You've just found the ultimate guide to IELTS listening. This is the longest, most detailed, most comprehensive guide to IELTS listening on the internet. It will help you succeed by helping you understand the test format, tips and strategies that only Band 9 students really understand. We're also going to show you where to find real IELTS listening practice tests for free and how to use those practice tests to constantly improve your score to a Band 9. And at the end, we're also going to give you one of our VIP IELTS listening practice tests for free. So all you have to do is sit back, watch this video and get the score that you need for IELTS listening. Let's start off by talking about the IELTS listening test format, because Band 9 students understand things about the format of the test and then adapt their preparation to match that format. The IELTS listening test is the same for general training and academic and Band 9 students understand this and what they do is they use a range of different sources to practice with both academic and general social situations to listen to. They expose themselves to all of these different inputs, which means that on test day they are totally comfortable with what they hear. On test day, you're going to have to answer 40 questions and the goal is to answer 40 out of 40 correctly. So you need to understand the test format. So part one, part two, part three, part four, as you go along these four parts, they progressively get more and more difficult. Band 9 students understand this and what they do to combat this is they will spend a lot more time during their preparation on parts three and four, because parts three and four really separate out the band sevens from the band eights from the band nine. Now normally band eight, band nine students are getting 100% of their answers correct in part one and part two, and then they really focus their preparation on part three and part four in order to feel 100% comfortable and know that they're going to do well on test day. And band nine students also understand the different styles of listening script that they're going to hear on test day. Part one, part two, part three and part four are all different. So let's look at each of those parts. Part one is going to be in a general or social setting with more than one speaker. Normally two speakers and often this will be someone phoning someone else and then form filling or taking down information such as taking down a telephone number or a license plate number or an address. Now this is quite an unusual way to listen to English. In normal situations we are not normally listening to someone writing down a telephone number. So the best way to prepare for this and practice this is actually use the official listening test that you get from Cambridge. I'll show you where to find those for free later on in this video. But if you want to really nail part one, practice those, get used to those practice tests in part one and you should be absolutely fine. Part two gets a little bit more difficult on the listening test. This is where you are again listening to a social or a general situation but only one person is talking at this time. So this could be someone talking about their holiday or reviewing a book or something like that. So what successful students do is they listen to this type of social situation with one person talking when they're practicing their listening. Examples of this could be a podcast where someone is just talking by themselves on the podcast. They are excellent for practicing your listening skills or there are many many YouTube channels like this one where there's one person talking to camera and again this is great practice. What I would recommend doing is pick something that you love. Pick a YouTube channel that you love not a IELTS channel because IELTS is pretty boring or a podcast that you love. Think of something you enjoy listening to and when you are on the bus or on your way to work or on your lunch break you can just listen to this and you are improving your ability to do part two of the listening test. Part three gets a little bit more difficult again. The context switches to an academic context but don't worry you don't have to be an academic person. You don't have to be at university studying a very academic subject to do well in this part. Remember academic and general training exactly the same for the listening test. The key here for part three of the listening test is you're going to have to listen to multiple people speaking at the same time so where can you find that? Successful students usually listen to podcasts so there are lots and lots and lots of podcasts out there where they will invite guests on so two three four guests and they will all debate a topic. Again what I would recommend doing is find a podcast either on your podcast app or on YouTube where you have multiple people discussing an academic topic this could be history or science or health anything that you are mildly interested in and really what you're trying to do is differentiate between the different accents the way that people interject the way that people show their opinion the way that people agree with one another or disagree with one another that's what you should be thinking about when you're practicing for part three of the listening test. Part four is the most difficult part it is an academic context and there is just one person talking normally this will be an academic lecture like someone giving a lecture at a university a great way to practice this is through TED talks go on to ted.com or go to their youtube channel and find some TED talks that you enjoy listening to that you think might benefit you or you're just interested in them and try and listen to how the person gets their points across how they stage what they're saying they are probably going to use words like first or firstly we're going to talk about this and then we're going to talk about that think about how they use this type of language to make what they are talking about clearer to you the listener so now that we know what each part comprises of and we know what's going to come up in each part of the listening test we need to now think about the types of questions that will come up on the listening test because if you know the context how many people are talking in each part and you're comfortable using the different types of questions then you will be in a very very good position to get a band eight or a band nine on test day because you know exactly what is coming up you're not stressed and you're going to feel very comfortable and just listen get the answer write it down and get the score that you need now the most important thing when it comes to the different types of questions is to understand that there are many different types there are more than 10 different types of listening question that you might get for example you might get a multiple choice question you might get summary completion or you might get labeling a map or filling in information the key thing to remember here is that they are asking you a variety of different questions to test a variety of different listening skills therefore the biggest thing that you should not do is just go into the test and have one strategy for all the different types of questions because they're all very very different so what we're going to do in this video later on we're going to give you strategies for all of the different types of questions right now all you need to know is that there are different types of questions that require different strategies later on in the video we're going to give you those but keep watching because there's some really important information coming you will have to listen to the IELTS listening test for 30 minutes this is really crucial to understand because many people for the first time in their lives are listening to 30 minutes of English continuously on test day you do not want the first time that you ever continuously focus on listening to English for 30 minutes you don't want that to be test day many students that we work with have great listening skills but they lack the stamina the focus to listen continuously for 30 minutes so what can you do about that you need to get used to listening and focusing on what you're listening to for long periods of time but what you should not do is just on day one get some practice tests try and listen for 30 minutes and then what will happen is after five or 10 minutes you'll lose focus and then you'll beat yourself up you'll be like oh i'm terrible i'm going to fail don't do that all right imagine you are running a marathon race all right how long is a marathon race i don't know exactly let's say it is 25 miles on day one you don't go and try and run 25 miles you might run five miles then eight miles then 12 then 16 then 20 and then eventually that you get to 25 you should do the exact same thing when you're preparing for the test what i would do is get a little clock like this you know put five minutes on and do some practice tests or listen to a podcast or a TED talk and be completely focused on that actually listen to what the person is saying and then the next day try and go to seven minutes or ten minutes and then the next day 12 minutes or 15 minutes listening is just like a muscle you need to build that up over time all right and if you do that over the course of a few weeks you will be able to 100 focus for 30 minutes and that's what we need if we want a bad nine if we miss one question or two questions or three questions then it's unlikely we're going to get that score you need to be able to focus completely for 30 minutes another common reason why students don't do so well and don't get a band aid or a bad nine is because they're not used to listening to recordings in English once on test day you will only hear the listening once is this because Cambridge are horrible people and they want you to fail no what are they doing they are recreating real life in real life if you go to university the university lecture is not going to repeat themselves multiple times if you get a job and someone asks you to do something they're not going to repeat it multiple times if you are at an airport and you hear you know information about your flight they won't do it five times because you don't know what they are actually saying many English teachers spoil their students most English teachers want their students to like them so what they do is they'll play recordings two three four times this is like a mother or father spoiling their child they want them to do well but they need to get a little harsher in order to get the child to actually perform and not be spoiled that's exactly what you need to get used to when you're practicing when you're listening to podcasts when you're listening to youtube when you're practicing you're listening try to get used to listening to things once and thinking about the answer and what they said once then after that you can check your answer you can listen back but don't make it the very first time on test day that you are listening to things once because you will get a very low score all right these are very very important headphones on test day you will either be given a pair of headphones like this or you will be played the recording from a loud speaker in a room what I would recommend doing is try to book the computer based test because on the computer based test you're going to be in a smaller room with fewer people and you are going to have headphones you're guaranteed to have headphones on the computer based test I've done both both the paper based test and the computer based test and headphones dramatically improve your focus it's not so much it makes the test easier it just makes it easier to hear and it is a listening test so that does improve your score if you live in a part of the world that doesn't have computer delivered IELTS tests and you must do a paper based test try to choose the test center that is going to have the best audio quality available so what you can do is you know when you're booking your test with IDP or the British Council or whoever it is ask them about the quality of the audio tell them that you're worried about that and if on test day and this does happen they either you know give you a terrible set of headphones or the recording is just terrible quality or you're in a big room full of people and you can't hear it complain on test day if you do not complain on test day it doesn't matter you would not believe the number of students that email us IELTS Advantage and say we had a problem with the audio what can I do I don't know I'm not the British Council I'm not IDP you are paying money to IDP you're paying money to the British Council they don't provide you with a good enough service complain to them on test day a big difference between the reading test and the listening test is with the reading test you can manage your own time you can go at your own pace but with the listening test because you are listening to a recording you must go at the pace of the actual listening script this means that there are no such thing as time management tips or time management strategies that are going to help you I've worked with hundreds of Band 9 students who got a Band 9 on the listening test and none of them deployed any sort of time management techniques or strategies on test day when it came to the listening test what they did was they became better at listening they improved their listening skills they became more aware of the different types of listening question and they perfected their strategy for each different type of question if you do that then you will not get lost you don't really need any time management tips and that's what we're going to help you with in the rest of this video finally I have some good news about the IELTS listening test when you're listening to the people talking in the IELTS listening test that is a very unusual way of talking kind of like I am talking to you right now I am focusing on being as clear and as slow as possible and that's what most of the IELTS listening test is like it is not like listening to real native English speakers speaking to one another but what I would recommend doing is not just practice the IELTS listening tests that is important but it is kind of a easy form of IELTS listening what I would do is expose yourself to how real native English speakers actually speak to one another again using real forms of English like podcasts for example and then that is going to give you a huge advantage because there's a saying you know train hard fight easy that comes from the army all right when you are training hard when you're listening to more difficult English the IELTS listening test will be really really easy so most of the band nine students that I work with they are listening to native English speakers talk all the time and that makes the listening test very very easy for them okay so now we know the format of the test let's think about the different tips and tricks that you can use on test day to improve your IELTS listening score tip number one for the IELTS listening test is read the instructions carefully especially when it comes to word count when you look at the questions it might say something like write only one word or write no more than two words and or a number often students get very confused about this so let's show you exactly what this means first of all every word counts so even prepositions even articles they all count so for example airport that's one word the airport that is two words at the airport that is three words the only exception to this are hyphenated words such as x examiner that is one word so if you see a hyphenated word that counts as one all other words count as one okay so I've created a nice little table for you and you can just memorize this table if you get confused on test day and use it during your preparation so that it becomes natural and second nature to you and you don't even have to think about it on test day so the instruction says write one word a correct answer would be for example airport because it's telling you to write one word but if you wrote the airport or airport two different words that would be wrong so if the instruction was write one word and or a number terminal two would be correct because that is one word and a number also the number two would also be correct there because it is one word or a number in terminal two would be wrong because that is more than one word and a number and airport terminal two that would also be incorrect because that is two words and a number so if the instruction was write no more than two words and or a number. Terminal two would be correct. Two would be correct and Heathrow terminal two would also be correct because they are all no more than two words and or a number. Incorrect would be Heathrow airport terminal two because that is more than two words. That is three words and a number. Write no more than three words. Outside Heathrow arrivals. That is three words so that would be correct. Outside Heathrow arrivals tomorrow. That is incorrect because that is more than three words. Now that might sound confusing right now. Often students do find that confusing. The best way to do that is just through practice. Alright so when you're practicing and you see some instructions like that be very careful and think about it and you'll get used to it like anything else. Don't just look at that table and think that's very confusing I won't be able to use it. You will if you practice it. My next tip is to try and do the computer-based listening test. I have done both and I've spoken to many many students that have done both and they find the computer-based test easier for many different reasons. Now first of all it is not going to dramatically improve your score. You're still doing the same test but there are some practical considerations that do make it a little bit easier. So first of all you have to write less. So because it is on a computer screen for example it might be multiple choice you just have to click A, B or C or there will be a drop down menu where you will be able to pick the correct option. That is a lot less time-consuming and you just have to think a lot less and you're reducing the number of different things that you're doing at the same time and that just makes it practically easier. A lot of students have also commented that in the paper-based test they constantly have to you know be looking up and looking down and thinking about what they're doing whereas it is far more natural for them to be listening looking at a computer screen and picking the correct answers. I don't know why but I agree with these students I think it is just a lot easier. You're doing fewer things on test day. Again that's what I think and that's what a lot of students who got a band 9 have said. We've already talked about this in the format part of this video but because you have headphones it is often a lot easier to hear what the person is saying and it's a listening test at the end of the day the better you're able to listen to what is being said the higher your score is going to be. Also a lot of students have just said that it's less stressful doing the computer-based test because there are fewer people in the room. When I did the test I think there were about seven or eight people. Compare that with some of the huge test centers where you know there's 50 to 100 people all doing the test at the same time in a big room. Some people find that extremely stressful and anything that causes stress is normally going to lower your score. And there are other advantages to the computer-based test which we will mention again later in this video.  So what I would recommend doing is use a pencil so that you can easily change your answer. Again speed is very very important you're going to have to go on to the next question and you don't want to be panicking and going oh how do I delete this. The fewer things that you think about on test day the higher your score is going to be. Probably the most common question that we get asked is can I write all in capitals? And my answer is very different from most of the teachers that I see online. So most of the teachers will give you a yes or no answer. If you actually go and search on the internet there are very different views on this and it's very difficult to find the correct information on this and what happens on test day is students overthink this and again the more you think the lower your score is going to be you want all of your brain power think of your brain as a computer or think of your brain as a battery everything that you think about drains that battery. So if you're going into the test thinking should I use capital letters or not capital letters or you know should I put a capital at the beginning of them it's draining your battery and you're not going to spend the time actually just listening and getting the correct answer. So make one decision that will remove all other decisions and that one decision is just write all in capitals. If you do that you don't have to worry about it and then you can focus on getting the score that you need. The next tip is about spelling. Spelling is very very very important. A huge number of students that I've worked with had great listening skills, great strategy, they were ready to get a bad nine but because they were spelling a few words incorrectly they were getting a lower score. So here's a system that we give our students. Number one when you are practicing be very honest with yourselves when you're giving yourself a correct answer or an incorrect answer. If you spelled one letter wrong that is completely wrong. What a lot of students do is they go very easy on themselves and they say oh I spelled it incorrectly but I'll give myself a tick I'll give myself a correct answer I'll spell it correctly on test day. You probably won't so be very honest with yourself. Secondly look at all of your spelling mistakes all the questions that you got wrong because of spelling and put those words into a document.  You can do this with writing as well if you're consistently making writing spelling mistakes. Put those into your doc so you'll have a document with all the words that you spelled incorrectly. Then what you do is you show the correct spelling beside it and then you know once a week or once a month you review those you cover up the ones that are correct and you try to spell those words correctly. Over time you will notice common words that you always spell incorrectly and then you will remove those spelling mistakes and improve your ability to spell these words correctly. My next tip is probably the most important one but the one that sounds really obvious and not very useful. Your job is to find the correct answer how is that useful? Well your job is not to understand every single word and understand everything that is going on in the listening test. Many many students will do a listening practice test and especially in part three and part four there will be words or phrases or maybe a whole sentence that you don't understand and they will panic and they'll think I don't understand this and then they'll get all these questions wrong. Again stress is your enemy you do not want to be very stressed out and you don't want to be second guessing yourself. You don't want to have very low confidence just because you don't understand certain words. Right I'm a native English speaker I am an IELTS teacher from time to time I will listen to IELTS listening tests and there will be a few words in there that I don't understand. The English language is huge there are professors of English at Cambridge University that will not know some words in the IELTS listening test. It is not your job to understand every single word it is your job to get the correct answers so if you hear a word you don't understand you can do two things number one ignore it is it essential that you understand that word is it essential for helping you answer the question if it's not forget about it or number two you can guess the meaning of that word from the context from the words around it from the sentences around it if it's crucial to help you answer the question. If you do that it reduces stress and it improves your vocabulary because you're going to constantly be improving your vocabulary by guessing the meaning of new words. Guess what that is how you learn languages and how you improve vocabulary you hear words you don't understand you guess what they mean you check it later and you have learned a new word so when you hear a new word check back later look at the script in the practice test think about the meaning of that word and you're constantly improving your vocabulary but if on test day you do not understand something do not panic. The next tip that I have is and I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by looking at a real question is prepare for the answers coming all right if I did the test and I didn't prepare for the answers coming and I'm going to show you what that means in a second I would not get a bad line what you want to do is look at the questions and read them before you hear the listening and you will have time to do this and as you practice with real practice tests you will get used to this but let's go through this question and think about what we could do here and how that is going to help us so the first thing that we're going to do here is we're going to think about the type of question that it is so this is a sentence completion question and they want one word only so this is preparing your answers what type of question is coming up and how many words or letters or numbers are going to have to be put in here the next read the title the title is going to give you context this is going to help prepare your brain for what is coming why do we have titles in books why do we have titles in audiobooks why do we have titles in anything because it makes it easier for our brains to digest something if we know what is coming then there are different subheadings here so 19th century manufacturing, transport, retailing this is going to help us understand where in the listening we are it is going to help or prevent us from getting lost then the next thing that we can do is we can think about the types of words that might come up so for the first time people's possessions were used to measure britain's blank so just by looking at the sentence structure here and thinking about the grammar this is probably going to be a noun remember it's only one word and then the next one here developments in production of goods and in so it's going to be something similar to production of goods again it's probably going to be a noun and when they are talking about production of goods we know that the answer is going to be in and around that area you could also predict the answer that might come up it's not always going to be exactly what you predict but often the case it is so for the first time people's possessions were used to measure britain's wealth prosperity gdp so before you even listen to this you're thinking of the types of answers that might come up and that makes it much easier to find the correct answer and i actually checked the back of the book and it is wealth and i haven't done this test before so that shows you i promise i didn't end up messing around it was very very easy to predict that so how do you develop that as a skill well like any skill you practice it you cannot just listen to that tip and then do that for the first time on test day you need to get used to every time that you see a question preparing for it what type of question is it how many words or how many letters or how many numbers am i going to put in there what's the title what types of words might come up predict the word that probably will come up think about the staging what will they be talking about when they're talking about that answer and that is really going to help you and then on test day the band nine students that i work with they don't even think about those things they do them naturally so the next tip is all about focus so we already talked about listening to english for 30 minutes at a time but let's talk about focus in a little bit more detail because being able to listen to something and being a hundred percent focused on what you are listening to are two different things i'm sure that you have been listening to your mother or your wife or your sister or your brother or your husband or whoever it is and they're talking and you kind of lose focus on what they're saying like sorry what they might get annoyed with you a little bit for not paying attention to them but as human beings our brains do not 100 focus on what we're reading or what we are listening to you need to develop that as a skill but the good news is is you can develop it number one we've already talked about that think about listening and focus as a muscle so again get yourself a timer focus on listening for five minutes then the next day 10 then 15 and 20 and build it up as a muscle the second thing is meditation meditation is not only going to help you with focus but it's going to help you with your mental health it's going to help you with your general happiness and it gives you a little bit of a break when you're studying so often students email us and tell us that you know their test is next week or their test is in a few days if that's the case you're probably going to be studying and practicing a lot a good way to break up your practice sessions and your studying sessions is to meditate there are many many apps don't ask me which one there are you know a huge number of apps that you can use or if you know how to meditate already do it for five or ten minutes in between blocks of studying it is going to improve your cognitive ability your everything it is a very very good practice to learn but it definitely helps focus another great way to improve your focus is by reducing stress on test day the number one reason students get stressed is they don't prepare enough they know that they're going to fail or they might fail the students that we work with on our VIP course that get a band 8 8.59 they normally go into the test and it's just a normal day for them they don't feel that much stress why because they are 100 prepared they have done so much practice and learned all of these strategies and practiced all of this to the point where they know because they have got a band 8 or a band 9 10 times during real practice tests they know all they have to do is just put what they have learned into practice now i'm not saying you have to join our VIP course but do not do the test until you are 100 percent ready you will know you're 100 percent ready by doing real practice tests under exam conditions if you are consistently getting the score that you need you're not going to be that stressed but if you need a band 8 and you're constantly getting 6.5 or 7 stop lying to yourself you're not magically going to jump up and score on test day it is better to delay your test or cancel your test you know do it later in the year wait a couple of months and do it when you are totally prepared that is going to mean that you are not thinking about i'm going to fail i'm going to fail you're just totally focused on getting the score that you need i've also worked with a lot of students who couldn't focus and what we did was reduce the number of distractions in their lives the big big distractions that we find are number one social media we literally got them to delete all social media from their phones and we got them to install you know browsers that couldn't access social media sounds extreme but you know these apps are designed to steal your focus another one is news and tv shows and things like that especially the news we have got students to just stop watching the news because you don't want in the back of your brain thinking about you know who has bombed who or you know what the stock market is doing or what weather disaster happened this year just eliminate all of that from your life and you know when you combine those two watching social media all day and just getting news pumped into your brain all day it's impossible to focus another big distraction is people that are draining people in your lives that create more problems than they solve people in your life that make their problems your problems you don't want those people in your life especially when you're doing an aisles test because you know if you're a friend or your loved one is having a huge issue in their life and you have to fix it for them you're not going to be able to prepare for the test and you're not going to be able to focus on test day probably a good idea to cut those people out for life you know but if you can't do that sit down and explain to them that you have a big test you need to focus for a few weeks or a few months and you know as a bonus they might leave you alone entirely but social media news and people with a lot of problems reduce your focus so the next tip is focus on the question that you're doing but think about the next one coming up so what does that mean so practically speaking so for example this question the first part of this question is about the 19th century when they are talking about the 19th century you want to be totally focused in on that part to get the correct answer but you want to have part of your brain thinking about main areas of change manufacturing the industrial revolution because when they start talking about that that is your signal that is the flag to move on to that part and be totally focused on that part now you might think that that's very difficult and it is but let's think about other areas of life where you do that when you're driving a car you are totally focused on the road in front of you and maybe the car in front of you but you're also at your periphery thinking about what is coming in this way what is coming in that way is that kid going to you know ride their bike right in front of me what's happening behind me is someone going to ram in behind me if I break so you're 100 focused on the road in front of you but you also have one part of your brain thinking of other stuff you do this all the time in normal life you need to practice this before test day by looking at real questions and practicing this technique it will feel strange and it will feel difficult when you're doing it but like anything else the more you practice it the easier it becomes and this is why practice doesn't make perfect perfect practice makes perfect when you're practicing you're not just doing tests that's what most students do they just do tests do tests do tests they're like why is my score not improving when you are doing tests you are trying to improve these things you're trying to improve these techniques such as preparing for the questions coming up focusing on the question that you're doing whilst thinking peripherally about the question that is coming up the next tip is you can get a question wrong and still get about nine all right so you can get about nine and get one question wrong why is this important as i've said many many times human brains are not perfect we're not robots the robots have not replaced us yet so you will lose focus from time to time when i did the test the i got the first question wrong i think so the test was about to start and i was looking at the window thinking about where i was going to go for a drink after the test like i was not focused on what i was doing and then the test began and it was a license plate number and i was like oh they're only going to say this once and i've completely missed it there are two things that you can do in that situation 80 percent of students if they missed the first question would panic and think i'm going to mess up my entire test oh let's just let's just leave now let's just go to the bar and get drunk now this is such a stupid thing i'm stupid i'm going to fail all my friends and family are going to think that i'm dumb if you do that you're pretty much guaranteeing that you will fail to get the score that you need what you should do instead is what i did is just think that's fine i've got one of them wrong but i need to focus for the rest of them and get all of the rest of them correct so if you get a question that you either lose focus on or especially in part four you might get a question that is just really really difficult don't beat yourself up and don't obsess about this question guess it put it down and then move on to the next question the next tip for the listening test is keep moving or you're dead so i read a lot of books about history especially military history and the best people in the world at going into a room and killing lots of bad guys are the sas the british special forces they're amazing at going into rooms and just killing everybody in there apart from the hostages and what they call the door is the murder hole and their technique is to move into the room get out of that murder hole and just keep moving until they are safe that is the exact same technique that you need to use during the listening test if you freeze in the murder hole and you stop moving you stop thinking about what you're doing you're dead but if you keep moving and you keep going and you keep thinking then you're going to do very very well and you'll be safe the next tip for the IELTS listening test is always give an answer even if you don't know so a lot of the questions are going to be multiple choice or you know choose a different option even if you don't know you should guess because you know if there's three options you have a 33 and a third chance of getting the right score now if we want a band nine we do not want to be guessing you know most of the questions we want to be answering them correctly but even students that i've worked with that have got a band nine have made a couple of guesses and still got a band nine so there is a strategy that you can use that is going to help you give educated guesses all right these are strategic guesses they are guesses that have a higher chance of getting the correct score than just a third so the first way that you can do this is through elimination all right so let's say for example you're doing this question and you get stuck on question 23 in connection with modern refrigerators both Annie and Jack are worried about a the complexity of the technology b the fact that some are disposed of irresponsibly or c the large number that quickly break down so let's say they're talking about the technology being very complicated and because of this many of them break down but they're not talking about how they are disposed of and they're not talking about that at all what you can do is you can eliminate b and then make a guess is it going to be a or c now again you're only doing this with questions that are very very difficult or you lose focus or you get lost but you've just increased your chances from 33 to 50 percent the next thing you can do is prediction so if we look at this example again for the first time people's possessions were used to measure Britain's wealth you can guess from the context what the correct answer is so even if you lost focus let's say you just started thinking started daydreaming about something while they were talking about that I would write in wealth it might be right it might be wrong but if you write nothing you are guaranteed a hundred percent that it's wrong if you write in something at least you have a chance the next tip is to use the example recording to get used to the voices get used to the accents and get used to the question that they are giving you so in some parts of the listening test they will play an example recording and they normally will be the same people talking with the same accent answering the same type of question so for example it might be writing down a telephone number so listen to that and what it will do is not only will it help you understand how to answer the question it will help you tune in to what the person sounds like especially their accent because sometimes the accent can be quite unusual for you you probably are not going to be able to listen to every single English-speaking accent in the world there are way too many of them but if they do play this example always carefully listen to it because you will tune in to the accent especially if it is an unusual accent the final tip is not to worry too much about accents as i said before the listening test is not like listening to real native English speakers talk to each other if you went into my local coffee shop or my local bar you wouldn't understand 90% of what is being said but when i'm speaking to you i'm an English teacher i'm speaking with a neutral accent very clearly and very slowly that is probably what you're going to hear on the listening test it is much better to spend your time practicing and preparing the different strategies that we're going to talk about in the rest of this lesson than it is to try and perfect the listening of you know the hundreds if not thousands of different English-speaking accents in Ireland and the UK alone there are hundreds of different types of accents you're not going to get that you don't need to worry about that on the listening test familiarize yourself with it you can listen to different podcasts different news shows listen to the local news in America Canada UK South Africa Australia New Zealand Ireland whatever you want to do but don't worry too much about it people are not going to speak in their very very unusual accent in the listening test now let's talk about common traps or tricks or distractors that you might find in the IELTS listening test and there are a series of these that might trick you into giving the wrong answer before we go through all of these i want to talk first about mindset which is very very important a lot of students get frustrated with the listening test especially because they think that IELTS and the people at Cambridge are trying to trick them into getting a lower score than they deserve if you believe that you're going to just give up and you're going to find your preparation really really frustrating we don't want that let's look at what actually is happening what they are doing is they're trying to recreate real life that is what the whole IELTS test is doing it is recreating what will happen when you move to an English speaking country so for example let's say you're working as a doctor or a nurse and they ask you for a particular drug or something like that so you're in the operating theater and they say give me 25 cc's of adrenaline I'm obviously not a doctor that's just an idea I had and then they say no actually we need 50 cc's so what they've done is they've changed the answer there if you gave 25 it would be wrong but by giving 50 and thinking about the trick that they just played on you you will be fine so don't see it as a trick see it as a challenge all of these things that I'm going to talk about now or challenges that they said for you so even if I say trap or trick try and think of challenge it's going to make it much much easier for you to learn this so the first trap that they might set for you or challenge that they might set for you is changing the correct answer from one answer to the next answer normally what this will mean is they will give an answer that could be correct and then later on in the recording it will change it to something different let's look at how they could do that with a real question so if we have a look at this question it says name of station returning to they could say something like we started off in London and then we arrived in Manchester so you are listening out for a place a town a city station and you hear London and then they say well we started off in London and then we arrived later in Manchester because you are hyper focused on trying to find a place or a city you just hear London write down the first thing that you say you need to be aware of this and aware that they might change it so don't just be hyper focused on predicting and finding the correct answer kind of allow yourself to listen to the words and the sentences around what they are saying and make a decision based on that another common trap or challenge could be that they use synonyms or paraphrasing so what happens is you are looking at the question you see a word or phrase in the question and you are listening out for that exact phrase sometimes it will be that exact phrase or that exact word but sometimes it will be a paraphrase or a synonym my synonyms are just the words that mean the same thing but are different for example man male woman female mean exactly the same even in 2023 and they are synonyms of each other so let's look at this example again name of station returning to so instead of station they might use destination or instead of returning they could say return instead of returning to they might use the phrase come back when will you come back so if you're just listening out for station returning to and they say something like coming back to your final destination you're going to get completely lost so you need to keep an open mind when you are looking at the questions don't just think what am i looking for exactly in the question think what could it be what synonym could they use what different phrasing could they use that means the same thing but is a different word another challenge is plurals especially plural nouns so for example let's say you are listening to people offering each other a cup of tea all right so they're having a cup of tea and a very common question in that scenario is do you take sugar so in this scenario sugar is an uncountable noun but then the person might say yes i'll have two sugars or i take two sugars so you have two different words here sugar and sugars the only difference is a little s on the end but one will be correct and one will be wrong and there's two ways that you can overcome this problem one is by listening to what you hear if there is an s on the end or a z on the end then it is probably the plural form you're talking about but also you can think grammatically i take two sugar grammatically is incorrect i take two sugars grammatically is correct so you need to be aware of the pronunciation your listening skills and grammar and spelling all at the same time another challenge is unusual spellings of names or places normally so this happens a lot with popular surnames so last names in english so for example we have very popular names like smith, jones, brown but there are standard spellings of those names and then unusual spellings of those names so for example brown the standard spelling is b-r-o-w-n but an unusual spelling but quite common is b-r-o-w-n-e and you shouldn't worry too much about this because if there is an unusual spelling normally comes in part one where someone is on a call with someone they're on a phone call and they're asking them for their name if it is an unusual spelling of their name or maybe a city or a town or something like that then they will spell it out they'll say my name is brown and how do you spell that b-r-o-w-n-e so the trap that a lot of students fall into is they hear brown oh i know how to spell brown they'll write it down immediately as the standard spelling and then they will miss the person spelling it out so especially in part one if the people that you're listening to ask for a spelling or spell anything out then you should listen exactly to how they spell it and then put it in there a challenge that many people have when i am talking to them is my similar sounding surname and this is a big trap that a lot of students fall into there are words that sound very similar to each other so my surname is pale p-e-l-l and every time i meet someone new they're like bell tell del hell because it's all they all sound kind of similar again you don't need to worry about this too much because this normally comes in part one and if the person has an unusual surname like me what i will do when i'm on the phone with someone is i will spell it out to them i'll say p for papa e for echo l for lima l for lima again how you overcome this is by listening not to the first thing the first word that you hear mr pale you write bell listen out if they spell it and write the exact spelling the final trap that a lot of students fall into is not being aware of not listening out for negatives and double negatives so what are those well a negative is when you use a word like not or didn't or wasn't you also need to be aware of double negatives in english this can be very very unusual if your native language doesn't have this so for example not bad in english means good not negative bad negative not bad means good i have heard some double negatives from time to time on practice tests but most of the time it is just like not or wasn't or didn't so what does that mean let's have a look at a particular question so here we have a customer satisfaction survey satisfaction with journey least satisfied with so imagine someone is on a call with another person they're asking about their journey what were you least satisfied with if they said food wasn't bad or they said what did you think of the food and they said not bad some people might hear that and think that the food was what they were least satisfied with but they're actually saying the opposite they're saying the food was quite good often what will happen is they will use a negative and then they will say the correct answer after that so for example they might say something like well the food wasn't bad but the drinks were terrible so in that sentence the food wasn't bad but the drinks were terrible what they were least satisfied with is the drinks the main thing to remember is not all questions will have these challenges but you do need to be aware of them let's use a driving analogy again when you're driving a car you are not hyper hyper focused on what is happening right at the front of the car you are kind of focused on that it does have most of your attention but you're also paying attention to the periphery you're paying attention to what's happening behind you to your right and to your left that should be the same thing that you're doing acoustically audibly when you are listening to the transcripts so most of your attention should be on what's the correct answer but pay attention to what is going on around what you think might be the correct answer because it might change they might spell it out differently there could be a synonym or it could be a negative and that's not actually the correct answer the correct answer is coming up you're probably very confused now and very frustrated but with practice this becomes much much easier let's show you where you can find real practice tests okay so in this part is extremely important more students fail the IELTS test by using fake unreliable tests than anything to do with their listening ability or their English ability about 90% of the tests that you'll find online on on youtube are actually fake don't worry we're going to show you how to spot the fake ones so you will know 100% of the time whether they're real or not and we're going to show you exactly where you can find real free practice tests I've also put together links for all of the places on the internet where you can find these real free practice tests that are reliable I've put them all into one document and I put them in the description below for you just to make it really handy for you but before I give you that before I show you the four places where you can find these reliable ones I want to talk about why fake tests are so dangerous because when I just show people where to find the reliable ones most of the time they will use those too quickly and then they'll go and use the fake ones the fake ones are produced by people who don't know what they're doing all right I'm not criticizing anyone or saying I'm better than anyone but there is a huge difference between a teacher that is trying to help people improve their scores and a youtuber who is trying to increase the number of views on their channel or a blogger who is trying to increase the number of views on their website more than 90 of the tests that you'll find online are fake these people don't care if you improve your score so they don't put as much effort or they don't even have the required expertise to make reliable tests so what is reliable reliable means that the test that you do today is going to be the same difficulty and the same challenge as test day and it's extremely difficult to actually do this and it takes a very long time and that's why these people don't do it because anything difficult and takes a long time most people don't want to do that so why is this a problem either the test will be way way too easy or way way too difficult if they're too easy you will be full of false confidence you'll go into the test thinking i'm going to get a band nine i've got a band nine multiple times and then you'll get your test score and it's like 5.5 that's because you were doing tests that were too easy even worse a lot of people will not even do the test because the tests are way too difficult if you get tests that are too difficult you will lose confidence completely you will give up on your dream of moving to a new country because you think that you're not good enough i've seen this many many times where students will email us and say i'm terrible at listening then we'll give them a real test and it turns out that they're pretty good at listening they were just using fake tests and the final reason is a lot of these are completely misleading with questions that you'll never see in different formats and what happens is you are used to this fake format and then you'll go in on test day and you'll be doing a test that you've never seen before that you're completely unfamiliar with our goal with you guys is that on test day you are completely comfortable that you know exactly what is coming up because you're only using real reliable tests so there are four places and four places only that have reliable tests and they're all free the first one is IDP on the IDP website you'll find lots of free practice tests the second one is the British Council same thing the next one is isles.org it's a wee bit more difficult to find those on the isles.org website but i'll give you those links below and then finally Cambridge English they do do these expensive ones expensive for most people but they also have some free ones on their website as well now i'll give you the links but you might be watching this video a few years in the future and they're constantly adding free stuff to their website so the easy way to find this information at any time is just go to google put in IDP or the British Council or isles.org or Cambridge into Google and then put plus isles listening tests Google will take you to the latest genuine free tests anything else even if it's your favorite youtuber or your favorite isles guru anything else is not reliable it doesn't matter if these people have millions of subscribers it doesn't matter if they have huge isles companies if they are not one of those four organizations then you are running a huge risk especially with youtube most of the youtube channels that have isles listening practice tests say that they're real they are completely fake they're either too easy too difficult or completely misleading or a combination of those do not use them you are wasting your time now when i say that to students what comes back is well there aren't enough free practice tests what you want to do is completely change your strategy and your mindset towards practice you will not get better by just practice practice practice practice practice practice does not make perfect perfect practice makes perfect now let's give you the perfect practice strategy so let's show you how to practice your way to a band nine this strategy this system that i'm about to show you has produced hundreds and hundreds of band nine students and it is the best isles practice strategy that i'm aware of and i've helped hundreds if probably thousands of students get a band nine so you'll need something first you'll need the practice tests probably don't get ones that are covered in coffee like mine buy new ones buy them from a reliable bookshop don't buy them you know photocopies of them they might be fake when i say this to students you know if you come from a poor background i totally understand but you know which is more expensive spending ten twenty dollars on reliable tests or wasting two hundred two hundred and fifty dollars on failing the test don't see this as a cost see it as an investment all right also don't download the pdfs that you'll find online they are often fake i'm not saying this because i make any money from these i'm not affiliated or associated with cambridge at all i make zero dollars if you buy these the reason why i'm telling you this is i care about you improving your scores that is the best way to do it so once you have your practice tests you're going to do three practice tests under exam conditions what does exam conditions mean well what it means is you've never seen that test before don't buy the book and on your way home like read the questions and kind of familiarize yourself with it and look upwards you don't know you want to recreate exactly what is going to happen on test day so don't cheat and time exactly the same time as what will happen on test day and you're going to do three of them because what you want before you ever book the test is you are consistently three times in a row getting the score that you need or probably half a band or a band above the score that you need if you can do that three times in a row then you're pretty much guaranteed to get that score on test day not only is this going to be great for you because you know that you're going to get the score that you need but on test day you will have completely removed any stress and you will be able to perform to the best of your ability because do you get nervous and stressed out when you're tying your shoelaces no because you know that you can do it you know that you've done it thousands of times before our students who do this system or use this system they've got the score that they need so many times that doing it is just like tying their shoelaces but if you don't get the score that you need three times in a row you need to move on to the next part of this system the next part of this system is going to the back of the book find the audio script the transcript of the test you just did and find the correct answers and what you're going to do is you're going to correct your test honestly you're going to check why you got each question wrong so to do that you can just look at the question think back to the recording but more importantly what you should do is look at the actual audio script and think about why you got it wrong and the aim of this exercise is to find your weaknesses to spot patterns what are your common weaknesses so let's go through a few of them just to make you aware of what you should be listening for what you should be looking for so a very common one is spelling you know be honest with yourself you should give yourself honest marking of your answers if multiple ones are spelt incorrectly don't give yourself a tick that's wrong if you're noticing that you are failing to get the score that you need because of multiple spelling errors then that's good news because it's pretty easy to fix that you might also spot that particular question types and we'll talk about those later in the video are causing you a problem so for example every time you get a multiple choice question you mess that up most of them are wrong or every time you get a maps question or a diagram question that you get most of those wrong that's a strategy issue it's not that your listening skills have an issue there's nothing wrong with your language probably you just need a strategy that works practice that strategy and then you will have no problems on test day you might also think back and you might have got a few wrong in a row when you lost focus so for example when I did the test and I was looking at the window looking at the birds and thinking about what I was going to do later that evening and I got the first question wrong not because there's anything wrong with my listening or my English but because I just completely lost focus if that is your issue again that's good news because you can improve your focus I talked about that earlier in the video a very very common problem is students will come back to me using this system and they'll say I can't find the particular reason I don't know what my weakness is if that's the case it's probably vocabulary so what you can do is you can look back look at the question but really read the audio script and if there were a lot of words or phrases that you have never heard before and you don't understand and that it was causing the issue you couldn't find the correct answer because you didn't understand the words then that is a vocabulary issue not really a listening issue you need to improve your vocabulary and I'll put a vocabulary improvement plan into the description so the last step is the step that most students don't like but it's where you see the most improvement take that weakness and work on it turn each weakness into a strength don't do more practice tests until you have improved that strength so for example if you have a huge issue with spelling doing more practice listening tests will not improve your spelling if you have a problem with vocabulary doing more practice tests will not magically improve your vocabulary you need to focus in on that and if you have any issues or you need help with that feel free to get in touch with us we'll either give you free resources or we'll talk to you about maybe joining one of our courses but we always have ways of helping you improve your weaknesses so feel free to get in touch now let's give you the step-by-step strategies that we give our VIP students that many of them have used to get a band nine so before we give you these step-by-step strategies let's look at how our students use them because what you cannot do is just look at the strategy once and then go and apply it on test day you need to do a few different things so what we're going to do is show you real questions and these questions that we're going to look at are maps and multiple choice there are other IELTS listening question types and we're going to show you where you can find strategies for all of them at the end but we're going to focus on these two because these are the two that help students the most these are the ones that students worry about and we want to reduce your stress and anxiety as much as possible so before we look at the questions let's look at how our students use these strategies so number one what they think about is what are the unique problems what are the specific issues that are related to these questions so for multiple choice for example one of the issues is that all of the options look the same or they look similar that is a unique problem you need to be aware of that so that on test day when you see it you'll be able to conquer that problem you'll be able to solve that problem or with maps what is very difficult for people is to visualize in their brain walking through that area or walking through that map that is a unique problem so we first need to think about what are those unique problems and then how do we solve them and then how do we use the strategy and the strategy is designed to overcome all of these problems and then all you have to do is just practice using that strategy until it becomes habit until it becomes second nature you learn it by heart don't go into the test trying to think of these strategies because we want to reduce thinking as much as possible go into the test knowing the strategies automatically so when you're driving a car if you've been driving for many years you don't think about signal check your mirror how to change gears how to use the pedals you just use them automatically that's the same approach that you should have if you want to band nine towards the strategies so let's start off by looking at maps so in the test you might get a question like this where they will show you a simple map or a diagram normally it is taking you through a tour of somewhere so you will hear a guide telling you where to find things or where to go during this tour or taking you on a tour of this place in this example it is a park but it could be a library it could be a university campus it could be a shopping center anywhere at all that you know you might get a tour around let's think about the key problems associated with listening maps the first one is not being familiar with the specific language used to describe maps for example you might hear someone say to the east or in the west you might hear someone instead of saying next to adjacent to for example so you don't want to be thinking what do these things actually mean and being totally confused so you need to familiarize yourself with these words and phrases and what i'll do is i'll put a link below in the description and the description will go through all of these if there are any on that list that you don't understand look up the meaning of it and get used to listening to those and understanding those it'll make your job much much easier the next problem that a lot of students face when it comes to maps is they're doing too many things at the same time now think about what you're doing when you're doing a maps question you're not only listening you're thinking about this unusual vocabulary you're having to visualize imagine yourself walking through the map you have to understand what is being said you have to understand the map you have to decide the correct answers all at the same time and you need to make notes now we just talked about learning how to drive a car and how easy it is after a few years of driving it but when you were first learning how to drive that car everything seemed very very difficult when you were a little girl or a little boy just tying your shoelaces seemed very very difficult when we do new things that are new to our brains it is difficult to do these things but how do you overcome that problem you overcome that problem through practice you practice these maps questions use the strategy that we're going to give you the strategy is designed to make everything much much easier i know i've said this before don't look at this video once and then think i'm going to get a band nine that's not how it works now the third big problem is visualization what do i mean by visualization visualization refers to being able to generate visual maps in your brain so if they are describing this park the best students the students that get the highest score can imagine themselves at going through the south gate they can imagine walking past the lake they can imagine seeing an adventure playground in their mind i've worked with a lot of different students over the years some students find this very very easy they have a visual brain it seems and other students find this nearly impossible if you find it easy you don't need to worry about this but if you find it difficult one of the things that i have found works really well with students is removing this negative self-talk so what a lot of students have said to me is i'm not good at this and really they're not bad at it it's not that that is an issue they're just creating an excuse in their head in other words they are allowing themselves to blame this so that when they get a low score they can say it's because i'm not good at visualization it's because i'm not good at maps really if they were truthful with themselves they just haven't put enough work in to improve visualization or improve maps if you learn this strategy that i'm going to give you and use it multiple times everything will become much much easier the second thing that i would say is if you struggle with visualization do this so instead of trying to get all the answers correct listen to the recording and look at the map and only focus on visualizing what is happening this is going to make it much much easier and you will convince yourself it's kind of tricking yourself into understanding that anyone can do this it's not that you're bad at visualization it is just that you are worried about the test you're stressed and naturally you will create excuses just listen to it think about where you're going around the park or museum or whatever it is and you will trick yourself into understanding that you're quite good at visualization okay now let's look at the strategy for listening maps step number one read the question carefully read the instructions carefully so for this particular map we need to write the correct letter a to h we're not writing the actual place names we're not writing old museum north gate we're not writing lake we are picking the letter and putting it in here i know that sounds very very obvious and i'm wasting your time but you would not believe the amount of students that deserve a band nine that don't get it because they don't read instructions make it a habit to really focus in on the question and the instructions step number two look at the map and understand the map so for example if we were to look at this one what is it it is a park so there is one big circular path there's a little path that goes off here there are trees there's a lake in the middle there's a museum in the middle there's two gates south gate and north gate adventure playground here glass houses here just basically look at the map and understand it i know that sounds super obvious but again when you're under stress and you're tired and you're getting towards the end of the test a lot of students don't do this next look at the different options and think about what these might be what might they say about these things so let's start at the south gate g there are trees so they might say the woods in the south or south woods or forest beside the south gate that might be those things so you're thinking about what they might say if we move up here a so think about what they might say to get to a so if we start at the south gate it will say if we turn left to go past the lake and there is a path or there is a trail or there's a footpath on your left that's going to show you where you're going to go to get to a d it could be the museum it could be the old museum but it might be new museum or new building or toilets or cafe beside the museum b and c are going to be next to the adventure playground b is going to be as you go through the north gate so they might start at the north gate c is going to be next to the adventure playground f will be beside the glass house it might be the glass house or it might be something next to the glass house and then h might be something next to the glass houses or it could be the wood or the forest or something like that so you're thinking about what it could be but you're also thinking about if i walk through this map what directions or what things will i hear that will get me to each of these and this might sound like it will take a lot of time and you won't have time to do it but the more you do it the quicker it will become until it becomes natural so imagine you're standing at the north gate what direction would you go if you were going to go to a so if we're standing at the north gate they probably will say if you follow the path to your right so we're standing here we move down and that will get us to a if you go left you will see the adventure playground you'll see the museum in front of you you want to actually visualize walking around this thing before you even hear it that is going to make it much easier for you to visualize as you are listening to it now we want to look at the different options here so 11 to 16 so we want to think about two things number one will there be any synonyms so cafe what is the synonym of cafe coffee shop maybe restaurants toilets there aren't many there are a lot of synonyms for toilets but they might say something like if you need to go to the bathroom so think about those synonyms and then think about where might these things be are there any obvious places where they would put the cafe or where they would put the toilets they're probably not going to put the toilets deep in the middle of the woods maybe they might do i don't know but it's probably more convenient for them to put the toilets beside the old museum or beside the glass houses or beside the adventure playground same with the cafe the cafe is probably going to be next to the old museum for example wild flowers so wild means people are not really curating it people are not doing anything to it so that's probably going to be out of the way it's probably going to be a or g or maybe h so by following all these steps before the recording even starts you're just making everything easier and easier and easier if you take two students one is really really good at listening and they don't follow those steps or you have a student that is not very good at listening but they follow those steps the student that is not very good at listening will get a higher score than the student that is good at listening that's how powerful these strategies are and the next step is to listen to the beginning of the talk very very carefully because this is going to tell you where the talk begins so they might begin at the south gate here or they might begin at the north gate those are the two obvious places where they will begin you must go through a gate you must go through an entrance but it's not guaranteed probably will happen and if they start at the north gate then if they say to your right that is going to be different from to your right at the south so if we have a look here if they start at the south gate to your right are trees h and glass houses but if we start at the north gate to your right we're going down here towards a so you need to really listen carefully to the beginning so that you understand where you're going so now the recording is starting you want to try to visualize actually walking through these places you can close your eyes if you want probably not a great idea because you have to take notes but try to actually walk down the path try to actually imagine that you're walking past the glass house past the lake what is to the right of the lake what is to the left of the lake as we go past the adventure playground what is here what if they're talking about a bend in the road what are they talking about here this is really going to help you and as you are listening you can make notes if it's paper-based test and think about what the correct answers might be the next step is to be very careful with traps or distractors or tricks they might play on you for example they might say let's start off at the south gate and to your left used to be the cafe but we moved it next to the old museum so if you put g for cafe you would be wrong they said we used to have it there but we moved it over here they will often talk about things closing down they move things they might be building something in the future so they might say the opposite they might say well we're going to build a cafe a new cafe to the left of the south gate here but that's going to take a few years if you want something to eat you should go next to the old museum the right answer is going to be d so they're not really trying to trick you they're just setting you little challenges to help determine who's really band nine who's band eight who's band seven who's band six the next thing to be aware of is sign posting language so sign posting language is things like let's start off at the south gate they're little flags little indications about where they are so let's start off at the south gate and if we go to the left here you will see the beautiful lake now let's go back so they're going back here and let's go past the glass house let's finish off at the north gate think about this sign posting language literally think of it as the signposts on the street they're giving you directions this is going to help you understand where you are navigate the map and then finally choose the correct answers and if it's paper-based transfer them over if it is computer-based just choose the correct answer if it's computer-based it will normally be just a drop-down menu with a a b c d e f on it now again i know i'm repeating myself do not watch this video i think i've mastered iot's listening maps questions get some practice tests get real practice tests we'll show you those in the video and practice that strategy and it will become much much much easier a lot of the students that i work with they say i hate maps i'm not good at maps well how many times if you actually practice the strategy once or never also what you should do when you are practicing maps and practicing these strategies is go slow all right if you need to rewind and play the recording multiple times in this scenario that is absolutely fine because what you're doing here is you're trying to learn the strategy you're not trying to perfect the correct answers you're not trying to judge your ability start off very very slow the goal is for you to master the strategy and become comfortable with maps and then get a little bit faster a little bit faster until you are at exam speed again using the driving analogy you don't go and drive 100 miles an hour in lesson one of your driving test now let's think about the strategy for multiple choice so multiple choice questions are going to look like this will normally be a series of questions there will be a question and then there will be three or four options your goal is to pick the correct answer so let's think about unique problems and give you some unique tips for IELTS listening multiple choice questions the first thing you should do is when you see multiple choice questions as soon as you finish the questions before move on and read the multiple choice questions it's crucial that you understand the difference between each of the different options and you understand the questions that are coming up what a lot of students do is they might be you know focusing on this they finish this section and they're so worried about did I get the correct answer here that they don't move on and read these questions let's say for example you have completely messed up this question it is a much better strategy just to give an educated guess for these questions and move on and understand these because if you think oh my god I've messed up these I'm going to fail I'm going to mess up my whole life and then you focus on these and you don't move forward then you've probably got these wrong and you're probably going to get all of these wrong all right if you mess these ones up go and give an educated guess give your best answer and then move on quickly because you really do need to read all of these and understand all of these next is a good idea to underline or think of the keywords in each question so what I like to do is focus on keywords within the question so 21 22 23 24 so that will be here here here and here within each question what are the keywords so discover and reading then we need to look at the three options and think about the keywords within each of the three options so why were they first created how was the ice kept frozen and where the next step is to think about the difference between each of the three options so for this one it's quite obvious let's have a look at the last one good value for money useful variations more useful than domestic appliances so as you can see these two are quite similar this one's talking about money and it being good value for money these two are both talking about usefulness so they're very very similar so you need to think okay both of these are talking about usefulness but what's the difference between the usefulness of each of these this one's talking about there being lots of variations useful variations whereas this one is a comparison it is comparing that there are more they're more useful than other domestic appliances so it's comparing refrigerators fridges to other appliances such as a vacuum cleaner a hoover a toaster a kettle all of those things whereas b is talking about just domestic fridges and they're being lots of different types of fridges so by underlining the keywords and thinking about the differences that makes it much easier to think about what they're saying the next thing to remember is that you should not think about what is the first answer that i hear and write down the first answer that i hear so let's take the first question for example what did any discover from reading about ice houses why they were first created so in the recording they might talk about why they were first created or how they were first created but that might not be one of the options that relates to what did any discover from reading about ice houses she might have listened to something or her dad or her mother told her why they were first created and then later she talks about she was reading about where they were located if you just note down the first one that you hear and you don't think about the specific question then you're going to be in trouble so it is not a listening test write down the first thing that you hear that is not what a listening test is for multiple choice it is not just a listening test it is a thinking test so you need to read the question understand the question and then think about related to the recording what is the correct answer it's not a listening test it is a listening and thinking test the next thing is what you should not do do not focus in on one question get lost panic and then miss the rest of the questions so for example if you were doing 21 what did any discover from reading about ice houses and you lose focus or you get confused or you don't understand what's going on then it is very very important that you just leave that question make an educated guess and move on to the next ones because what happens is you miss that you lose focus and you focus in on that and you're like oh my god I just missed that and then you're like okay which one should I choose and then the recording keeps going and keeps going and you've just messed up 22 23 and 24 they will be in order so you need to decide what the correct answer is be decisive I know that's difficult for many people in the world to be decisive and choose the correct answer but if you don't choose an answer you're sacrificing the rest of the questions the next thing is be very careful about qualification statements these are words like but or however so if we go down to 24 she might say something like yeah generally they're good value for money however in recent years or but recently they've become very very expensive so you might hear the first part of that sentence and think oh good value for money and you mark that as the correct answer but then she says but but however changes her mind qualifies what she's about to say and you've just messed the whole thing up so listen out for those words but or however and if you hear them think about what the whole sentence means not just the first part of the sentence okay now that we know what's going to come up let's think about our step-by-step strategy for multiple choice questions number one always never change is whatever the question is read the instructions carefully choose the correct letter a b or c i know that's very obvious and you're a very intelligent person but make sure that you read the instructions the next step is read each question and think about what is actually being asked so let's say 24 for example what do jack and annie agree regarding domestic fridges not what do they think separately what do they agree on if you don't read the question it's going to be very difficult for you to find the answer to number 24 because the keyword there is agree and that's the next step highlight keywords the next step is to look at each option and understand the difference between each option next is to think about any synonyms or paraphrasing that you might hear so for example it took a long time to become popular a long time could be 50 years 100 years they might say it took forever popular they might say famous or widely used or used by the masses there are many many things that might come up now you're not going to be able to sit there and think about synonyms and paraphrasing forever but just try and be aware of them and think of the obvious ones don't start off with 21a and try and think of 20 different synonyms for the word created just think of the obvious one created made keep moving keep going through that then the next one if you can predict the correct answer this is a little bit difficult for multiple choice questions so i wouldn't try and do this too much because often the three answers are very very possible but if you have time try and make predictions but if you can't predict anything don't worry too much about it now the listening is going to start what you're listening out for are keywords synonyms paraphrasing so don't just listen for the keyword listen for the synonym of that keyword then there you will know when they're talking about that so for example what did annie discover from reading about ice houses so she might literally say when i was reading about ice houses or she might say i read a book or i was studying when you hear that you know okay she's going to start talking about the different options then listen for the different keywords within the different options and pick the correct answer that brings us on to the next step listen to the whole section so the section where she's talking about reading about ice houses do not listen for the first thing that she says listen to the whole section and then decide your correct answer because there will be distractors she might change her mind she might talk about other things you're trying to break the recording down into four parts so there's four parts here there's four questions you need to break the recording down into four parts okay she's going to talk about this listen to that whole part choose the correct answer then 22 listen to that whole part choose the correct answer and continue in that fashion if you think that you'll find the correct answer put a tick beside it so you think probably is this one but keep listening because she might change your mind or the answer might change but if you are a hundred percent sure at the end choose that as your correct answer and finally the final step make an educated guess if you're not sure if you're not sure pick the one that you think is the highest chance of being correct move on to the next one and that's you done Hey Chris here from IELTS Advantage and in this special video what we're going to do is give you an IELTS listening practice test for free so what this video is going to do is give you that listening test so that you can practice your listening skills at home and what we're going to do at the end of the video is give you the answers so the rest of the video will be the listening test and then at the end I'm going to give you those answers so good luck and I'll see you at the end for the answers IELTS listening part one hello there and welcome to the Klein Museum which was the actual home of Mr Klein and his family before he went on to be the famous author we all know him as today before we get started there are some questions I'd like to ask you for our records would that be okay with you sir yes I'd be more than happy to help out that's great thank you first of all what's your name my full name is John Horton John Hort could you spell your surname for me please of course it's H-O-R-T-O-N Horton it's actually quite a popular name where I come from and where exactly was it that you come from I just flew in from London yesterday specifically to come visit here that's so exciting well it's great to have such a dedicated fan turn up at the museum the next thing I need to ask you is for your phone number as our director has plans to take some special exhibits on tour next year that sounds very interesting I definitely like to be kept informed about that my number is 064 145 354 064 145 354 is that right that's it exactly got it thanks and next could you just tell me if it's your first visit to the Klein Museum yes well actually my parents did bring me here when I was quite young and I don't actually remember it but technically this is my second time being here oh my so your whole family are Klein fans then yes definitely it was my parents who got me started on him and what's your favorite Klein book I love all of his popular ones like hay day and the knocking but my absolute favorite has got to be the final push which wasn't as popular as the others but really left me with the lasting impression I know exactly what you mean it really is surprising that it isn't better known and while you're visiting will you require the services of our in-house photographer no that won't be necessary are you aware that personal cameras are not allowed into the museum oh really I wasn't actually well in that case I suppose I better how much does it cost one photo is five dollars but you can get five for just ten dollars which option would suit you best I'll go with one photo as I really only need it as a reminder of my visit here this is a bit embarrassing actually what's that I need to put today's date on the form but I actually can't remember what date it is today that's nothing to worry about well I flew in yesterday which was the 15th of February so that makes today the 16th of February okay so thank you for your patience and now let's get started with the tour as you can see the main entrance is furnished with these standard double doors from the era and lead us directly to the guest room which is the largest room in the house this is in fact the very same room where he signed his very first publishing deal back in 1894 at the opposite end of the room we have the fireplace in the center where he and his family would gather during the cold winters to keep warm on the right of the fireplace is the entrance to the utility room but unfortunately we don't have any of the objects that were stored there by the client family as the house has changed hands on several occasions before it was finally turned into a museum in his honor then on the left of the door that leads into the kitchen you can see this hatch that was used as the serving window as was customary so as not to have the staff interacting with the guests if you follow me through to the kitchen here you can see the stove is placed directly against the wall at the back of the fireplace and this is because when the fire is lit the heat can be used in the oven of the stove and on the left the sink is located directly under the window so that this area was well illuminated for preparing food and washing the crockery at the back of the kitchen is the doorway to the bedroom in those days beds weren't as popular as they are now so people slept on thin wooden mats laid on the ground like the ones you see here and the whole family would sleep here together except for on the coldest nights when they would move to the guest room to benefit from whatever heat was left coming from the evening fire at the back you'll notice this little cubby which may look like an ensuite at first but is in fact the office of our great Mr Klein as he found this to be the quietest location in the house and could focus on his work without interruption finally if you could just follow me back through the kitchen here we can exit through the back door of the house to the woodshed where the Klein family stored well obviously their wood however it was the staff that would have been the only ones that really had any reason to be back here and that pretty much concludes our tour does anyone have any questions they'd like to ask i else listening part two the first thing is that clean energy has been increasing this is electricity from clean energy sources over the last 20 years but when you look at the percentage of global electricity from clean energy sources it's actually been in decline from 36 percent to 31 percent and if you care about climate change you gotta go in the opposite direction to a hundred percent of our electricity from clean energy sources as quickly as possible now you might wonder come on how much could five percentage points of global electricity be well it turns out to be quite a bit it's the equivalent of 60 nuclear plants the size of diablo canyon california's last nuclear plant or 900 solar farms the size of topaz which is one of the biggest solar farms in the world and certainly our biggest in california well a big part of this is just simply that fossil fuels are increasing faster than clean energy and that's understandable there's just a lot of poor countries that are still using wood and charcoal as their main source of energy and they need modern fuels but there's something else going on which is that one of those clean energy sources in particular has actually been in the decline in absolute terms not just relatively and that's nuclear you can see its generation has declined seven percent over the last 10 years now solar and wind have been making huge strides and so you hear a lot of talk about how it doesn't really matter because solar and wind is going to make up the difference but the data says something different when you combine all the electricity from solar and wind you see it actually barely makes up half of the decline from nuclear well let's take a closer look in the united states over the last couple of years really 2013 2014 we prematurely retired for nuclear power plants they were almost entirely replaced with fossil fuels and so the consequence was that we wiped out almost as much clean energy electricity that we get from solar and it's not unique to us and people think of california as a clean energy and climate leader but when we looked at the data what we found is that in fact california reduced emissions more slowly than the national average between 2000 and 2015 what about germany they're doing a lot of clean energy but when you look at the data german emissions have actually been going up since 2009 and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020 the reason isn't hard to understand solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time which means that when the sun's not shining the wind's not blowing you still need power for your hospitals your homes your cities your factories and while batteries have made some really cool improvements lately the truth is that they're just never going to be as efficient as the electrical grid every time you put electricity into a battery and you take it out you lose about 20 to 40 percent of the to 40 percent of the power that's why when in california we tried to deal with all the solar we brought online we now get about 10 percent of our electricity from solar when the sun goes down and people come home from work and turn on their air conditioners and their tv sets and every other appliance in the house we need a lot of natural gas backup so what we've been doing is stuffing a lot of natural gas into the side of a mountain and that worked pretty well for a while but then late last year it sprung a leak this is eliso canyon and so much methane gas was released it was the equivalent of putting a half a million cars on the road it basically blew through all of our climate commitments for the year well what about india so sometimes you have to go places to really get the right data so we traveled to india a few months ago we met with all the top officials solar nuclear the rest and what they told us is they said we're actually having more serious problems than both germany and california we don't have backup we start of it we say we want to get to 100 gigawatts by 2022 but last year we did just five and the year before that we did five so let's just take a closer look at nuclear the united nations intergovernmental panel on climate change has looked at the carbon content of all these different fuels and nuclear comes out really low it's actually lower even than solar and nuclear obviously provides a lot of power 24 hours a day seven days a week during a year a single plant can provide power 92 of the time and what's interesting is that when you look at countries that have deployed different kinds of clean energies there's only a few that have done so at a pace consistent with dealing with the climate crisis so nuclear seems like a pretty good option but there's this big problem with it which all of you i'm sure are aware of which is that people really don't like it there was a study a survey done of people around the world not just in the united states or europe about a year and a half ago and what they found is that nuclear found is that nuclear is actually one of the least popular forms of energy even oil is more popular than nuclear and while nuclear kind of edges out coal the thing is people don't really fear coal in the same way that they feared nuclear which really operates on our unconscious so what it was that we fear i mean there's really three things there's the safety of the plants themselves the fears that they're going to melt down to cause damage there's the waste from them and then there's the association with weapons and i think understandably engineers look at those concerns and they want to look for technological fixes i mean that's why bill gates is in china developing advanced reactors why 40 different entrepreneurs are working on this problem and and i myself have been very excited about it we did a report how to make nuclear cheap in particular the thorium reactor shows a lot of promise and so when the climate scientist james hansen asked if i wanted to go to china with him and look at the chinese advanced nuclear program i jumped to the chance we were there with mit and you see berkeley engineers and you know i had in my mind that the chinese would be able to do with nuclear what they did with so many other things just start to crank out small nuclear reactors on assembly lines because ship them up like iphones or mac books and send them around the world i would get one at home in berkeley but what i found was somewhat different the the presentations were all very exciting and very promising they have multiple reactors that they're working on the time came for the thorium reactor and a bunch of us were excited they went through the whole presentation they got to the timeline and they said we're gonna have a thorium molten salt reactor ready for sale to the world by 2040 i else listening part three so let's look though at the four choices that we are making right now um the first one the most by far the most consumed uh seafood in america and in much of the west is shrimp shrimp in the wild is a wild product is a terrible product 5 10 15 pounds of wild fish are regularly killed to bring one pound of shrimp to the market they're also credibly fuel inefficient to bring to the market in a recent study that was produced out of delhousie university it was found that dragging for shrimp is one of the most carbon-intensive ways of fishing that you can find so you can farm them and people do farm them and they farm them a lot in this very area problem is the place where you farm shrimp is in these wild habitats in mangrove forests now look at those lovely routes coming down those are the things that hold soil together protect coast create habitats for all sort of young fish young shrimp all sorts of things that are important to this environment well this is what happens to a lot of coastal mangrove forests we've lost millions and still a lot of coastal mangrove forests we've lost millions of acres of coastal mangroves over the last 30 or 40 years that rate of destruction has slowed but we're still in a major mangrove deficit the other thing that's going on here is a phenomenon that the filmmaker mark benjamin called grinding Nemo this phenomenon is very very relevant to anything that you've ever seen on a tropical reef because what's going on right now we have shrimp draggers dragging for shrimp catching a huge amount of bycatch that bycatch in turn gets ground up and turned into shrimp food and sometimes many of these vessels manned by slaves are catching these so-called trash fish fish that we would love to see on a reef grinding them up and turning them into shrimp feed an ecosystem literally eating itself and spitting out shrimp the next most consumed seafood in america and also throughout the west is tuna so tuna is this ultimate global fish these huge management areas have to be observed in order for management area called a regional fisheries management organization is called icat the international invention for the conservation of Atlantic tunas the great naturalist Carl Safina once called it the international conspiracy to catch all the tunas of course we've seen incredible improvement in icat in the last few years there is total room for improvement but it remains to be said that tuna is a global fish and to manage it we have to manage the globe well we could also try to grow tuna but tuna is a spectacularly bad animal for aquaculture many people don't know this but tuna are warm-blooded they can heat their bodies 20 degrees above ambient temperature they can swim at over 40 miles an hour so pretty much eliminates all the advantages of farming a fish right a farmed fish is or fish is cold-blooded it doesn't move too much that's a great thing for growing protein but if you've got this crazy wild creature that swims at 40 miles an hour and heats its blood not a great candidate for aquaculture the next creature most consumed seafood in America and throughout the west is salmon now salmon got its plundering too but it didn't really necessarily happen through fishing this is my home state of Connecticut and I used to be home to a lot of wild salmon but if you look at this map of Connecticut every dot on that map is a dam there are over 3,000 dams in the state of Connecticut I often say this is why people in Connecticut are so so uptight if somebody could just unblock Connecticut's chi I feel that we could have an infinitely better world but I made this particular comment at a convention once of national parks officers and this guy from North Carolina sidled up to me says you know you oughtn't be so hard on your Connecticut because we here in North Carolina we got 35,000 dams so it's a national epidemic it's an international epidemic and there are dams everywhere and these are precisely the things that stop wild salmon from reaching their spawning grants so as a result we've turned to aquaculking grants so as a result we've turned to aquaculture and salmon is one of the most successful at least from a numbers point of view when they first started farming salmon it could take as many as six pounds of wildfish to make a single pound of salmon the industry has to its credit greatly improved they've gotten it below two to one although it's a little bit of a cheat because if you look at the way aquaculture feed is produced they're measuring pellets pounds of pellets per pound of salmon those pellets are in turn reduced fish so the actual what's called the FIFO the fish in and the fish out kind of hard to say but in any case credit to the industry it has lowered the amount of fish per pound of salmon problem is we've also gone crazy with the amount of salmon that we're producing aquaculture is the fastest growing food system on the planet it's growing at something like seven percent per year and so even though we're doing less per fish to bring it to the market we're still killing a lot of these little fish and we're also feeding fish to chickens and pigs so we have chickens and they're eating fish but weirdly we also have fish that are eating chickens because the byproducts of chickens feathers blood bone get ground up and fed to fish so I often wonder is there a fish that ate a chicken that ate a fish it's sort of a reworking of the chicken and egg thing anyway all together though it results in a terrible mess what you're talking about is something between 20 and 30 million metric tons of wild creatures that are taken from the ocean and used and ground up that's the equivalent of a third of a china or of entire united states of humans that's taken out of the sea each and every year the last of the four is a kind of amorphous thing um it's you know what the industry calls a white fish there's many fish that get cycled into this white fish thing but the way to kind of tell the story I think is through that classic piece of American culinary innovation culinary innovation the fillet of fish sandwich so the fillet of fish sandwich actually started as halibut and it started because a local franchise owner found that when he served his McDonald's on on Friday nobody came because it was a Catholic community they needed fish so ray croc um he went to ray croc and he said I'm going to bring you a fish sandwich going to be made out of halibut ray croc said I don't think it's going to work I want to do a hula burger and there's going to be a it's a slice of pineapple on a button but let's do this let's have a bet whoever sandwiched you know sells more that will be the winning sandwich well it's kind of sad for the ocean that the hula burger didn't win um so he made his halibut sandwich uh unfortunately though the sandwich came in at 30 cents ray wanted the sandwich to come in at 25 cents so he turned to atlantic cod we all know what happened to atlantic cod in new england so now the fillet of fish sandwich is made out of Alaska Pollock it's the largest fin fish fishery in the united states two to three billion pounds of fish taken out of the sea every billion pounds of fish taken out of the sea every single year if we go through the Pollock the next choice is probably going to be tilapia tilapia is one of those fish nobody ever heard of 20 years ago it's actually a very efficient converter of plant protein into animal protein and it's been a godsend to the third world it's actually a tremendously sustainable solution goes from an egg to an adult in nine months problem is that when you look about the west it doesn't do what the west wants it to do it really doesn't have what's called an oily fish profile eyeouts listening part four but the question is why why do we sometimes fail to perform up to our potential under pressure it's especially bewildering in the case of athletes who spend so much time physically honing their craft but what about their minds not as much this is true off the playing field as well whether we're taking a test or giving a talk it's easy to feel like we're ready at the top of our game and then perform at our worst when it matters most it turns out that rarely do we practice under the types of conditions we're actually going to perform under and as a result when all eyes are on us we sometimes flub our performance of course the question is why is this the case and my experience on the playing field and in other important facets of my life really pushed me into the field of cognitive science i wanted to know how we could reach our limitless potential i wanted to understand how we could use our knowledge of the mind and the brain to come up with psychological tools that would help us perform at our best so why does it happen why do we sometimes fail to perform up to what we're capable of when the pressure is on it may not be so surprising to hear that in stressful situations we worry we worry about the situation the consequences what others will think of us but what is surprising is that we often get in our own way precisely because our worries prompt us to concentrate too much that's right we pay too much attention to what we're doing when we're concerned about performing our best we often try and control aspects of what we're doing that are best left on autopilot outside conscious awareness and as a result we mess up think about a situation where you're shuffling down the stairs and what would happen if i asked you to think about what you're doing with your knee while you're doing that there's a good chance you'd fall on your face we as humans only have the ability to pay attention to so much at once which is why by the way it's not a good idea to drive and talk on the cell phone and under pressure when we're concerned about performing at our best we can try and control aspects of what we're doing that should be left outside conscious control the end result is that we mess up my research team and i have studied this phenomenon of overattention and we call it paralysis by analysis in one study we asked college soccer players to dribble a soccer ball and to pay attention to an aspect of their performance that they would not otherwise attend to we asked them to pay attention to what side of the foot was contacting the ball we showed that performance was slower and more error prone when we drew their attention to the step by step details of what they were doing when the pressure is on we're often concerned with performing at our best and as a result we try and control what we're doing to force the best performance the end result is that we actually screw up in basketball the term unconscious is used to describe a shooter who can't miss and san antonio spurs star tim duncan has said when you have to stop and think that's when you mess up in dance the great choreographer george balanchine used to urge his dancers don't think just do when the pressure is on when we want to put our best foot forward somewhat ironically we often try and control what we're doing in a way that leads to worse performance so what do we do knowing that we have this overactive attention how do we ensure that we perform at our best a lot of it comes down to the prefrontal cortex that front part of our brain that sits over our eyes and usually helps us focus in positive ways it often gets hooked on the wrong things so how do we unhook it something as simple as singing a song or paying attention to one's pinky toe as pro golfer jack nicholas was rumored to do can help us take our mind off those pesky details it's also true that practicing under conditions that we're going to perform under closing the gap between training and competition can help us get used to that feeling of all eyes on us this is true off the playing field as well whether it's getting ready for an exam or preparing for a big talk one that might have a little pressure associated with it getting used to the types of situations you're going to perform under really matters when you're taking a test close the book practice retrieving the answer from memory under time situations and when you're giving a talk practice in front of others and if you can't find anyone who will listen practice in front of a video camera or even a mirror the ability to get used to what it will feel like can make the difference in whether we choke or thrive we've also figured out some ways to get rid of those pesky worries and self-doubts that tend to creep up in the stressful situations researchers have shown that simply jotting down your thoughts and worries before a stressful event can help to download them from mind make them less likely to pop up in the moment it's kind of like when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're really worried about what you have to do the next day you're trying to think about everything you have to accomplish and you write it down and then you can go back to sleep journaling or getting those thoughts down on paper makes it less likely they'll pop up and distract you in the moment the end result is that you can perform your best when it matters most that is the end of the test as promised here are the answers good luck number one john horton number two london number three zero six four one four five three five four number four the final push number five you can have the 16th of february or february 16 or 16 february 6 b 7 d 8 e 9 c 10 h 11 b 12 e 13 a 14 d 15 c 16 india 17 is nuclear 18 coal 19 with weapons 20 china 21 shrimp 22 market or the market 23 mangrove 24 global 25 40 miles 26 over 3000 27 spawning grounds or their spawning grounds 28 pig or pigs or the pig or the pigs 39 or nine months 31 playing field 32 too much 33 awareness or control 34 by analysis 35 step by step details 36 c 37 b 38 b 39 a 40 c chris here again and thank you so much for watching our listening sample test i hope that you did really really well and if you made some mistakes here's a video that is going to help you reflect on your mistakes and improve that's really going to help you whatever i would like you to do is put your scores in the comments below it's great to see what level all you guys are at and also if you would like to see more sample listening tests please let us know in the comments below or if you have any other recommendations for future videos feel free to comment below and if you have any questions or you need any help with the aisles test any help with preparation or materials or courses or anything like that feel free to send us an email chris at aisles advantage.com is my email address we answer 100% of the emails that come through and i look forward to reading your emails thank you very much guys and as always if you need anything feel free to get in touch and don't forget to like and subscribe