IELTS Listening Short Answer Questions – Lessons, Tips

Good morning and welcome to the main library of the University of British Columbia. My name is George Martin and I’m the head Jack. I’m happy to give you a brief introduction to our library. I guess I’m qualified. I’ve been working here since 1961. Back in the days when the only electrical were electronic stuff here was the lights. Oh and the phones of course. Mechanical typewriters and slide rules there. No fancy laptops and cellphones. Computers, in a library? No way. Everything was on paper. If you needed to find something, you went to the card index and if that didn’t help, you asked one of the staff and if that didn’t work, you told your professor that you couldn’t write the essay because the library didn’t have the book you needed. My, you students have it so easy nowadays. We’ve got about 15 computer terminals on each of our 4 floors. If you know the title or the author, then you can find out if we’ve got it in seconds and if we do, where it is. If we haven’t got it then you can find out if the public libraries and other university libraries in Vancouver and Burnaby have it. Now you know that library books are arranged according to the numbers on the back of each book. Does anyone know the name of this numbering system? Right, the Dewey decimal classification system, which was invented by Melvil Dewey, an American Jack not John Dewey the philosopher.

Pause

In Melvil’s day, book classification systems were in a real mess and he decided to do something about it and around 1876, came up with the system we still use today. Look up there and you can see a list of basic categories. 000 generalities which include all sorts of things – encyclopedias, news media etcetera. Then a 100 – philosophy and psychology. 200 – Religion. 300 – Social sciences and so on up to 900 – Geography and History. With over 4 million books, actually, nearer to 5 million now, we have a lot to thank Melvil for. Now, if you look out to your right, you can see the layout of the library. It’s very logical. We start down here on the first floor or the ground floor for our British cousins with three zeros – generalities and so on up to the fourth floor with all the 800 th and 900 th . By the way, you won’t find books on medicine and dentistry here. There all over in the medical library just to the east of the medical school. Now, if you look at the plan of the 2 nd floor, you can see we can have a CD and DVD library. The music collection covers just about everything that we call serious. From Bach and Beethoven, Folk music, blues, early rock ‘n’ roll and Jazz and more. But sorry, no punk, heavy metal, rap or hip hop yet. For oriental music, like Peking opera, you’ll have to get to the Asian study center or Chinatown. A word about taking books out, the usual lending period is two weeks. But a few books in great demand can only be taken out for 2 days and I suggest you try to return books on time. The fine is $1 a day for the first week and a $1 a day thereafter. One last thing, your fancy new smart Mary card is also your library card and you can also use it to pay at the Mary cafeteria. So don’t lose it or you will starve to death without any library books. Okay, I guess that’s enough here. Let’s move up to the 2 nd floor.

2. 1961

3. 15

4. 4th floor

“Good morning and welcome to the main library of the University of British Columbia.”

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

“My name is George Martin and I’m the head Jack. I’m happy to give you a brief introduction to our library. I guess I’m qualified. I’ve been working here since 1961.”

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

 “We’ve got about 15 computer terminals on each of our 4 floors.”

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

“Then a 100 – philosophy and psychology. 200 – Religion. 300 – Social sciences and so on up to 900 – Geography and History. With over 4 million books, actually, nearer to 5 million now, we have a lot to thank Melvil for. Now, if you look out to your right, you can see the layout of the library. It’s very logical. We start down here on the first floor or the ground floor for our British cousins with three zeros – generalities and so on up to the fourth floor with all the 800 th and 900 th.”