IELTS Listening Map Questions | Example 3

Section 2

You will hear a woman talking to a group of people who are looking around a sports and leisure centre. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m very pleased to be able to welcome you to City Scope, our lovely modern Sports and Leisure facility. I brought you up to the rooftop cafe on top of the stadium so that you can enjoy the view, while I explain briefly what we have here and point out to you the major features of the site. Then we’ll go round and have a look at ground level. We’re extremely proud of this new facility. You see, when the project was first discussed, we expected that a multinational company would give us half our funding and the central government grant would make up most of the rest, with a smaller contribution from a local business. Well, we’ve got quite far into the planning stage, when the multinational pulled out and both the central and local government decided they couldn’t afford anything. So we ended up with a beautiful project, a small amount of sponsorship promised by local organizations and nothing else. We thought we’d never build it. But at the last moment we had an amazing donation of several million pounds from a national transport company and that got us going again, and we managed to get all the rest from local fundraising. There’s hardly a street in the city that hasn’t made its contribution one way or another, so there’s a true sense of local ownership here. So, this is what we got. We wanted a new stadium because the 1950s football stadium is on the other side of town and is shortly due to be pulled down and built over. This site was the old airport with some playing fields on one side of it and a few buildings from the 1930s when the airfield first opened. So we were able to plan a new stadium with plenty of room for all the things people wanted. The playing fields have been upgraded and refenced. So they’re now a set of top quality outdoor pitches for amateur football, hockey and so on. We have both sports and other entertainment here. We want to encourage all kinds of people onto the site and hope some of them may come to use the cinema or the cafe and end up trying the fitness center. These are all grouped together. The cafe is in the original 1930s passenger hall and the architects have managed to retain some of the elegant style of the building. The other buildings like the control tower, which would have made a great feature and the aircraft hangers which we had hoped might, house fitness centers were unfortunately not structurally sound enough to preserve. So everything else is newly built, opened in 2010.

Right. Now if you’d like to gather a little closer to the window, I’ll point out the various buildings. We’re at the highest point of the stadium, here in the rooftop cafe on the opposite side to the main entrance doors. On our left, you can see two buildings just beyond the end of the stadium. The closest one is the business center used for meetings and conferences and so on, which provides a good source of revenue for the upkeep of the sports facilities. And next to the business center, the bigger building is the hotel which is rented from us by an independent company. As you see they are served by the perimeter road, which runs round three quarters of the site. Now coming around to the front of the building, immediately in front of the entrance, that circular open space at the end of the road is the transport hub. From here, there are buses and a monorail link to the free car park about 10 minutes from here, but you can’t see that. There’s also a large secure cycle park. Oh and disabled parking, of course. People find it is very convenient and it keeps the site virtually carfree.

Okay, now if you look as far as you can over to the right beyond the buildings, you can see our outdoor pitches, which I mentioned earlier. Between the pitches and the entrance is a little kind of pedestrian plaza. Are you with me? Okay, with the cinema in the building farthest away from us next to the pitches. Then there’s the Ten Pin bowling between the cinema and the road. Near the far end of the perimeter road and between the mini roundabout and the pitches, there’s our fitness center with all kinds of equipment and a small pool and changing rooms for teams using the pitches. Then joined onto the stadium next to the entrance is a range of small shops, which all specialize in sports equipment, clothes, shoes. They sell toys and so on as well, all that sort of thing. They seem to be doing well. As you see the service road goes right around but we keep the traffic and the pedestrians well apart. So it’s all very relaxed around the plaza, popular with families. And just in front of the bowling is our lovely restaurant. You can see it from here. It’s not building on the plaza between us and the bowling. It’s open all day and in the evenings. There’s quite a queue there on weekends, I’m pleased to say. So, now you’ve got the layout. We can go and have a closer look at everything. 

1. E
2. B
3. A
4. D

“And next to the business center, the bigger building is the hotel which is rented from us by an independent company. As you see they are served by the perimeter road, which runs round three quarters of the site.”

For the second question, it is clear from the talk which goes thus:

“Now coming around to the front of the building, immediately in front of the entrance, that circular open space at the end of the road is the transport hub.”

For the third question, it is clear from the talk which goes thus:

“ Okay, with the cinema in the building farthest away from us next to the pitches.”

For the fourth question, it is clear from the talk which goes thus:

“Near the far end of the perimeter road and between the mini roundabout and the pitches, there’s our fitness center with all kinds of equipment and a small pool and changing rooms for teams using the pitches.”