PTE Listening Practice Test 8

"The practice of quarantine, requiring travellers or goods suspected of carrying disease to wait in isolation before entering a city, dates back to fourteenth-century Europe. The word itself derives from the Italian 'quaranta giorni', meaning forty days, the period ships arriving in Venice were required to wait offshore during outbreaks of plague. Officials at the time did not understand the biological cause of disease transmission, but had observed empirically that isolating new arrivals for a sufficient period reduced the spread of illness through a city. Over subsequent centuries, quarantine periods and practices were refined as understanding of disease incubation periods improved, allowing authorities to calculate more precise isolation windows for specific illnesses. Quarantine stations, often located on islands or in dedicated buildings near ports, became a common feature of major trading cities well into the twentieth century. Modern quarantine practices, informed by a much more detailed understanding of pathogen biology, were applied at a global scale during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many countries required travellers to isolate for periods calculated from the virus's known incubation window. Despite centuries of refinement, the underlying principle remains essentially unchanged from its origins in medieval Venice: separating potentially infected individuals from the wider population for a scientifically informed period of time."

"quarantine" শব্দটি ইতালীয় "quaranta giorni" (৪০ দিন) থেকে এসেছে — ভেনিসে জাহাজ প্লেগ থেকে বাঁচতে ৪০ দিন উপকূলে অপেক্ষা করত। আধুনিক কোয়ারেন্টাইন COVID-19 মহামারীতে বিশ্বব্যাপী প্রয়োগ হয়েছিল, একই মূলনীতি বজায় রেখে।

"As renewable energy sources such as solar and wind supply a growing share of electricity grids, the challenge of storing that energy for use when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing has become increasingly important. Lithium-ion batteries, similar to those used in electric vehicles, are now widely deployed at grid scale, offering rapid response times that help stabilise sudden fluctuations in supply or demand. Pumped hydro storage, a much older technology, works by using surplus electricity to pump water uphill into a reservoir, then releasing it through turbines to generate electricity when needed; it currently accounts for the large majority of the world's grid-scale energy storage capacity. While batteries respond faster, pumped hydro systems can typically store far larger quantities of energy for longer durations, making the two technologies complementary rather than directly competing, according to most grid planners."

"Open-access scientific publishing, in which research papers are made freely available online rather than locked behind expensive journal subscriptions, has expanded considerably over the past two decades. Advocates argue that open access allows researchers, students, and members of the public in lower-income countries, who might otherwise be unable to afford subscription fees, to read cutting-edge research on equal terms with wealthier institutions. Studies also suggest that openly available papers tend to be cited more frequently than papers behind paywalls, since more researchers are able to discover and build upon them. However, many open-access journals fund themselves by charging authors a publication fee instead of charging readers, which critics argue can disadvantage researchers from institutions with limited research budgets. Some funding bodies have responded by requiring that research they fund be published openly, while also providing dedicated grants to cover these author-side publication fees."

"Machine translation systems have improved dramatically in recent years, particularly for straightforward factual text, but idiomatic expressions remain one of their most persistent weaknesses. A phrase such as 'it's raining cats and dogs' translated literally into another language would produce a nonsensical or confusing result, since the idiom's meaning bears no relation to its individual words. Modern translation systems trained on vast amounts of bilingual text have become better at recognising common idioms and substituting an equivalent expression in the target language rather than translating word for word, but they still struggle with newer slang, regional expressions, or idioms used in unusual or creative contexts. Professional human translators therefore remain essential for literary works, marketing content, and any text where cultural nuance and tone matter as much as literal meaning."

"Despite being further from the Sun than Mercury, Venus is actually the hottest planet in our solar system, with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead, due to an extreme greenhouse effect caused by its thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide."