Henry Jones
- Mar 1
- 6 min read

Listening: Four Essential Exam Skills

There are four important techniques that you will need to use throughout the listening exam.

Specifically, we will look at:

🎯 Predicting answers
🔍 Predicting and understanding synonyms and paraphrases.
⚖️ Avoiding being tricked by 'distractors'
📝 Understanding fast, connected, and reduced speech
💬 How improving your vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation will improve your listening score

1. 🎯 How to Predict Answers

Before listening, you have 20 - 35 seconds to read the questions and predict some of the answers. Making predictions will help prepare your ear to catch the correct answer.

Look at the following exercise and ... 1) ... think about what type of word/number the answer could be.

Which of the answers (1-8) would be: - nouns - verbs - adjectives - numbers - names - times - prices - days of the week

2) ... if it's a noun/verb/adjective, think about what specific word it could be.

Can you make any reasonable guesses as to the missing words?

source: https://ielts.idp.com/prepare/article-free-listening-practice-questions

Did you make predictions similar to those below?

If you would like to complete the above exercise, here is the audio for the exercise, and here are the transcript and answers.

When preparing for the exam, take your time to practise looking at these gap-fill type exercises and making predictions for 1) the type of word it could be 2) if it's a noun/verb/adjective, what specific word it could be.

On exam day you only have 20 - 35 seconds to read the questions, but if you've practised this skill beforehand, you should be able to make predictions quickly and efficiently.

2. 🎯 How to Predict and Understand Synonyms and Paraphrases

Look at the following multiple choice question.

It is very unlikely that in the recording the speaker will say the exact words you can see in the question (“Stevenson’s was founded in 1926”) - they will most likely use a synonym of ‘founded’ or explain the idea using a paraphrased sentence.

Some possible synonyms for 'founded' could be:

- started

- began

- set up

- launched

This is the answer:

In the recording, instead of "founded", the speaker says "set up" and instead of "he set up Stevenson's" he says "this company", referring back to the first sentence.

When preparing for the exam, take your time to practise predicting synonyms and paraphrases.

you should get into the habit of predicing synonyms and paraphrases in the exam.

Look at questions 11 - 14 and discuss the following question with a partner.

Now look at the audioscript.

How have the ideas in questions 11-14 been expressed in the audio with synonyms and paraphrases?

3. 🎯 How to Avoid being Tricked by 'Distractors'

Low level listeners or candidates who are only listening superficially might think they hear an answer, but it is actually only a ‘distractor’ (or, 'red herring'). These distractors are designed to separate the higher level listeners from the lower level listeners.

In contrast to lower level listeners, higher level listeners will be able to understand the meaning of whole ideas, not just individual words or bits of phrases. They will also be more sensitive to ‘signpost’ language like ‘but’, ‘however’, ‘actually’ and ‘in fact’ as well as rising and falling intonation.

Distractors Exercise

Look at the following examples of typical distractors and answer the following questions.

What is the correct answer?
How might a listener get ‘distracted’ or confused by some other information in the recording?

The first one has been done for you.

1. John decided to study _____. A) Literature. B) Maths. “I’d always wanted to study literature, but in the end I thought that studying maths would be a better idea, so I chose that”