TOEFL Listening Mock Test 1

NARRATOR: Listen to a conversation between a student and a professor. STUDENT: Hi, Professor. Um, do you have a few minutes to talk? I wanted to get some quick feedback on my draft for the biology paper. PROFESSOR: Of course, Diego. Come on in. You are writing about ecosystems, right? STUDENT: Yes. But I am having a big problem with the introduction. I already wrote three pages, but I feel like my main topic is just too broad. PROFESSOR: Let me see... Ah, yes. You are trying to cover the entire Amazon rainforest ecosystem. That is definitely too big for a five-page paper. You will run out of space very quickly. STUDENT: That is what I was worried about. So, should I, you know, focus on just one specific organism instead? PROFESSOR: Exactly. For example, you could write about how orchids survive on high tree branches. That will keep your paper focused and well under the five-page limit. STUDENT: That is a great idea. I will change my focus to orchids. Also, I wanted to double-check the deadline for submitting this draft to you. PROFESSOR: The final deadline for submitting drafts for my review is this Wednesday at 4:00 PM. Oh, wait, my mistake, it is actually Thursday at 4:00 PM. That gives me enough time to read them before our Friday lecture. STUDENT: Okay, perfect. I will work on the orchid topic tonight and email you the draft by Thursday afternoon. PROFESSOR: Sounds like a plan, Diego. Remember, when you write about the orchids, make sure to explain their symbiotic relationship with the trees. That is a key concept we discussed last week. STUDENT: Right, the relationship where one organism benefits and the other is not harmed. Commensalism, correct? PROFESSOR: Yes, exactly! If you include that term and define it, your paper will be in excellent shape. STUDENT: Thank you, Professor. I really appreciate your help. See you in class on Friday. PROFESSOR: You are welcome, Diego. Have a good afternoon. [Q1] Why does the student go to see the professor?

(Shared with Q1.) [Q2] According to the professor, what is the main problem with the student's current draft?

(Shared with Q1.) [Q3] What is the deadline for the student to email his draft to the professor?

(Shared with Q1.) [Q4] What can be inferred about the concept of commensalism?

(Shared with Q1.) [Replay: "Oh, wait, my mistake, it is actually Thursday at 4:00 PM."] [Q5] Why does the professor say this:

NARRATOR: Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class. PROFESSOR: Okay, today we are going to look at an incredible ecological partnership in the plant world. Specifically, how some flowering plants depend on insects—not for pollination, which we have already covered, but for dispersing their seeds. This process is called myrmecochory. Simply put, myrmecochory is the dispersal of seeds by ants. It is a mutually beneficial relationship, or a mutualism, found in thousands of plant species worldwide, especially in temperate forest floors. PROFESSOR: Now, how does a plant convince an ant to do the heavy lifting of carrying its seeds all the way back to the nest? Well, these plants produce seeds with a special external structure called an elaiosome. An elaiosome is a fleshy, lipid-rich appendage attached directly to the seed coat. It is packed with lipids, proteins, and essential vitamins that are highly nutritious and attractive to ants. STUDENT: Um, excuse me, Professor. Do the ants end up eating the seed itself? Because, you know, if they eat the seed, it can't grow into a new plant, right? PROFESSOR: Excellent question, Tomas. No, they don't. You see, the ant picks up the seed by the elaiosome, carries it back to its underground nest, and feeds the nutritious appendage to its larvae. The actual seed—which has a tough outer coat and is completely inedible to the ants—remains entirely undamaged. Once the elaiosome is consumed, the ants carry the bare seed out of their main living quarters and discard it in their underground waste dump, or refuse chamber. PROFESSOR: And this is where the magic happens. The nest's waste chamber is essentially a protected, nutrient-rich compost pile. It is rich in organic matter, which shelters the seed from predators like birds or rodents, and protects it from forest fires. So, the seed is deposited in the perfect environment to germinate. PROFESSOR: But here is where it gets even more fascinating. Recent research shows that plants don't just rely on nutritional rewards. They also use chemical mimicry. This refers to the plant producing chemical compounds on the elaiosome that chemically mimic, or imitate, the odor of insects. Specifically, some plants release certain fatty acids that smell exactly like dead insects or ant prey. To an ant, this olfactory signal says, 'Hey, this is valuable food, pick me up immediately!' The ant is essentially tricked by its own chemical communication system into transport—uh, transporting the seed. It's a highly elegant evolutionary strategy. By manipulating the ants' hardwired sensory systems, these plants guarantee their offspring are safely tucked away underground. [Q6] What is the lecture mainly about?

(Shared with Q6.) [Q7] According to the professor, what is an elaiosome?

(Shared with Q6.) [Q8] According to the professor, what are two benefits that a plant seed receives from being discarded in an ant nest's waste chamber? Choose 2 answers.

(Shared with Q6.) [Q9] Why does the professor mention that the outer coat of the seed is tough and inedible?

(Shared with Q6.) [Q10] According to the professor, how do some plants use chemical mimicry to influence ants?

(Shared with Q6.) [Replay: "The ant is essentially tricked by its own chemical communication system into transport—uh, transporting the seed."] [Q11] Why does the speaker say this:

NARRATOR: Listen to a conversation between a student and a registrar office administrator. STUDENT: Hi there. Um, my name is Tomas. I'm a senior, and I'm planning to graduate this coming spring. I'm here because I was checking my online degree audit, and, well, it says I'm three credits short of the general education requirement for social sciences. But I was sure I'd completed that. STAFF: Hello, Tomas. Let me pull up your file... Okay, I see your record here. Yes, the system shows you have 117 credits, but you need 120 to graduate, with those three missing from social sciences. Did you take a course that maybe didn't get counted? STUDENT: Right, that's what I think happened. Last summer, I took an introductory sociology course at Westmore Community College. I had the official transcript sent here directly from their registrar back in August, but it's not showing up on my portal. STAFF: Ah, I see. Let me check our pending transfer credit database... Ah, yes, here it is. The transcript from Westmore did arrive, but it looks like there's a hold on it because of a missing Transfer Course Equivalency Form. Did you submit one of those before you took the class? STUDENT: A course equivalency form? I don't think I did. I thought as long as it was an accredited college, the credits would just transfer over automatically. STAFF: Unfortunately, no. To make sure a course at another institution matches our curriculum, our department heads have to review the syllabus and sign off on it. Without that signed form, the credits just sit in our queue. But don't worry, we can get this sorted out. STUDENT: Oh, good. Because the deadline to submit the final Graduation Audit Petition is... well, it's this coming Friday at five, right? I'm a bit stressed about missing it. STAFF: Yes, Friday at five is correct. Here's what you need to do. First, download the Transfer Course Equivalency Form from our website. You'll need to email it to the head of the Sociology department, along with the syllabus of the course you took at Westmore. Once they sign it to confirm it's equivalent to our Intro to Sociology, they'll email it back to you, and you can forward it to us. STUDENT: Okay, that sounds manageable. But what if the department chair doesn't get back to me by Friday? Professors are usually pretty busy. STAFF: Tell you what. Go ahead and submit your Graduation Audit Petition today online. There's a checkbox on the form that says "Pending Transfer Credit." If you check that, it alerts our office that an external transcript is being processed. That way, you won't miss the Friday deadline, even if the department chair takes a few extra days to sign off on the equivalency. STUDENT: Oh, that is such a relief! I'll fill out the petition right now. Thank you so much for your help. STAFF: You're very welcome, Tomas. Just make sure to get that equivalency form to the sociology department as soon as possible so we can finalize everything. [Q12] Why does the student go to see the registrar office administrator?

(Shared with Q12.) [Q13] According to the administrator, why were the student's transfer credits not added to his record?

(Shared with Q12.) [Q14] What can be inferred about the student's attitude regarding contacting the sociology department head?

(Shared with Q12.) [Q15] Why does the administrator mention the "Pending Transfer Credit" checkbox?

(Shared with Q12.) [Replay: "Tell you what."] [Q16] Why does the administrator say this: "Tell you what."

NARRATOR: Listen to part of a lecture in an environmental science class. PROFESSOR: When we picture glaciers, we typically imagine pristine, white expanses of ice. But if you actually walk onto a glacier, especially during the summer, you'll find it's often peppered with tiny, water-filled pits. These are called cryoconite holes. And today, we're going to explore how these miniature features play a massive role in both glacial melt rates and global carbon cycles. Let’s start with what creates them. The process begins with 'cryoconite'—a term for the dark, powdery dust that settles on ice surfaces. This dust is a complex mixture of fine mineral soil, industrial soot carried by winds from hundreds of miles away, and organic matter, including microbes. Now, because this dust is dark, it has a very low albedo. Albedo, as you may recall, is the measure of how much solar radiation a surface reflects. While clean ice reflects up to eighty percent of sunlight, cryoconite reflects very little. Consequently, the dust absorbs solar heat, melts the underlying ice, and sinks vertically, forming a cylindrical pocket of water with a layer of dark sediment at the bottom. Now, you might think these holes are scattered uniformly, but they are concentrated in specific regions. They primarily form in the accumulation zone—uh, correction, the ablation zone. That’s the lower portion of the glacier where annual ice loss from melting exceeds the accumulation of new winter snow. In the ablation zone, the winter snow melts away, exposing the older glacier ice beneath and allowing the cryoconite to gather and melt inward. STUDENT: Professor, if the dark dust keeps absorbing heat, what stops it? I mean, why don't these cryoconite holes just melt all the way through the glacier to the bedrock? PROFESSOR: That seems logical, doesn't it? If it's dark, it absorbs heat, so it should just keep boring downward. But actually, a physical constraint prevents this. As a cryoconite hole deepens, the surrounding ice walls begin to shade the sediment at the bottom. At a certain depth, the angle of the sun is such that the bottom of the hole receives very little direct solar radiation. The system reaches what’s known as a thermal equilibrium depth—typically between twenty and fifty centimeters deep—where the heat absorbed by the sediment matches the heat lost to the surrounding cold ice. So, the hole stops deepening. But here’s where it gets truly fascinating. These holes are not just physical features; they are highly active 'biophotoreactors'—a term scientists use to describe self-sustaining, biological systems powered by light. The cyanobacteria in the cryoconite sediment perform photosynthesis, capturing carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and turning it into organic matter. The cyanobacteria actually secrete a sticky substance—extracellular polymeric substances, or EPS—which binds the loose mineral dust and soot together into stable granules. This biological binding prevents the wind from easily blowing the dark material away, keeping it anchored to the ice and driving the melting process over successive years. This organic matter then feeds other microscopic life-forms, like tardigrades and rotifers, which live inside these tiny wells. In fact, researchers have found that these holes can accumulate significant amounts of organic carbon. During the late summer melt-out, when the glacier surface degrades, the water and organic material stored in these holes are released. This nutrient-rich runoff is swept downslope, where it fuels downstream ecosystems, like glacial rivers and coastal fjords. But this also has a feedback effect. As the ice melts, the dark sediment is redistributed across the glacier’s surface, further lowering the overall albedo of the ablation zone, which, in turn, accelerates the melting of the entire glacier. So, these tiny, microscopic habitats actually dictate large-scale physical changes on a regional level. [Q17] What is the lecture mainly about?

(Shared with Q17.) [Q18] According to the professor, what is the role of the sticky substance secreted by cyanobacteria?

(Shared with Q17.) [Q19] Why does the professor mention the "ablation zone" of a glacier?

(Shared with Q17.) [Q20] Based on the lecture, how does the depth of a cryoconite hole regulate its own growth?

(Shared with Q17.) [Q21] What can be inferred about the downstream ecosystems that receive runoff from glaciers in late summer?

(Shared with Q17.) [Replay: "That seems logical, doesn't it? If it's dark, it absorbs heat, so it should just keep boring downward."] [Q22] Why does the speaker say this:

NARRATOR: Listen to part of a lecture in a linguistics class. PROFESSOR: Good morning, everyone. Today, we're diving into developmental psycholinguistics, specifically how infants acquire the meanings of verbs. Now, nouns are relatively straightforward. A parent points to a cup and says, 'cup.' The child associates the sound with the physical object. But verbs—verbs are trickier. How does a toddler figure out what words like 'think,' 'give,' or 'push' actually mean when the physical world is full of simultaneous, confusing actions? For decades, the dominant view was what we call semantic bootstrapping. Semantic bootstrapping is the theory that children use their innate knowledge of semantic categories—like identifying who is performing an action, the 'agent,' and who is receiving it, the 'patient'—to map out the basic grammatical structure of their native language. So, they see a dog chasing a cat, recognize the dog as the cause or agent, and assume that 'dog' must be the subject of the sentence. But this theory has a, uh, a major blind spot. It doesn't fully explain how children learn verbs that aren't easily paired with obvious, observable physical actions, or how they distinguish between two actions happening at the exact same time. PROFESSOR: This is where syntactic bootstrapping comes in. Syntactic bootstrapping is a cognitive mechanism where children use the grammatical structure of a sentence—its syntax—to deduce the meaning of an unfamiliar verb. Instead of relying solely on what they see, they use the sentence's form as a linguistic clue. Let me give you a classic experiment that illustrates this beautifully, conducted by Letitia Naigles in 1990. Naigles took two-year-old toddlers and showed them a television screen split in two. On one side of the screen, a duck was actively pushing a bunny down into a squatting position. On the other side, both the duck and the bunny were simply waving their arms in circles, doing the same motion side by side. Now, while the toddlers watched this, they heard a voiceover. One group of children heard: 'The duck is gorping the bunny.' This is a transitive sentence structure—meaning it has a subject acting directly on an object. The other group heard: 'The duck and the bunny are gorping.' This is an intransitive structure, where there is no direct object, just two subjects performing an action together. By the way, 'gorping' is a nonsense verb, completely made up, to ensure the children had no prior knowledge of its meaning. STUDENT: Wait, so how did the researchers know what the kids actually thought 'gorping' meant? They can't exactly explain their reasoning at two years old. PROFESSOR: Excellent question, Tariq. The researchers used a preferential looking paradigm. This is a technique based on the fact that children will look longer at a visual display that matches what they are hearing. When the voiceover said, 'Find gorping!', the children who had heard 'The duck is gorping the bunny' spent significantly more time staring at the side of the screen where the duck was forcing the bunny to squat. They deduced that 'gorping' must mean the causative, transitive action—the pushing. Conversely, the children who had heard 'The duck and the bunny are gorping' looked longer at the side where both characters were waving their arms. They inferred that 'gorping' referred to the coordinated, intransitive motion. What this proves is that the toddlers didn't just look at the physical scene and guess. They used the syntactic frame—the presence or absence of a direct object—to narrow down and choose the correct meaning of the novel verb. They boot-strapped, or pulled themselves up, into the verb's meaning using their existing grasp of syntax. Of course, this doesn't mean semantic bootstrapping is useless. In fact, most modern linguists agree that children likely employ both strategies in tandem, depending on the stage of development and the complexity of the vocabulary they are encountering. [Q23] What is the lecture mainly about?

(Shared with Q23.) [Q24] According to the professor, what is a limitation of semantic bootstrapping?

(Shared with Q23.) [Q25] In the experiment described by the professor, what did the children see on the split screen? Choose 2 answers.

(Shared with Q23.) [Q26] Why does the professor mention the preferential looking paradigm?

(Shared with Q23.) [Q27] What does the professor imply about the relationship between semantic bootstrapping and syntactic bootstrapping?

(Shared with Q23.) [Replay: "By the way, 'gorping' is a nonsense verb, completely made up, to ensure the children had no prior knowledge of its meaning."] [Q28] Why does the speaker say this: