Form, note, table, flow-chart and summary completion

Narrator: Part 1. You will hear a woman phoning a company that organises guided cycle tours.

Receptionist: Good morning, Coastline Cycle Tours, Tom speaking. How can I help?

Woman: Hi there. I'm calling about your guided day tours. A friend of mine did one last year and recommended you, and I'd like to book one for my family in August.

Receptionist: Lovely. It's been a busy summer, but there's still some availability. Can I start with your name?

Woman: Yes, it's Sarah Pettigrew.

Receptionist: Could you spell the surname for me?

Woman: Sure. It's P, E, double T, I, G, R, E, W.

Receptionist: Thank you. And how many people would be in the group?

Woman: Well, it was going to be four of us – me, my husband and our two teenagers – but my brother rang last night to say he'd like to come along too, so let's say five.

Receptionist: Five, fine. How old are the teenagers, just so I know? Our minimum age is twelve.

Woman: They're fourteen and sixteen, and they both cycle to school every day, so they'll probably be faster than the rest of us.

Receptionist: No problem there, then. Now, we run three different routes. There's the Castle route, which is the shortest, the Valley route, which is quite hilly, and the Lighthouse route, which follows the coast.

Woman: My friend did the Castle one and loved it.

Receptionist: It's very popular, but I should mention that the castle itself is closed for repairs until September, so you'd only see it from the outside.

Woman: Oh, that's a pity. And hills are really not our thing. So the coast, I think – the Lighthouse one.

Receptionist: Good choice. It's mostly flat, and the views are wonderful. What date were you thinking of?

Woman: Ideally the fourteenth of August.

Receptionist: Let me just check… I'm afraid the fourteenth is fully booked. I could offer you the twelfth or the sixteenth.

Woman: The twelfth is a Monday, isn't it? My husband's working that day. The sixteenth, then.

Receptionist: Sixteenth of August, Lighthouse route, five people. Now, will you be bringing your own bikes, or would you like to hire them from us?

Woman: We'll need to hire all of them. Is there anything for someone who isn't very fit? My brother had a knee operation last year, and he's worried about keeping up.

Receptionist: We have a few electric bikes, which make things a lot easier. There's a small extra charge for those.

Woman: Yes, please – one electric bike for him. And what does all that come to?

Receptionist: The tour is thirty-five pounds per person, including bike hire, so for five people that's a hundred and seventy-five, plus ten pounds for the electric bike. But groups of five or more get twenty-five pounds off, so the total would be a hundred and sixty.

Woman: A hundred and sixty. That's very reasonable. So, where do we meet on the day?

Receptionist: A lot of people assume it's at the railway station, because our office used to be there, but we moved last year. We now meet outside the museum on Harbour Street, at half past nine.

Woman: Outside the museum. Got it. Do we need to bring helmets?

Receptionist: No, helmets and locks are provided, and each bike has a small bag on the back for your things. The one thing people tend to forget is that the weather on the coast changes very quickly, so please bring waterproofs, even if it looks sunny when you set off.

Woman: Waterproofs. Fine. What about food? Should we bring a picnic?

Receptionist: You can if you like, but there's a lunch stop included in the price. For years we used to stop at a pub in the village, but now we go to a farm just outside it, where they make their own cheese and bread. People love it.

Woman: That sounds lovely. One last thing – my brother's plans are a bit uncertain. What happens if we have to cancel?

Receptionist: You get a full refund as long as you let us know at least forty-eight hours before the tour starts. It used to be twenty-four, but too many people were cancelling at the last minute, so we had to change it.

Woman: Forty-eight hours. That should be fine.

Receptionist: Great. I'll email you a confirmation this afternoon, with a map showing the meeting point.

Narrator: Part 4. You will hear part of a lecture on urban heat islands.

Lecturer: Good afternoon. Today I'm going to talk about a phenomenon that affects almost every large city in the world: the urban heat island. The term was first used several decades ago, but the effect itself had been noticed long before that, when early weather observers found that their city thermometers consistently gave higher readings than those placed in nearby farms and villages. In short, the urban heat island describes the way in which a city is noticeably warmer than the surrounding countryside. The difference can be several degrees. Now, you might expect the gap to be widest in the afternoon, when the sun is at its strongest. In fact, the opposite is true. During the day, both the city and the rural areas heat up. It's at night that the difference really shows, because the countryside cools quickly while the city slowly releases the heat it has stored.

Lecturer: So what causes it? Researchers generally identify four main factors, and I'll take them in turn. The first is the materials we build with. Brick, concrete and stone all hold heat, but the worst offender is the dark surface that covers most of our roads and many flat roofs – I mean asphalt. It absorbs a great deal of the sun's energy during the day and, rather like a storage heater, keeps it for hours afterwards.

Lecturer: The second factor is the lack of vegetation. In rural areas, a great deal of the sun's energy is used not to heat the ground but to turn water into vapour. As water evaporates from leaves and from damp soil, it draws heat out of the surrounding air. Evaporation, in other words, works as a kind of natural air conditioner. In a city covered in concrete, rainwater runs straight into the drains, there's very little moisture left at the surface, and so that natural cooling is largely lost.

Lecturer: Third, there's the shape of the city itself. Planners sometimes talk about 'urban canyons' – narrow streets lined by tall buildings. These are very good at trapping heat. The sun's energy bounces from one wall to another instead of escaping to the sky, and, just as importantly, tall buildings standing close together block the wind, so the warm air simply sits there instead of being carried away.

Lecturer: And finally, cities produce a lot of heat of their own. In the past the main sources were vehicles and factories, and they still contribute. But increasingly, a large share comes from air conditioning, which, ironically, cools the inside of buildings by pumping heat out into the streets – making the outdoor problem worse and, of course, increasing the demand for more air conditioning.

Lecturer: Why does all this matter? Well, higher temperatures increase the demand for energy, and they also speed up the chemical reactions that create certain air pollutants, such as ground-level ozone. But the most serious effect is on health. During heatwaves, the risk of illness rises sharply. Young children are often mentioned in this context, and they do need protection, but the research shows that the group at greatest risk is elderly people, who are less able to regulate their body temperature and who often live alone.

Lecturer: Fortunately, there's a good deal that cities can do. One of the simplest measures is the so-called cool roof. Instead of absorbing the sun's energy, a roof painted in a light colour can reflect much of it back into the sky. The cost is low, and studies have found that the temperature inside the top floor of a building can fall noticeably as a result.

Lecturer: Trees are another powerful tool. Most people think of them simply in terms of shade, and shade is certainly valuable. But trees also cool the air directly, by releasing moisture through their leaves – the same process I described earlier. Parks, green roofs and even small street gardens can all help in the same way, though a single large tree generally does more than a lawn of the same area.

Lecturer: However, a city can't do everything at once, so it needs to decide where to act first. For that, planners need detailed maps of temperature across the whole city. Ground-level measurements are expensive to collect, so these are now usually produced using data from satellites. And what they reveal is often uncomfortable: the hottest neighbourhoods tend to be the poorest ones, with the fewest trees and the most closely packed housing. In the second half of today's session, we'll look at how two cities have used this information to decide their priorities.

Narrator: Part 3. You will hear two students, Maya and Ben, discussing a research project on food waste in student accommodation.

Maya: OK, Ben, our tutor wants a progress report by Friday, so I thought we could go through what we've done so far and then plan the next stage.

Ben: Good idea. She'll probably ask why we chose the topic in the first place. I know everyone assumes we got the idea from that guest lecture on sustainability last term.

Maya: Which is funny, because we'd already decided by then. It was really that bin in our kitchen in halls, wasn't it? Overflowing every single Sunday night.

Ben: Exactly. And the news story about the university throwing away food from the canteens only came out after we'd started, so we can't claim that either.

Maya: Right. So, the food diaries. Overall I think they worked quite well. Nobody complained that they took too long – most people said it was about two minutes a day.

Ben: And I was worried people would exaggerate to make themselves look good, but there's no real sign of that. The problem was the weekends. From Monday to Friday the diaries were full, and then on Saturday and Sunday they're almost blank.

Maya: Which is a shame, because that's probably when most food gets thrown away. We'll have to mention that as a limitation.

Ben: Definitely. What about the results? Did anything surprise you?

Maya: Well, I expected bread to be the thing that was wasted most, and it was, so no surprise there. What I really didn't expect was the difference between the halls. The ones with the smallest kitchens actually wasted less food.

Ben: I think it's because there's less fridge space, so people can't buy as much at once. They shop more often and buy what they need.

Maya: That's my theory too. Someone suggested that cooked meals are wasted more than raw ingredients, but we didn't collect data on that, so we can't say anything about it.

Ben: Now, the food-swap shelves. Did you look at them?

Maya: I did. The idea's great – you leave food you're not going to eat and someone else takes it. But they're in the basement, next to the bike store. Half the students I asked didn't even know they existed.

Ben: Some people say the rules are confusing, but I read them and they seemed perfectly clear to me.

Maya: I agree, the rules are fine. I'd rather they just moved the shelves up to the main entrance, where everyone walks past.

Ben: Yes, that's what we should recommend. OK, so who does what before Friday? I was going to start writing the introduction.

Maya: And I was planning to analyse the photos of the bins, but the software's on your laptop, isn't it?

Ben: It is. Look, I'll do the photos, then. The introduction can wait till next week.

Maya: Fine. In that case I'll email the catering manager. We said we'd ask her about the canteen figures, and she takes ages to reply, so the sooner the better.

Ben: Good. Now, the next stage. The interviews. We can't start those without approval from the ethics committee, can we?

Maya: No, that has to come first. I'll fill in the form tomorrow. Then we need to find people to interview. We tried posters last time, but they kept being torn down.

Ben: The halls have a weekly newsletter that goes to every student. Let's put an advert in that instead.

Maya: Good idea. And where should we do the interviews? The rooms in the library are always booked up.

Ben: What about the laundry room? People sit there for an hour waiting for their washing anyway, and they're usually bored.

Maya: Ha – that's actually perfect. Then there's the bins. I think we should weigh them once a week for four weeks.

Ben: Which day, though? If we do it on Friday, we miss the whole weekend.

Maya: Monday morning, then, before the bins are collected. That way we catch the weekend waste, which the diaries missed.

Ben: Great. And at the end, who do we present it to? I thought the university had a whole sustainability team.

Maya: Apparently not – there's just one sustainability officer for the whole university. But she's very keen to see what we find, so we'll present it to her.

Ben: Perfect. I think that's a plan.