IELTS Listening Section 3 & 4: Latihan Audio & Strategi

21 & 22. B dan D (IN EITHER ORDER)

23 & 24. A dan E (IN EITHER ORDER)

25. D

26. G

27. C

28. B

29. F

30. H

Marie: I haven’t seen you for a bit, Colin.

Colin: No, I’ve been busy with my project.

Marie: You’re making a vegan alternative to eggs, aren’t you? Something that doesn’t use animal products.

Colin: Yes, I’m using chickpeas. I had two main aims when I first started looking for an alternative to eggs. But actually, I’ve found chickpeas have got more advantages.

Marie: Right, but how about your project on reusing waste food? You were looking at bread, weren’t you?

Colin: Yes, it’s been hard work, but I’ve enjoyed it. The basic process was quite straightforward — breaking the stale bread down to a paste, then reforming it.

Marie: But you were using 3D printing, weren’t you, to make the paste into biscuits?

Colin: Yeah, I’d used that before, but in this project I had time to play around with different patterns for the biscuits and finding how I could add fruit and vegetables to make them a more appetizing colour. And I was really pleased with what I managed to produce.

Marie: It must have been a great feeling to make something appetizing out of bits of old bread that would have been thrown away otherwise.

Colin: It was, and I’m hoping that some of the restaurants in town will be interested in the biscuits. I’m going to send them some samples.

Marie: I came across something on the internet yesterday that might interest you. It was a company that developed touch-sensitive sensors for food labels.

Colin: Mm.

Marie: It’s a special sort of label on the food package. When the label’s smooth, the food is fresh. And then when you can feel bumps on the label, that means the food’s gone bad. It started off as a project to help visually impaired people know whether food was fit to eat or not.

Colin: Interesting. So just solid food?

Marie: No. Things like milk and juice as well. But actually, I thought it might be really good for drug storage in hospitals and pharmacies.

Colin: Right. And coming back to food, maybe it would be possible to use it for other things besides freshness. Like how many kilograms a joint of meat is, for example.

Marie: Yes. There’s all sorts of possibilities.

Marie: I was reading an article about food trends, predicting how eating habits might change in the next few years.

Colin: Oh, things like more focus on local products?

Marie: That seems so obvious, but the shops are still full of imported foods. They need to be more proactive to address that and somehow motivate consumers to change.

Colin: Yes, one thing everyone’s aware of is the need for a reduction in unnecessary packaging, but just about everything you buy in supermarkets is still covered in plastic. The government needs to do something about it.

Marie: Absolutely. It’s got to change.

Colin: Do you think there’ll be more interest in gluten and lactose free food for people with allergies or food intolerances?

Marie: I don’t know. Lots of people I know have been buying that type of food for years now.

Colin: Yes, even if they haven’t been diagnosed with an allergy. That’s right.

Marie: One thing I’ve noticed is the number of branded products related to celebrity chefs. People watch them cooking on TV and then buy things like spice mixes or frozen foods with the chef’s name on.

Colin: I bought something like that once, but I won’t again.

Marie: Yeah, I bought a ready-made spice mix for chicken, which was supposed to be used by a chef I’d seen on television, and it didn’t actually taste of anything.

Colin: Hmm. Did the article mention ghost kitchens used to produce takeaway food?

Marie: No. What are they?

Colin: Well, they might have the name of a restaurant, but actually, they’re a cooking facility just for delivery meals. The public don’t ever go there.

Marie: But people aren’t aware of that. It’s all kept very quiet, so people don’t realise the food’s not actually from the restaurant.

Colin: Right.

Marie: Did you know more and more people are using all sorts of different mushrooms now to treat different health concerns, things like heart problems?

Colin: Mm. They might be taking a big risk there.

Marie: Yes. It’s hard to know which varieties are safe to eat.

31. walls

32. son

33. fuel

34. oxygen

35. rectangular

36. lamps

37. family

38. winter

39. soil

40. rain

Student: For my presentation today, I’m going to talk about the Céide Fields in the northwest of Ireland — one of the largest Neolithic sites in the world. I recently visited this site and observed the work that is currently being done by a team of archaeologists there.

The site was first discovered in the nineteen-thirties by a local teacher, Patrick Caulfield. He noticed that when local people were digging in the bog, they were constantly hitting against what seemed to be rows of stones. He realised that these must be walls, and that they must be thousands of years old for them to pre-date the bog which subsequently grew over them. He wrote to the National Museum in Dublin to ask them to investigate, but no one took him seriously.

It wasn’t until forty years later when Patrick Caulfield’s son Seamus, who had become an archaeologist by then, began to explore further. He inserted iron probes into the bog to map the formation of the stones — a traditional method which local people had always used for finding fuel buried in the bog for thousands of years. Carbon dating later proved that the site was over five thousand years old and was the largest Neolithic site in Ireland.

Thanks to the bog which covers the area, the remains of the settlement at Céide Fields are extremely well preserved. A bog is ninety percent water; its soil so saturated that when the grasses and heathers that grow on its surface die, they don’t fully decay but accumulate in layers. Objects remain so well preserved in these conditions because of the acidity of the peat and the deficiency of oxygen. At least one hundred and seventy-five days of rain a year are required for this to happen. This part of Ireland gets an average of two hundred and twenty-five days.

The Neolithic farmers at Céide would have enjoyed several centuries of relative peace and stability. Neolithic farmers generally lived in larger communities than their predecessors, with a number of houses built around a community building. As they lived in permanent settlements, Neolithic farmers were able to build bigger houses. These weren’t round, as people often assume, but rectangular, with a small hole in the roof that allowed smoke to escape. This is one of many innovations and indicates that the Neolithic farmers were the first people to cook indoors.

Another new technology that Neolithic settlers brought to Ireland was pottery. Fragments of Neolithic pots have been found in Céide and elsewhere in Ireland. The pots were used for many things — as well as for storing food, pots were filled with a small amount of fat, and when this was set alight, they served as lamps.

It’s thought that the Céide Fields were mainly used as paddocks for animals to graze in. Evidence from the Céide Fields suggests that each plot of land was of a suitable size to sustain an extended family. They may have used a system of rotational grazing in order to prevent overgrazing and to allow for plant recovery and regrowth. This must have been a year-round activity, as no structures have been found which would have been used to shelter animals in the winter.

However, archaeologists believe that this way of life at Céide ceased abruptly. Why was this? Well, several factors may have contributed to the changing circumstances. The soil would have become less productive and led to the abandonment of farming. The crop rotation system was partly responsible for this, as it would have been very intensive and was not sustainable. But there were also climatic pressures too. The farmers at Céide would have enjoyed a relatively dry period, but this began to change and the conditions became wetter as there was a lot more rain. It was these conditions that encouraged the bog to form over the area which survives today.