn't eat one, you could show that you knew what one looked like.

The obvious solution was to grow them in Europe, but that was extremely difficult in a cold climate. Gardeners in the Netherlands managed it first, towards the end of the sixteen-hundreds, and the British soon followed. They grew the plants in special hothouses. You might expect these to have been heated by fires, and some were, but fires were hard to control, and too much heat killed the plants. The best results came from pits filled with ⟦Q34⟧ bark. This was oak bark that had been used to make leather, and as it slowly rotted, it gave off a gentle, steady heat for months at a time.

Even so, a single plant needed two or three years to produce one fruit, and it needed a skilled gardener to look after it. So the cost was enormous. It's often said that one home-grown pineapple could cost as much as a ⟦Q35⟧ carriage, although we should probably treat that figure with some caution.

This led to one of the oddest businesses of the eighteenth century. People who wanted to impress their guests, but couldn't afford to buy a pineapple, could pay to ⟦Q36⟧ rent one for the evening. It would sit in the middle of the dinner table, and the next day it was returned to the shop, and might be rented out again several times before somebody finally bought it and ate it.

The fashion even reached architecture. At Dunmore, in Scotland, there's a garden building from seventeen sixty-one that's often called the strangest building in the country. The lower part looks like an ordinary summerhouse, but on its ⟦Q37⟧ roof sits an enormous stone pineapple, about fourteen metres tall. You can still visit it today.

In the nineteenth century, everything changed. Fast ⟦Q38⟧ steamships could now bring fresh fruit across the Atlantic from the West Indies much more quickly than sailing ships, so far more of it arrived in good condition. Prices fell sharply, and by the eighteen-fifties, pineapples were being sold by street sellers in London. The fruit was no longer a status symbol, and the wealthy quickly lost interest in it.

The final stage of the story took place in Hawaii. In nineteen-oh-one, an American businessman, James Dole, started a pineapple plantation there, and began to sell the fruit in cans. Canning was slow at first, because each fruit had to be prepared by hand. Then, in nineteen eleven, an engineer named Henry Ginaca designed a machine that removed the skin and the ⟦Q39⟧ core. Later versions of the machine could prepare up to a hundred pineapples a minute. Canned pineapple was now cheap enough to sell all over the world.

But there was still one problem. Many people simply didn't know what to do with it. So in the nineteen-twenties, the company began to publish ⟦Q40⟧ recipes, showing people how to use canned pineapple in cakes, salads and other dishes. They appeared everywhere, from women's magazines to the labels on the cans themselves. It worked so well that by the middle of the century, the pineapple, once the most expensive fruit in Europe, had become one of the most ordinary.

Next week, we'll be looking at the history of another tropical product: chocolate.

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.