Part 1 of the Listening paper looks like the friendliest part of the exam: eight half-minute extracts, three options each, and everything is played twice. And yet it is a part where wrong answers get marked with great confidence. Not because candidates fail to understand the English in the recording, but because they listen to all eight questions in the same way when almost all of them come down to one of four different operations wearing the same format: a fact, a purpose, an agreement and an attitude.
Eight conversations with nothing in common
There are eight unrelated extracts of about thirty seconds each: sometimes one person speaking, sometimes two. Before each extract, a voice reads a context sentence (“You hear a woman talking to a friend about a concert”). Each extract is played twice, and then the next one begins, with no connection to the previous one.
The practical consequence is that every thirty seconds you change situation, voices and register, and that everything you have before listening comes down to two things: the written question and that context sentence, which is the only one spoken aloud and the one almost nobody makes use of. It tells you who is speaking, to whom, and about what. If you know it is a phone call to a shop, you already know the question will probably be “why is she calling”, and you know what kind of sentences will carry the answer.
Four questions hidden in one format
A fact stated plainly
“Where did they first meet?”, “What time does the shop close?”. These are the most honest questions in the exam: the information is in the recording, stated clearly, and you only have to locate it. The trap here is one of order: the speaker usually mentions two or three candidates before giving the right one (“I thought it was at eight, but it turns out they close at seven on Fridays”). The correct answer tends to come after a correction, not before it.
What the speaker is doing, not what they are talking about
“Why is the man calling?”, “What is the woman doing?”. Here the information is not in any single sentence. Someone calling to complain rarely says “I’m calling to complain”: they describe what happened, and you have to work out the intention from the whole. This question is failed when candidates cling to the topic (“he’s talking about an order”) instead of the function (“he’s asking for a refund”). The three options are usually three verbs of intention, and all of them fit the topic; only one fits what the person is actually doing.
What two people agree on
“What do they both think about the hotel?”, “What do the speakers agree about?”. Many candidates find this the most demanding question in the part, because it means following two people at once. Two speakers each say several things, and you have to find the point where both of them, in different words, hold the same view. The correct option paraphrases something one speaker said and the other confirmed, often with the smallest of signals: “That’s exactly it”, “Yes, I found that too”, “Same here”. The wrong options are usually things only one of them said, or precisely the things they disagree about.
What the speaker thinks or feels
“How does the woman feel about her new job?”, “What is the man’s opinion of the film?”. The answer is rarely an emotion word. Nobody says “I feel disappointed”. They say “It wasn’t quite what I’d been led to expect, to be honest”. Attitude is encoded in the grammar and in small markers: “though”, “still”, “I suppose”, “to be fair”, the contrast between what was expected and what was found. And the turn often comes at the end: thirty seconds of praise and one final sentence that qualifies everything. Whoever decides at fifteen seconds walks away with the option that describes the first half.
The four at a glance:
| The question sounds like… | What you are listening for | The usual trap |
|---|---|---|
| ”Where / when / how much…” | A concrete fact, stated as such | Several candidates are mentioned; the right one follows a correction |
| ”Why is he calling / what is she doing…” | The intention, worked out from the whole | Picking the topic instead of the function |
| ”What do they both / agree…” | What one says and the other confirms | Something only one of them said, or the very thing they disagree on |
| ”How does she feel / what does he think…” | The attitude, in nuances and in the last sentence | The option that describes the first half |
A whole extract, taken apart
A complete case, invented with the shape of the agreement questions, the ones that make you follow two voices:
You hear two friends talking about a restaurant they went to.
Man: So, what did you make of it? I thought the food was decent, nothing special. Woman: Same here. Though the waiter was lovely, wasn’t he? He really made the evening. Man: He did. It’s just a shame about the noise. I could hardly hear you. Woman: Oh, I didn’t mind that. It felt lively.
What do the two friends agree about? A. The food was better than they expected. B. The service was excellent. C. The restaurant was too noisy.
All three options grow out of the recording, which is why all three sound right if you listen halfway. A repeats the topic of the food, but both describe it as fine and nothing more: the opposite of “better than expected”. C is true for him (“a shame about the noise”) and false for her (“I didn’t mind that”): only one of them said it, and it is precisely what they disagree on. B is correct, and notice how it is built: she says the waiter “really made the evening” and he confirms it in two words, “He did”. Neither “service” nor “excellent” is heard in the audio. The answer paraphrases something one person said and the other ratified with the smallest of gestures. That gesture, “He did”, “Same here”, “Exactly”, is what you hunt for in an agreement question.
Now the same mechanism in an attitude question:
You hear a woman talking about a course she has just finished.
Woman: The tutors knew their stuff, the materials were excellent, and I met some great people. I’d say it was worth every penny. I just wish someone had told me how much reading there’d be each week. I nearly gave up in the third month.
How does the woman feel about the course? A. She found the workload heavier than she expected. B. She thinks it was overpriced. C. She was disappointed by the teaching.
A few seconds of praise and then the turn: “I just wish someone had told me…”. Whoever decides during the praise walks away with an option that does not even exist, because all three options are written with that last sentence in mind. B leans on “worth every penny” and flips it; C leans on “the tutors” and flips it too; A paraphrases the one thing she regrets: the amount of reading. The attitude was not in an adjective, it was in an “I just wish” at the end.
The trap has a shape, and you can recognise it
A common pattern in the distractors: a word you hear literally in the recording appears in a wrong option. If option B says “expensive” and you hear “expensive” in the audio, do not reject it outright, but treat it as suspect and check what the speaker said around that word. The correct option, by contrast, tends to say what the recording says in other words: the audio says “it cost me a fortune” and the correct option says “she was surprised by the price”. The reason is simple: the exam wants to know whether you understood, not whether you recognised a sound.
Three concrete habits follow from that tendency:
- When an option repeats a word from the recording, ask what else the speaker said about it. The word usually appears in a sentence that is then denied, qualified or contradicted.
- Look for the paraphrase, not the match. Before listening, think how each option could be said in other words. If the option says “reluctant”, the recording will probably say “I wasn’t keen” or “it took some persuading”.
- Do not close the answer until the extract ends. Last-sentence turns exist precisely for people who decide early.
Two listenings, two different jobs
Because each extract is played twice, most candidates do the same thing twice: listen to the whole thing and hesitate. It is more useful to split the work.
On the first listening, the task is to answer the operation you identified: locate the fact, work out the intention, find the point of agreement or catch the attitude. By the end you should have a candidate and, if possible, one option ruled out.
On the second listening, the task changes: you are no longer looking for the answer, you are looking for the trap. Listen again with the three options in front of you and ask why the other two are there. Many Part 1 distractors lean on something genuinely said in the recording, with a detail changed or only part of the truth; if you find the sentence that justifies it and see why it does not answer the question, your candidate is confirmed. If you find nothing that justifies your candidate, you have latched onto a word.
And one survival rule: if you are still torn between two options when the second listening ends, mark one and move on. The next extract does not wait, and losing the beginning of the next question because you are still chewing on the previous one is the most expensive way to fail: the mark for this question and, on top of it, the mark for the next.
Before the audio starts: read and classify
The reading time before each extract is short, so it pays to have a fixed procedure rather than improvising every time.
- Read the question first and classify it. Is it a fact, a purpose, an agreement or an attitude? With practice this takes two seconds and completely changes how you listen. The options come a second later: before the audio, but once you know what you are looking for.
- Listen carefully to the context sentence. It tells you who is speaking and in what situation, and that narrows the register you are about to hear a great deal: a call to customer services does not sound like two friends discussing a film.
- Read the three options and anticipate the paraphrase. One second per option: how would someone say this in real speech?
- If the question is about agreement, prepare for two voices. Decide in advance that you will wait for the second speaker’s reaction before treating anything as confirmed.
What to practise this week
If you are going to spend time on Part 1, do not spend it listening to more extracts for their own sake. Spend it classifying. Take a practice test, cover the audio, and before listening to anything write next to each question which of the four operations it asks for. Then listen and check two things: whether you classified correctly, and whether the ones you got wrong were “I went with the word I heard” mistakes. When those two numbers improve, Part 1 stops being the part you fail with confidence.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions are there in Part 1 and what are they worth?
Eight questions, one per extract, with three options each. Each correct answer is worth one mark, so Part 1 contributes eight of the thirty raw marks shared across the four parts of the Listening paper.
Do the extracts follow an order of difficulty?
No. They are independent and do not go from easy to hard. An attitude extract with a last-sentence turn can be the second one, and a plainly stated fact can be the eighth. That is why it pays to classify each question rather than assume the part “gets harder as it goes”.
What if I miss the context sentence?
Keep whatever you caught: usually it is enough to know whether there is one speaker or two and whether the situation is formal or informal. And do not freeze: the extract starts straight away, and the written question already tells you a lot about what you are going to hear.
Is it better to read the options before or during the first listening?
Before, even if it is quick. Reading them during the listening splits your attention during the very thirty seconds you need all of it. A quick look beforehand to anticipate paraphrases, and during the audio, listen.
Conclusion
Do this for two or three weeks and Part 1 stops feeling like a thirty-second lottery and becomes a routine: read, classify, listen to answer, listen to take the trap apart, mark and move on. And because attitude and opinion questions come back in Part 3 and Part 4, with more text and more voices, what you train here carries over to the rest of the paper.