Mac OS X Version 10.7.5
Audacity 2.0.5
I have cut the last minute or so from my project. When I listen back, although the waveforms are not showing for that cut piece, I can still hear it. Is there no way to permanently delete this selection?
That does not make sense. When I delete part of a track, it is gone, so we’re going to need details:
How exactly did you do that? Walk us through the process step be step so that we can reproduce what you are seeing.
Playing back in Audacity?
so what is showing?
Thanks Steve for responding so quickly. I am brand new at this.
Using the “save as” optionsI then saved one of the projects as project 2. Then as I was reading the manual I chose duplicate thinking it would make a duplicate file.
I now see that when I chose duplicate it created a set of duplicate tracks in the same project. The second set has not been cut so I’m thinking that’s the one that’s actually playing out to the end of the original.
Yes, now that I’ve deleted the second set of tracks it has in fact deleted the last 1.5 minutes I had cut.
Good, It sounds like you have sorted it out now 
There’s a tutorial about basic editing with Audacity that you may find helpful: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tutorial_editing_an_existing_file.html