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:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp39kaAVtLBSDL3HMhv1aTXV4SCOc9_8s
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TRANSCRIPTS
Yvonne: Any of you who are of my generation or older will no doubt
remember ... the strap. But for those youngsters listening, I'd better
explain because I'm saying this for your benefit. The strap, as they
called it, was a thick piece of leather about an inch wide and half as long as a belt and it was especially designed for hitting small children, on the palms of their hands. Nowadays, if you do something wrong at school, you're unlucky if you even get a telling off. And even the most serious offences get little more than a concerned phone call from the head teacher to your mum and dad. Now, when I was at St Anne's School for Girls in the fifties, we didn't have things quite so easy. It didn't take much to get a strapping. I'll never forget the first time it happened to me. One morning, I came to school in the wrong shoes - brown ones instead of black - and that was enough for the principal to call me up in front of the whole class of children and beat my hand
until it bled. I saw this and many other examples of our school's discipline system as very cruel and unfair.
Now, unlike many people of that time, I didn't just forget about it when my school days were over. Soon I had children of my own and the thought that they would one day get the same treatment, really made my blood boil ... and that's when I heard about P.O.P.P.I. ... er ... Parents Opposed to Physical Punishment of Infants. All the other members were like me. They had young children and didn't want some unfeeling teachers filling their lives with misery. So we started writing letters. First, to the schools, then to the education department and eventually, to our local politicians, and in 1979, the government put an end to the strap ... and to the cane ... and to the paddle and we thought that we had guaranteed our children the chance to grow up into fine young
people. And that, I'm afraid, did not happen. My own son and daughter have turned into lazy, irresponsible young adults who really have no idea how lucky they are. I'm sure you all know people like them ... and they're not the worst by far. But it's only recently that I've begun to think - to wish - that they'd never changed the law. Cruel it may have been, unfair it often was, but it taught us our place in society. And that's something that few young people today seem to know or want to respect. For example, we wouldn't have all the teenage crime that goes on nowadays if those teenagers concerned had, when they'd been younger, been given the strap.
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CORRECT ANSWERS
9. hitting
10. telling off
11. the wrong shoes
12. (very) cruel
13. young children
14. the government
15. lazy
16. how lucky
17. changed the law
18. (teenage) crime
