Ashfield University — Full Test

[Section 1. You will hear a telephone conversation between a student who is coming to Ashfield University on an exchange programme and a member of staff in the university's Accommodation Office. First you have some time to look at questions 1 to 6.]

MARK: Good afternoon, Ashfield University Accommodation Office, Mark speaking.

LENA: Oh, hello. I'm coming to Ashfield in September as an exchange student, and I'd like to apply for a room in one of the halls of residence.

MARK: Certainly. I can take your details over the phone and start the application off for you now. Can I begin with your name?

LENA: Yes, it's Lena — Lena Bergmann.

MARK: Would you spell the surname for me?

LENA: Of course. It's B-E-R-G-M-A-N-N.

MARK: B-E-R-G-M-A-N — just the one N at the end?

LENA: No, two. Two Ns. B-E-R-G-M-A-N-N.

MARK: Bergmann, with a double N. Thank you. And which subject will you be studying with us?

LENA: Well, at home I'm in the engineering faculty, but for the exchange I've been accepted onto the architecture programme.

MARK: Architecture — right, so you'll be based over in the Sherwood Building. Let me put that down. And when are you planning to arrive?

LENA: My flight was originally booked for the tenth of September, but I've had to change it, so I'll actually get in on the twelfth now.

MARK: The twelfth. That's fine — that's still before registration closes. And how long will you be staying with us?

LENA: Six months. It's a one-semester placement, so I finish at the end of March.

MARK: Six months, lovely. Now, we have two halls that take exchange students: Marlow Hall and Hartley Hall. I'm afraid Marlow is completely full for September — it went in about a fortnight — so it would have to be Hartley.

LENA: Hartley. Is that far from the main campus?

MARK: Not at all — about eight minutes on foot, and there's a bus in the winter. Right — now, the rooms themselves. In Hartley there are two types. There's a standard room, where you share a bathroom with three other students, and that's ninety-eight pounds a week. Or there's an en-suite room, with your own shower, and that one's a hundred and twenty-eight.

LENA: I think I'd rather have the en-suite. So a hundred and twenty-eight a week.

MARK: A hundred and twenty-eight. I'll reserve one for you.

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

MARK: Now, there are a couple of things you'll need to sort out before you travel. The first is the deposit. That's refundable at the end of your stay, assuming there's no damage, and it needs to reach us by the first of August.

LENA: And how much is that?

MARK: Two hundred and fifty pounds. It went up this year, I should say — it was two hundred until last September — so do ignore the older figure if you see it on a printed leaflet.

LENA: Two hundred and fifty. All right. Can I ask what's actually in the room? I'm trying to work out what to bring on the plane.

MARK: Sensible question. Every room has a bed, a desk and a chair, a wardrobe, and — this surprises people — a small fridge of your own. The kettle and the microwave are in the shared kitchen on each floor, so there's no need to buy those.

LENA: Oh, that's useful. So is there anything I do need to bring?

MARK: Bedding, that's the main one. We don't supply sheets, duvets or pillows, and students are always caught out by that. You can buy a starter pack in town when you arrive if you'd rather not carry it. Towels as well, though most people pick those up here.

LENA: Bedding. I'll write that down. One last thing — my flight lands quite late in the evening. Will there be anyone there?

MARK: The reception desk in Hartley is staffed until eight in the evening, and after that it's closed. So if you're arriving after eight, you'll need to telephone the security office — they hold the keys overnight and they'll let you in. The number's on your booking confirmation.

LENA: The security office. Thank you, that's really helpful.

MARK: Not at all. I'll email the form through to you this afternoon...

[That is the end of Section 1.]

[Section 2. You will hear a talk given to a group of Erasmus exchange students on their first day at Ashfield University. First you have some time to look at questions 11 to 15.]

DIANE: Good morning everyone, and a very warm welcome to Ashfield University. My name's Diane Foster, and I'm the International Student Coordinator — I'll be your main point of contact for the whole of your six-month placement, so please do come and find me if anything at all is unclear. Let me start by running through what's happening this week, and then I'll say a little about finding your way around the campus.

DIANE: So, first things first: registration. Everyone needs to register in person before Wednesday — that's the deadline, so please don't leave it any later. You'll do that in the main hall of the Lambert Building, which is the large red-brick building just inside the main gate. And do bring two things with you: your passport, and your acceptance letter. I'm afraid we can't complete your enrolment without both of those.

DIANE: Once you've registered, you'll be issued with your student ID card. Now, that card matters — it's not only for the library; it also gets you into your accommodation block, and you'll need it whenever you borrow equipment. If you do lose it, a replacement will cost you fifteen pounds, so it's well worth looking after.

DIANE: Next, the welcome social. In previous years we held this on the Monday, but we found that a lot of you were still travelling and arriving then, so we've moved it: it's now on the Friday evening. It's a relaxed dinner and a chance to meet the other exchange students, and — I should stress — it's included, so there's nothing extra to pay.

DIANE: One last practical point before I turn to the map. A lot of you have already asked about the internet. You'll get your login details when you register. Just be aware that the wi-fi in the halls of residence can get rather slow in the evenings, so if you have important work to finish, the library is a far more reliable place to do it.

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

DIANE: Right — let me tell you where to find things. If you look at the map on your screen, you're standing here, at the main entrance, at the bottom.

DIANE: As you come in through the main gate, the Lambert Building — where you register — is immediately on your right; it's already marked for you. Directly opposite it, on your left, is the library, which as I mentioned stays open until midnight during term time.

DIANE: Just before the library, though — the small building on your left as you first come in, right beside the entrance — is the health centre. So if you're ever feeling unwell, that's the one nearest the gate; you can't miss it.

DIANE: Now, if you carry straight on up the main path, you'll reach a small square with a fountain in the middle. The building on the far side of the square, directly facing you, is the refectory — that's where you'll get hot meals and coffee throughout the day.

DIANE: The accommodation office is a little more tucked away. From the fountain, take the path to your right, and it's the very first building you come to, sitting just behind the refectory. Any problems with your room — a radiator, a key, anything — and that's where to go.

DIANE: And finally the sports centre. That one's right over on the western edge of the campus. From the fountain, follow the path to your left, past the science labs, and the sports centre is the large building right at the far end. You'll need your ID card to get in, but there's no charge for exchange students.

DIANE: Okay — that's the tour. I'll now hand over to my colleague, who'll talk you through choosing your modules...

[That is the end of Section 2.]

[Section 3. You will hear two students, Priya and Tomás, discussing a research project with their tutor, Dr Halliwell. First you have some time to look at questions 21 to 25.]

DR HALLIWELL: Come in, both of you, sit down. Right — I've read your proposal. "How students actually use the outdoor spaces on the Ashfield campus." I like it. But I notice it isn't the topic you came to me with in October.

PRIYA: No. Originally we were going to look at energy use in the halls of residence.

TOMÁS: And we were quite attached to that, actually. My worry with it was the data — I was convinced the estates department would never hand over the consumption figures, and that we'd spend six weeks chasing them.

PRIYA: Which turned out not to be a problem at all. I emailed them and had a spreadsheet back the same morning. No, what stopped us was the archive. When we searched the department's project archive, a fourth-year group had finished almost exactly that study last year — same halls, same three-year window.

TOMÁS: There didn't seem to be much point doing it again.

DR HALLIWELL: No, there wouldn't have been, and you were right to drop it. For what it's worth, being over-ambitious was the one thing that proposal wasn't — if anything it was rather modest. Now. The questionnaire.

PRIYA: We've drafted it. Twenty-two questions.

DR HALLIWELL: And it's well drafted. The wording is clear — I couldn't find a single question I'd call ambiguous, which is rarer than you'd think — and twenty-two is a sensible length. I wouldn't cut it. What does concern me is who's going to fill it in. Every single one of your pilot respondents is an architecture student.

TOMÁS: That's fair. We started with the people we could reach.

DR HALLIWELL: Understandable, but the whole university uses those spaces — engineers, medics, the language school. If your sample is one department, your findings are about one department.

PRIYA: So we widen it.

DR HALLIWELL: You widen it considerably. What else is worrying you?

PRIYA: Honestly, the thing I keep coming back to is what happens after the responses come in. If we get four hundred questionnaires back, twelve of those questions are open-ended, and neither of us has ever coded qualitative data before. We've got two weeks in the timetable for it.

TOMÁS: See, I'm not worried about that. I'm worried nobody will answer at all.

DR HALLIWELL: Priya's is the better worry. Coding open responses always takes about three times as long as students expect. And Tomás — response rates online are perfectly reliable, provided the sample is drawn properly. That's a myth I'd let go of.

TOMÁS: All right. But we still have to get people to respond. I could email every exchange student — I've got the mailing list.

DR HALLIWELL: You could. Bulk email gets you five per cent on a good day, and only from people who already like you. Putting a link on the department website is worse — it reaches the people who go looking for it.

PRIYA: So what would you do?

DR HALLIWELL: I'd stand in the refectory at lunchtime with a tablet and ask people to their faces. One day, two of you, and you'll come away with several hundred. Direct approach, every time.

PRIYA: The refectory. Right, we'll do that on the Tuesday.

TOMÁS: Can we talk about the follow-up interviews? Priya wants us to do them together. I'd rather split them up — we'd get through twice as many in the same fortnight.

PRIYA: We would, but neither of us has interviewed anyone before. If one of us asks the questions and the other takes notes, we won't miss half of what's said.

DR HALLIWELL: I'm with Priya — certainly for the first few, and I'd suggest for all of them. You can record them if participants consent, but I'd warn you that transcribing twelve interviews will swallow your Easter. Good notes are enough at this level.

TOMÁS: Fine. Both of us at every interview, then, and no recording.

PRIYA: And we can use the seminar room — it's quieter than the library, and we can book it.

DR HALLIWELL: Sensible.

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

DR HALLIWELL: Right. Let's go through the draft section by section, because my comments differ quite a lot from one part to the next. The introduction first.

PRIYA: We rewrote that three times.

DR HALLIWELL: It shows, and it was worth it. It's clear, it's short, it tells me what the study is and why it matters. Don't touch it — leave it exactly as it stands. The background reading is a different story.

TOMÁS: We've got fourteen references.

DR HALLIWELL: You have, and eleven of them were published before 2005. The literature on campus green space has moved on enormously since then — there's been a great deal of work since the pandemic in particular. The structure of the section is fine; the sources aren't. Go back and find current ones.

PRIYA: Understood. And the description of the survey?

DR HALLIWELL: Ah. That runs to three pages, and about two and a half of them are unnecessary. I don't need to know what weight of paper you'll print the forms on, or how you'll number the boxes. Keep the sampling strategy, keep the question types, and cut the rest right back.

TOMÁS: That's easily done.

DR HALLIWELL: The timetable is the one that troubles me. You've allowed four days for the analysis and a single week for writing up, in a term when you both have two other modules. I've supervised this project for eleven years and I've never seen it done in that. Rework it with realistic figures — double both, at least.

PRIYA: We'll redo it this week.

DR HALLIWELL: Please. And finally, ethical approval. There's a heading on page nine, and underneath it a single sentence saying you'll follow university guidelines.

TOMÁS: We weren't sure what to put.

DR HALLIWELL: The committee needs the consent form itself, a statement of how you'll store the data, and how long you'll keep it. Without those three things they'll return it unread, and that costs you a fortnight. Put them in before anything else.

PRIYA: We'll do that first, then.

[That is the end of Section 3.]

[Section 4. You will hear part of a lecture given to first-year students at Ashfield University about the return of the beaver to Britain. You now have some time to look at questions 31 to 40.]

LECTURER: Good afternoon. Last week we looked at species that have been lost from the British landscape. Today I want to concentrate on one that has come back — the Eurasian beaver — and on what its return tells us about how we manage rivers.

LECTURER: Let me start with the animal itself. The beaver is the second largest rodent in the world, after the capybara, and it is entirely vegetarian, which surprises people. But that is not why ecologists find it interesting. You'll sometimes see beavers described in popular writing as nature's architects, or as nature's builders. The term the literature actually uses is rather more precise: beavers are ecosystem engineers. That means an organism which physically alters the habitat around it, and by doing so changes the conditions for every other species living there. There are very few of them. Apart from ourselves, the beaver is the most dramatic example in the northern hemisphere.

LECTURER: So why did they disappear from Britain? Three reasons, all of them commercial. The first was the fur, which is exceptionally dense and waterproof, and was the most valuable of the three. The second was the meat — and here there's a curious detail, which is that the medieval church classified the beaver as a fish, because of its scaly tail, which meant it could be eaten during Lent. And the third was a secretion the animal produces called castoreum. Now, castoreum had a long history in medicine — it was prescribed for headaches, and it does in fact contain a compound related to aspirin. But its lasting commercial use, and the one that continues to this day, is in the perfume industry, where it is valued as a fixative. Between them, those three pressures were enough. The beaver was extinct in Britain by the sixteenth century, and across Europe the total population fell to perhaps twelve hundred animals.

LECTURER: Its return here is very recent. A licensed trial began at Knapdale, in Argyll, in 2009. Rather more famously, a population turned up unannounced on the River Otter in Devon — nobody knows how — and after a five-year study they were given permission to remain. There are now beavers in a number of English and Scottish catchments, and the debate has shifted from whether they should be here to how we live alongside them.

LECTURER: Now, what actually happens when a beaver arrives on a river? Almost everything follows from the dam. Beavers dam small watercourses to raise the water level, because they are slow and vulnerable on land and want to swim to their food. The dam creates a pond, and behind and around that pond, over a few seasons, you get an area of wetland — exactly the habitat that Britain has lost more of than any other over the last century.

LECTURER: That has several consequences, and I'll take them in order of how well evidenced they are. The first, and the one attracting government interest, is water storage. A dam holds water back and releases it slowly, so the peak that arrives downstream after heavy rain is lower and later. At the Devon site, peak flows leaving the beaver-occupied stretch were reduced by around thirty per cent, which means a measurable reduction in flooding for the village below. That is a serious finding, and it is why several water companies are now paying for this work.

LECTURER: The second consequence is water quality. As the flow slows, particles drop out of suspension, so the dam traps sediment — and with it the nitrates and the pesticides that are attached to those particles. Water leaving a beaver pond is consistently cleaner than water entering it.

LECTURER: Third, biodiversity, and the numbers here are remarkable. At one Devon site the count of frogs rose from ten clumps of spawn before the beavers arrived to nearly six hundred within four years. Insect diversity roughly doubles. And fish — this is worth noting, because people assume the dams are a barrier to migration, whereas in practice migrating fish pass over them in high water. The real benefit to fish is the deep pool behind the dam, which holds water and keeps them alive through a drought, when the rest of the stream has dried to nothing.

LECTURER: So far this sounds entirely positive, and from the riverbank it very largely is. But beavers do not read land-ownership maps. Where a river runs through farmland, the flooding that creates all that wetland habitat may be flooding a productive field, and the complaint we hear most often from farmers is damage to crops — a waterlogged hectare of maize is a real loss to a real business. They also fell trees, and while a willow will regrow, a mature ornamental tree in a park will not.

LECTURER: Fortunately the mitigation is cheap and well understood. An individual tree can be protected by wrapping the lower trunk in wire mesh, which takes ten minutes and lasts for years. Where flooding is the problem, the standard solution is a flow device — a pipe laid through the dam with its inlet well upstream, out of earshot of the animals, since they respond to the sound of running water. The pipe doesn't remove the dam; it simply fixes the water level at a height the landowner can accept, and the beavers carry on living behind it. Add to that a national management framework, licensing, and a compensation fund for the cases that can't be engineered away, and coexistence becomes a matter of administration rather than ecology.

LECTURER: Next week we'll look at a much more contested case: the proposal to reintroduce the lynx.

[That is the end of Section 4.]