IELTS Listening

Overview of the IELTS Listening Test

 The IELTS Listening test lasts around 30 minutes.
 You will have 1o minutes at the end to transfer your answers to the answer sheet
provided.
 It is divided into 4 parts. The questions get progressively more difficult as the test goes
on.
 There are 40 questions in total. Each question carries 1 mark.
 Timing is key. For each part, you will have time to look at the questions before the
recording begins and you will have time to check your answers at the end.
 Listening is exactly the same for Academic and General Training.

Advice on Test Day

 Get there early. You need to be settled and ready for what’s coming.
 Read and listen to the instructions carefully. Many students throw away easy marks by
not following simple instructions.
 Write your answers on the test paper. Feel free to write on it. You’ve paid for it.
 Carefully transfer your answers at the end to the answer sheet.
 You can write in all capital letters if you wish.
 If you have problems hearing the recording, complain at the end. You’ve paid for a
service and you deserve to be treated properly.

IELTS Listening Guide

 

IELTS Listening Practice

This post is about IELTS listening practice and how you can improve your listening skills at
home.

 IELTS Listening Practice

Here are some links to official IELTS practice tests:

 The British Council

 IDP
 IELTS Official

DO NOT use practice tests from unofficial sites. These tests are created by people who do not
know what they are doing. They are either too easy or too hard. The tests will give you a false
impression of your current level and will sabotage your progress.
Reviewing Your Practice Tests
1. Do some real practice tests under exam conditions.
2. Identify any particular types of question that caused you problems.
3. Analyse your mistakes.
4. Think about why you made those mistakes. What were the particular reasons why you
answered those questions incorrectly? Was it timing, strategy, vocabulary, grammar,
listening skills, spelling?
5. Focus on improving your weakest areas first.
6. Repeat the process until you are consistently getting the score you need.

Improving your Listening Skills

 Best Podcasts for English Learners

Podcasts offer you an insight into what you can expect if you actually lived in an English
speaking country. There are also so many of them, that you can pick the ones that suit your
interests.

 How to Improve Your Listening Skills

Students often ask me ‘How do I improve my reading and listening skills?’ The short answer is
‘Read and listen more.’ However, this is not a very good answer because you need to know
HOW to practice and WHERE to get good sources of reading and listening material.

IELTS Listening Lessons

 Summary Completion Lesson

This lesson will help you prepare for the IELTS listening test by familiarising you with summary
completion questions, giving you some tips and a chance to practice.

 Overview and Tips 

This is a good article to start with and will allow you to understand exactly what the IELTS
listening test is and how you can use this site to improve your listening skills.

 Form Filling Question Tips

In the first section of the IELTS listening test, there is often a form filling question. Normally the
answers will be one or two words long and will be factual information, such as phone numbers,
dates and times.

 Multiple Choice Questions

This post will show you how to effectively answer multiple choice questions in the IELTS
listening test. It will show you the three different types of multiple choice questions, look at
common problems and give you tips and a strategy to help you on test day.

 Labeling a Map or Plan

This post will help you answer labeling map or plan IELTS questions more effectively by
looking at common problems, useful language and giving you a strategy to use on test day.

IELTS Listening Scores

You can calculate your Band score by counting up your marks out of 40 and looking at the
scores below:

18-22- Band 5.5

23-25- Band 6.0

26-29- Band 6.5

30-31- Band 7.0

32-34- Band 7.5

35-36- Band 8.0

37-38- Band 8.5

39-40- Band 9.0

Completing the IELTS Listening Answer Sheet Properly

 

How to Improve IELTS Reading and

Listening Skills
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Students often ask me ‘How do I improve my reading and listening skills?’

The short answer is ‘Read and listen more.’ However, this is not a very good answer because you
need to know HOW to practice and WHERE to get good sources of reading and listening
material.

This article will help you:

1. Learn HOW to practice

2. WHERE to find the best sources
3. HOW often you should be practicing

How to Practice Listening and Reading

There are two kinds of listening and reading practice- passive and active.

One of them is the most common, but least effective, but the other will increase your skills
dramatically in a much shorter period of time.

Passive listening is when you simply listen to a song, people talking, the news etc. and don’t do
anything else. In other words, you do not actually think about what you are listening to.

Passive reading means you simply read something, but you do not take any steps to think about
or learn from what you are reading.

Active Listening and Reading

When you actively listen to something, you listen to less information, but you think about it in a
much deeper way. This deeper way of thinking about what you are listening to means you learn
in a much more efficient and effective way.
For example, instead of listening to 30 minutes of the news, you might just listen to 3 minutes of
the news but think about any new words or phrases you hear, guess what these mean and then
note them down in a vocabulary notebook.

Active reading could mean that instead of reading a full chapter for 30 minutes, you simply read
one paragraph, but think about the grammar and the function of each sentence. You would then
try to use the same grammar and functions in your own writing.

Active listening and reading require you to think and do much more than simply sit back and
hope that English will magically be downloaded to your brain, but it will cut your preparation
time and also lead to huge improvements.

Examples of Active Listening

The most important things you can think about when active listening are:

1. Pronunciation
2. Vocabulary
3. Grammar
4. Structure

I don’t recommend doing all four at once. It is just too much to think about. Instead, I would
start by focusing on the area that you are weakest in. This is the best use of your time. So, if you
really struggle with pronunciation, focus on that.

This will also improve your speaking because you will constantly be thinking about how native
speakers talk.
Examples of Active Reading
The most important things you can think about when active reading are:

1. Vocabulary
2. Grammar
3. Structure
4. Idea development

Again, don’t do all four at once; start with the one you need the most help with.

This will really help you with your writing. Normally, the more someone reads, the better they
are at writing.

Vocabulary

When reading or listening you should do the following things:

1. Underline or note any new words or phrases.

2. Read or listen to that section again and try to guess what that word/phrase means.
3. Check meaning in dictionary. Don’t skip step 2!
4. Write new word/phrase in a special vocabulary note book.
5. Add meaning, pronunciation, collocations, example sentences, synonyms etc. to help you
remember the word/phrase.
6. Review regularly.

Before too long you will have a large number of new words and phrases to use.

Grammar

When reading or listening you should do the following:

1. Underline or note any sentences you do not fully understand.

2. Think about why the writer used that grammar structure.
3. Identify the grammar structure.
4. Check structure in book or on website.
5. Try to use this structure when speaking or in your writing.
6. Review regularly.

Pronunciation

1. Pick 1 or 2 sentences that have some interesting pronunciation features in them.

2. Listen to them a few times.
3. Write down the sentence and mark any features, such as:
1. Intonation (mark this with arrows up or down)
2. Linking words (mark this with linking from one word to another)
 3. Weak sounds (use a different colour for these)
4. Stress (Underline the stressed syllables)
4. Try to copy the features above by mimicking what the speaker said.

Structure

1. Underline or note down any discourse markers (such as Firstly, however, although, for example
etc.)
2. Note the function of the sentences and how the speaker/writer used these words to structure
what they say/write.
3. Try using these words yourself to structure your writing/speaking.

Idea Development

1. Underline topic sentences.

2. Note how the writer develops this main idea with explanations and examples.
3. Use the same/similar technique when practicing Task 2 essays.

Where to find the best sources

First of all, do NOT spend all of your time listening to and reading IELTS tests. They are boring
and you will get sick and tired of them very quickly. You should practice doing IELTS tests, but
I think that this should be only around 10-20% of your preparation time for reading and listening.

The other 90-80% should be spent listening or reading to something you find interesting or, even
better, enjoy. If you like reading Harry Potter, read that. If you like watching Game of Thrones,
listen to that. Prefer cartoons? They’re fine too. Anything in English that you enjoy is fine.

Google will help you out with finding the things you like, but here are a number of things I think
are extremely useful for language learning:

Podcasts

Podcasts have taken over from radio and I absolutely love them. You can download them or
stream them using lots of apps or websites. My personal favourite app is Stitcher.

There are millions of podcasts out there, you just have to search and find one you love. Once you
find some podcasts you like, you can listen to them whenever and wherever you like. They are
also perfect for active listening because you can pause and listen to them again and again.

Here are some of my recommended podcasts.

YouTube

Just like radio has been replaced by podcasts, TV has been replaced by YouTube. Again, there
are millions of channels and shows on YouTube, so all you have to do is search for something
you like.

Ted Talks

These are short lectures about interesting topics. Luckily, they are often on the kind of topics you
will find on the IELTS writing and speaking tests. Very good for idea development and
vocabulary.

Here are the Ted Talks I recommend.

Audio Books

There are millions of free audio books available online.

Audible is my favourite app for listening to these.

Amazon Kindle

You don’t have to buy a Kindle device. You can download the Kindle app on any device and
then you will have access to millions of free books. There are also millions of books you have to
pay for, but they are not very expensive.

Your Local Book Shop

Most books stores in the world have an English section. Check out what’s on offer in your local
shop.

How long should I practice for?

The answer to this question is different for every person because we all have different schedules
and commitments.

A student with lots of free time and no family or work commitments is going to have much more
time to practice than a busy person with a job and family.

The short answer to this is practice as much as possible.

Lots of people say that they have no time to practice, but there are many opportunities
throughout the day. For example, you could listen or read when you get up in the morning before
you get up, on your way to work, when you are exercising, during your lunch break, on your way
home from school, before you go to bed and many many others.
What you should remember is that it is much more effective to practice a little every day than to
leave everything to the last week before your test.

Extra Resources
If you need more help with IELTS Reading and Listening, please click the links below for lots
more information:

Listening

Reading

Just starting to learn about IELTS? My IELTS Preparation Guide is what you need.

Here’s also a video summarising the information above:

IELTS Listening- Summary Completion

Lesson
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This lesson will help you prepare for the IELTS listening test by familiarising you with summary
completion questions, giving you some tips and a chance to practice.

IELTS Summary Completion- Skills Tested

When you get to university or start working, two of the key skills you will have to use
are summarising and paraphrasing. These skills are tested in summary completion questions.

You will be given a list of sentences that summarise the clip you will listen to. IELTS have taken
text from the clip and used paraphrasing to change these sentences so that they have same
meaning, but different words. They have also summarised the listening by choosing a number of
phrases that sum up the key points. In other words, you should be able to read the sentences
before listening and have a very good idea about what you are going to hear.

What do I have to do?

You should first look at the sentences and try to understand the general meaning. Use the
sentences to predict what you are going to hear. This will help you follow the listening and
hopefully get the correct answers more easily.

Next you have to remember that the sentences are just paraphrases of what you will hear and you
will therefore need to think about how they might have changed the sentences. For example, the
sentence might say ‘The ________ family structure has changed greatly in the last fifty years.’
but in the listening you might hear ‘In the last half century the nuclear family unit had been
altered significantly’.

Next you need to look at the gaps and try to predict what the answer will be. You can predict
what type of word will fit grammatically (verb, noun, adjective etc.) and predict the content
based on the other words around it.

You should be very careful not to go over the word limit. The instructions will normally say ‘NO
MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER’ but read the instructions carefully to
make sure.

Now you are fully prepared to listen and fill in the gap with the correct information from the text.
You answer will be taken directly from the listening.

Summary Completion Practice

Look at the sentence below and try to guess what the talk is about. The sentences summarise the
key information from the listening.

You should write no more than THREE words and/or a number.

The video is quite long so I’ve only used the first 5 minutes. 

1. Elon first thought about making  _____________ when at college, when he thought about
the most challenging issues facing the planet.
2. They are more efficient than gasoline engines because charging it at home gives you
double the efficiency compared to ______________.
 3. Their ________ is competitive because of very small energy consumption and a cutting-
edge battery pack.
4. The goal of the company has remained a three step method, where model one was
__________ at low production numbers, version two has a reasonable price and an
average volume and three would be at a cheap price, high volume.

Next look at the spaces and try to guess the type of word that would fit, thinking about both
grammar and content.

Finally, think about how I might have paraphrased the listening.

Now listen to the first 5 minutes of the Ted Talk and try to find the answers.

[ted id=1695]

You can also read the transcript on the Ted Talk website.

Answers
1. an electric car

2. a power plant

3. range

4. an expensive car

If you got any questions wrong, go to the link below and read the transcript to find out how you
got it wrong. This is a very important thing to do for any listening or reading IELTS questions.

Next Steps
For extra practice go the official IELTS site and practice their summary completion questions.

If you want to get better at these types of questions, you really need to perfect your summarizing
and paraphrasing skills. When listening or reading something in English try to think like those
who make the reading and listening IELTS tests- how can I summarise this using paraphrasing?
If you practice this enough you will gradually improve to the point where you find these
questions very straightforward.

IELTS Listening Overview and Tips

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Listening Overview

The IELTS listening test is the same for both those taking the Academic and General Training
papers.

It consists of 40 questions (10 per section) and lasts around 30 minutes. You will have 10
minutes at the end to transfer your answers from the question paper to the answer sheet.

The listening test consists of four separate sections, each more difficult than the last. In other
words, part one is the easiest and part four is the most difficult. Each part has a different theme
or focus.

 In section 1 you will hear a conversation between two people and it is almost always
someone making an appointment or making a booking of some kind (e.g. making a hotel
reservation or hiring a car). The questions are normally gap-fill questions in which you
have to listen to the information and complete a form or sentence.
 In section 2 you will hear someone talking by themselves about a non-academic subject
(e.g. TV or radio presenter).
 Section 3 switches to an academic context and it will always be more than one person
discussing something (e.g. an academic paper or assignment).
 Section 4 is normally an academic lecture and you will hear one person (normally the
lecturer or professor) talking for an extended period of time.

You will be given a short amount of time (approximately 30 seconds) between each section and
you should use this time to look at the questions coming up.
You will hear the recordings only once.

There are several different types of question and each requires a different strategy so you should
familarise yourself with all of them. They include:

 Form/note/table completion
 Labeling a diagram or map
 Sentence Completion
 Short Answers
 Selection
 Multiple Choice
 Matching

IELTS Listening Tips

1. You will have to practice listening to both one person speaking (a monologue) and more
than one person speaking at the same time. Listening to monologues is challenging
because the person doesn’t often stop speaking for very long so students can feel like
 they are being overwhelmed. Listening to more than one person can be difficult because
there may be different accents or styles of speaking and it is tricky to ‘tune-in’ to what is
being said. For lots of free practice activities for both monologues and more than one
person talking, please check out our guide on IELTS listening practice.
2. Be careful with your spelling. Lots of easy marks are thrown away because of poor
spelling. My advice is to keep a notebook of words you find difficult to spell. Even native
speakers have a hard time with some English words, so the only way is to record and
learn. Both US and UK spelling are allowed in the listening test.
3. You will be given a short break (normally around 30-40 seconds) before each section and
in the middle of sections 1, 2 and 3. You should NOT use this time to check your answers
from the previous section. You should look at the questions in the next section and try to
understand the questions and predict the answers coming next. When you predict try to
think about the context of the question. Can you guess the answer? For example, if there
is a ‘$’ in front of the answer, you will probably be listening for an amount of money.
Also, establish what type of word (adjective, noun, verb etc.) the answer will be.
4. At the end, you will be given 10 minutes to transfer your answers to the answer sheet.
When you are doing this make sure you are very careful with spelling and make sure your
answers are correct grammatically. For example, if the question was ‘The man wanted to
______ a ______ car.’ the answers are likely to be a verb and then an adjective. If your
answers are not grammatically correct or spelled incorrectly, then they will be marked as
wrong.
5. Be careful with capital letters. If your word is someone’s name or a place, then it must
have a capital letter to be correct.
6. Make sure you follow the instructions carefully especially when it comes to word limit. If
the question states ‘No more than three words’ you can’t write any more than this. If your
answer is four words for this answer it will be incorrect.
7. A range of accents are used to reflect the international nature of English. These could be
from anywhere in the English-speaking world, including the US, Canada, South Africa,
New Zealand, Ireland or Australia. You could also hear one of many regional accents
from the UK. You should, therefore, try to get used to all of these different accents.
Instead of just listening to the BBC News, you could try listening to the news, or
anything else for that matter, from a range of different countries. A quick search on
Google is all you need to find these.
8. It is important to familiarise yourself with the different types of test questions and
practice IELTS past papers. When you practice these tests it should be under exam
conditions, but then it is important to find out why you got certain questions wrong.
Focusing on your mistakes is very important. You should listen again and again until you
find out why you got the question wrong, don’t just look at the answers and forget about
them. If you do this you will not improve very quickly. You can also look at the
transcripts and find out where you went wrong by reading.
9. I did just say that you should practice past papers, however, you should also remember
that this is a test of your general level of English, so you should listen to not only IELTS
but everything you can in English. In general, those who do the best on the listening test
are those who have practiced listening in English the most. The best candidates listen to
English a little every day. Please check out our article on 25 online language learning
tools for lots of ways you can listen at home for free.
10. Focus on getting the easy questions correct first before worrying about the more difficult
questions. Anyone hoping to do well on the IELTS listening test should be getting 10 out
of 10 on the first part of the test. Make sure you can do this consistently in the first part
before worrying about the other parts, especially part four.
11. Make sure you don’t get tricked. IELTS listening tests will often try to fool you by giving
you something that seems like the correct answer first and then changing this to
something else later in the recording. For example, your questions might be ‘The man
would like a ______ car.’ At the start of the recording the person might say they want a
‘big family car’, but then change their minds and say they want a ‘small sports car’. If
you wrote down the first option you would be wrong.
12. You have to get used to listening to things only once. Lots of teachers allow their
students to listen to a recording three or four times. You can, of course, listen again and
again when analysing your mistakes, but when practicing the exam you should do it
under exam conditions and that means listening just once.
13. Do you have messy handwriting? Lots of people do, don’t worry. In the listening test,
you should write your answers in all capital letters if your writing is messy.
14. Remember to bring an eraser. You will have to write your answers in pencil, so make
sure you can change any notes or answers using an eraser.
15. It’s not just a listening test; it’s an understanding, reading, writing, vocabulary and
spelling test. Make sure you practice all of these skills under exam conditions.
16. Write your answers on the question paper as you do the test. I know lots of students who
don’t do this and try to remember all of the answers and then use their memory to fill out
the answer sheet. You are under enough pressure without making it a memory test on top
of everything else. Keep it simple and note down the answers as you go.
17. Practice your shorthand. Shorthand is when you write a shortened version of a word. For
example, you might write approx. for approximately or Eng. for English. This will help
you save time in the exam. Often two answers will come in a very short space of time, if
you are busy writing a long word instead of listening, you might miss it. Shorthand is a
very personal thing, so do whatever suits you.
18. Concentration is key in the listening test. It is totally normal to lose concentration and
most people find it difficult to concentrate for the complete 30 minutes. To improve your
concentration you need to practice active listening. Active listening involves setting
yourself small tasks when you are practicing and actually doing something when you are
listening, just like you will be in the IELTS listening exam. See our article on IELTS
listening practice for ways you can listen actively.
19. Don’t leave any blank spaces. This might seem very obvious, but you wouldn’t believe
how many students do this. You are not penalized for wrong answers so you should
always have a guess.
20. Before each section, you will be given information about the speaker and what they will
be talking about. You won’t be tested on this, but it will help you answer the questions
that follow by understanding the context.
I hope you found these IELTS listening tips useful and if you have any questions please let us
know in the comments below. Now it is time to find a few online resources that will help you
practice listening every day.

IELTS Listening Form Filling Question Tips

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In the first section of the IELTS listening test there is often a form filling question. Normally the
answers will be one or two words long and will be factual information, such as phone numbers,
dates and times.

These questions may seem relatively simple, but it would surprise you how many students throw
away easy marks in this section.

Also, this is one of the areas that IELTS try to trick you by giving a number of different pieces of
information when only one of them is correct. One common trick is for the person to give one
piece of information and then correct it later in the recording. If they do this, always write down
the second piece of corrected information.

There are a number of ways students can prepare for this kind of question. Below are some tips,
common problems and solutions.

Prediction
Prediction is an important skill in all areas of the IELTS listening test but crucially important in
the form filling section.

Predicting enables you to not only focus your brain on the area that you will hear, but more
importantly, not focus on any other areas.

For example:

Name: Shaun Rodgers

Room no. ___________
Number of occupants: 1
Check out time: ____________

In this example we can accurately predict that we are going to hear a room number and time.
That means we can completely focus on those two items, making it much easier for us to get the
correct answer.

When predicting we should think about:

Grammar: noun, verb, adjective, adverb etc.. Often it will be obvious which word form we need
to use. If we use a different form of the word we will get the question wrong.
Subject: phone number, address, date, business name etc.. This will help us focus on the correct
part of the recording and find the correct information more easily.
Function: list, question, label, instruction etc..

In the IELTS listening test you will have between 30-45 seconds before you hear the recording.
Use this time wisely by predicting what you are going to hear.

Synonyms

In the IELTS listening test it is normal for you to read one word but hear another word with the
same meaning. For example, you may read ‘cost’ but hear ‘price’. This is called a synonym and
the IELTS listening test has lots of them.

A common mistake is to read a certain word and listen for that word and not hear it. That is
because the recording used a synonym. For example, you might hear someone making a hotel
reservation and you have to note down their details.

The form might say ‘Arrival Date’, but you will hear ‘day you arrive’. Similarly, you may read
‘Departure Date’, but you might hear ‘day you leave’.

Make sure you think about the type of information you might hear in the form of synonyms, not
just the information you read.

Word Limit
Be careful not to write too many words in this section. You will be given specific instructions
and you must not go over this limit. For example, NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS means that
you may write one OR two words but no more.

NOT MORE THAN ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER means that if you write more than one
word your answer will be incorrect.

Numbers

You should familiarise yourself with how numbers sound in English and remember that the
speaker may have an accent from an English speaking country you might not be familiar with,
such as Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand or Canada.

The numbers that often come up are:

13 30
14 40
15 50
16 60
17 70
18 80
19 90

These numbers are difficult for many non-native speakers and that is why IELTS like to use
them. Practice listening and saying these numbers.

You might also get a credit card number. These number are always 16 digits long, so depending
on how many numbers are already provided, you will know how many numbers to write down.

Finally, telephone numbers have two considerations. Firstly, native speakers offer say ‘oh’
instead of ‘zero’ and we may also group numbers together by saying ‘double’ or ‘triple’ in front
of it. So 0778880700 would sound like ‘oh, double seven, triple eight, oh, seven, double oh.’

Letters

If there is a word, such as a surname or address, that is unfamiliar to most people, the recording
will spell it out. Make sure you familiarise yourself with how all the letters sound. You could
also categorise them by similar sound. For example, B, D, E, T, G, P and C all have a similar
final sound and may be used to try and trick you.

Addresses

Are you aware of the normal address format in the UK and Australia? Many different countries
have very different address formats to this one and can be confusing. In the exam you want to
know exactly what to expect.
It is normally:

House/Flat Number
Street Name
Town/City Name

Finally, you might have to write down a post code. These always start and end with one or two
letters first (normally the same as the city) and then a series of numbers in between. Make sure
you write down both the letters and numbers. Example: M1 4JH

For example:

22 South Street
Bristol
BS1 5TW

Dates

Make sure you are aware of the spelling of all the days of the week, especially difficult ones like
Wednesday. This is also true for months like February. Also, if you don’t put a capital letter at
the beginning of these words you will be incorrect.

Also be aware of some synonyms such as, weekend for Saturday and Sunday or fortnight for two
weeks.

There are also different ways of saying and writing dates, for example:

‘The eleventh of September 2002′ could be written as ’11 September 2002.’

Again, pay attention to the word limit in the question and only write under this limit.

Summary

These questions may seem straightforward but there are many tricks and unfamiliarities that can
come up in this section. Make sure you are prepared by following the advice in this post, but the
most important thing is to practice these kinds of question again and again.

IELTS Listening- Multiple Choice Questions

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This post will show you how to effectively answer multiple choice questions in the IELTS
listening test. It will show you the three different types of multiple choice questions, look at
common problems and give you tips and a strategy to help you on test day.

3 Kinds of Multiple Choice Questions

There are three different formats for these questions.

The first is a short answer multiple choice question. You will be given a statement and a
number of different options to choose from. Below is a picture of a sample question.

Source: Cambridge English IELTS Past Papers.

The second type of multiple choice questions are sentence completion questions. You will be
given a sentence stem and you will have to complete it with one of a number of options. Below is
an example.
Source: Cambridge English IELTS Past Papers.

The last kind is when you are given a sentence and you have to match this to one of a number of
pictures.

Some multiple choice questions require you to choose more than one answer from a variety of
options. You may be asked to choose two answers from five options or four answers from seven
options. Approach these in the same way you would a single answer question.

Common Problems
1. When given three choices, like above, you are likely to hear the speaker talking about all
three options. Just because you hear it mentioned, doesn’t make it correct. You must
select the correct answer, not the first one you hear.
2. The answers will normally come in the form of synonyms or paraphrases. Don’t just
listen for exact matches; think about how the answer could be expressed using synonyms
or paraphrasing.
3. The three choices often look similar in meaning and it may be difficult for you to tell the
difference. Look for keywords in the different options that allow you to tell the difference
between the different options.
4. This is not just a test of your listening skills but also your reading skills. There is much
more to read in multiple choice questions, so practice underlining the keywords in the
questions and quickly understanding the difference between the different options.

Tips
 1. Don’t check your answers from the previous section when you have a break. It is
important that you read the multiple choice questions and try to understand them.
2. Highlight keywords. The keyword in the question will help you answer the question
correctly. The keywords in the different options are those that differentiate meaning
between the choices.
3. Don’t write the first answer you hear. Remember that they will try and trick you.
4. Don’t spend too much time on one question. If you didn’t get the answer or you are
unsure, make an educated guess and move on.
5. Be careful if you hear words like ‘but’ or ‘however’. This often means that the speaker is
going to qualify a previous statement.
6. Practice makes perfect.
7. Your answer will often be a letter and not a word. Read the instructions to make sure and
be careful when transferring your answers at the end.

Strategy
1. Read the instructions carefully.
2. Read the questions and identify what is actually being asked. Highlight the keyword in
the question.
3. Look at the different options and underline any keywords that help you tell the difference
in meaning.
4. Think of any synonyms or paraphrases you might hear.
5. Predict the answer.
6. When listening, listen for any keywords and synonyms.
7. Don’t write the first answer you hear. They will probably talk about more than one option
so wait until they have talked about them all and then answer. Be careful with answers
that are given by the speaker and then taken away.
8. If you think an answer is correct, put a tick beside it and keep listening to make sure.
9. Don’t spend any more time than is necessary. If you miss an answer, make a guess and
move on.

IELTS Listening- Labeling a Map or Plan

By Christopher Pell 7 Comments

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This post will help you answer labeling map or plan IELTS questions more effectively by
looking at common problems, useful language and giving you a strategy to use on test day.
Source: Cambridge English IELTS Past Papers.

This type of question could appear in any of the four listening sections but it is most likely to
appear in section 2. In section 2 you will listen to just one person talking about a non-academic
topic. It is often someone giving information to an audience about an event or showing them
around a building, such as a university or a hotel. This section is a little more difficult than
section 1.

Labeling a Map or Plan

Source: Cambridge English IELTS Past Papers.

This type of question requires you to identify the different parts of the map or plan by listening to
and understanding a description or following directions. You will, therefore, be listening to a
person describing a map or plan or to someone showing a group of people around and you have
to follow their directions.

You might be given a list of possible answers, like above, or not and in this case, you will have
to select the answer from the recording itself.

The information you need to answer the questions is in the same order as on the recording.

Common Problems
1. Not being aware of the vocabulary and functional language used to describe locations and
directions. See our useful language section below.
2. Too much information. This question requires you to not only listen but to also follow a
description or directions, understand the map or diagram and write short notes, all at the
same time.
 3. Spelling. A common problem in all IELTS listening questions, but particularly in this
type of question because you have to do so many things at the same time.
4. Visualization. This refers to your ability to form mental visual images. You will be sitting
in an exam room and the person talking will be describing a plan you have never seen
before. Unless you can imagine what it looks like it is very difficult to answer these
questions.

Useful Language
Below is a selection of vocabulary and phrases you should be aware of before doing the listening
test:

 at the top/at the bottom

 on the left/on the right/on the far side
 North/South/East/West
 to the north/to the west
 slightly west of
 in the southwest/in the northeast
 in the middle of/in the centre of
 above/below
 inside/outside
 opposite/in front of
 left-hand side/ right-hand side
 clockwise/anticlockwise
 a little beyond
 just past
 before you get to
 adjoining
 enter via
 runs alongside

If you don’t understand any of these, please look them up and practice using them.

Listening Strategy
1. Read the question carefully. Understand the map or plan and its features.
2. Ask yourself where things are in relation to the questions. This should help you predict
the answers and follow the talk.
3. Think about where the person might begin their talk from. What is to their right and left?
What is in front of and behind them?
4. Look at the major parts of the map or plan to help you understand and navigate your way
around.
5. Predict what type of words might be the answer i.e. will it be a place, room, street,
building etc.
6. Listen to the beginning of the talk carefully because this will help you understand the
context and help you follow the talk more easily.
7. Visualize the place they are describing whilst the person is talking. Note down any
possible answers, but be careful with distractors e.g. ‘this was the library but we decided
to move it down to the end of the corridor’.
8. Use signposting language like ‘The next room we are about to see is…’, or ‘If you now
follow me to….’, to help you understand each stage of the talk.
9. Make short notes on the question paper and then transfer your answers at the end using
correct spelling.