This is the new Cambridge First Certificate in English Listening test, 2016.
Practicing on these Cambridge FCE Listening tests helps raise your score in the Cambridge English First exams. These tests are also very good to exercise English listening skills.
Correct answers & audio transcript are posted below.
This video is in the series of NEW Cambridge First Certificate in English exam preparation:
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TRANSCRIPTS
Presenter: Every year in Britain, at the beginning of November,
schools have a one week holiday and on the fifth of November, many people celebrate Guy Fawkes Night. The celebration centres around the burning of a life-sized model of a man, with a black hat and beard, called 'Guy'. The model has been specially made for this purpose. It's a wonderful time for kids of all ages but not so much fun for cats and dogs, which are usually terrified by sounds of exploding fireworks and skyrockets. To understand the reasons for this tradition, we have to go back almost 400 years to a time when there were two important religious groups in Britain - the Catholics and the Protestants. For many years, there had been fighting between them. In 1605, the king, James I, and his government, were Protestants and they made life rather difficult for the country's Catholics, of which there were many.
According to the popular story, a group of prominent Catholics met
secretly and decided that the king and his government must die. They came up with the idea of destroying the Houses of Parliament with explosives. The leader of this gang of conspirators was a man called Robert Catesby. Of course, being well-known Catholics, the group were not trusted by the government and so they needed the help of a professional soldier, who the government officers would not recognise.
The man they eventually found for the job, was Guy Fawkes. After an unsuccessful attempt to dig a tunnel, the conspirators bought a house beside the parliament building, which already had a tunnel going into the Houses of Parliament from its cellar. For many weeks, Catesby and his companions moved huge barrels of highly explosive gunpowder along the tunnel and placed them in exactly the right places under the government building. When the king and his parliament had their first meeting of the year in November, the conspirators planned to explode the gunpowder and so kill everybody in the building. Guy Fawkes had the important job of watching the street outside the conspirators' house and warning the others of any approaching danger. Well, the king found out about the plot and he sent soldiers to arrest them.
However, they found only Guy Fawkes on duty outside the house. The other conspirators had escaped. Eventually, all the plotters were caught and executed but Guy Fawkes has remained the most famous, probably on account of his being caught first. There was also another result of the discovery of the plot. Afterwards, all Catholics in England were blamed for the attempted attack, and this gave the Protestant government the excuse it wanted to persecute the Catholics even more. Although these events are still celebrated throughout Britain today, Catholics and Protestants have learned to live together in peace and so the celebration itself is mostly harmless fun. Besides, the story is no longer believed by most serious historians.
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CORRECT ANSWERS
9. life-sized model
10. purpose
11. terrified
12. Catholics
13. must die
14. a tunnel
15. explosive gunpowder
16. approaching danger
17. caught first
18. harmless fun
