Listening: Two Speakers, One Number
You listen twice to a recorded dialogue between a market vendor and a customer in Surabaya. The vendor says the price is tiga puluh lima ribu per kilo, then later, when the customer buys two kilos, says something you hear as tujuh puluh ribu but the audio is partly obscured by background noise. The customer replies ya, sudah. A question asks how much the customer paid. You are also asked why the customer did not bargain. You noticed the vendor used Mbak and the customer used Pak, and that the customer was in a hurry.
1. How would you answer the payment question, and what reasoning supports your figure?
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The figure is 70,000 rupiah. Reasoning: the unit price is stated clearly as 35,000 per kilo; the customer buys two kilos; 35,000 × 2 = 70,000, which matches the partially obscured utterance. This is a consistency check, not a guess - the arithmetic corroborates the unclear audio, which is exactly how you should handle a noisy listening item. The customer's ya, sudah confirms agreement and closes the transaction. A weaker answer would be 35,000 (mistaking unit for total) or a made-up figure. Note also that you should not invent a discount: nothing in the exchange signals bargaining success, and sudah here marks closure, not a reduced price. If the obscured number had not matched the arithmetic, you would flag uncertainty rather than silently pick one.
2. What evidence in the exchange explains why the customer did not bargain, and how confident can you be?
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Three signals point to a non-bargaining purchase. (1) Time pressure - the customer is in a hurry, and haggling takes time and social effort. (2) The closing move - ya, sudah accepts the stated price without a counter-offer; a bargaining customer would typically propose a lower figure or use phrases like bisa kurang?. (3) Terms of address - Pak and Mbak mark a polite, slightly distant register; bargaining is not impossible in this register, but the exchange reads as a straightforward sale. Confidence should be moderate, not absolute: the recording is partly obscured and the hurry is your inference from context, not a quoted line. A precise answer distinguishes what was heard from what was inferred. Claiming the customer 'could not bargain' would overreach; the evidence supports 'chose not to, plausibly because of time'.