Listening: hearing the answer through the distractors
What the paper sounds like
A1 Movers Listening lasts about 25 minutes and has five short parts, and each recording is played twice. In one part you draw lines between named people and places in a picture; in another you write a word or a number such as a name, a day, a time or a price. Other parts ask you to match labelled pictures to things people say, tick one of three pictures, or colour objects in a scene and write a single word. Every part contains five questions and every part contains wrong options.
Language you must control
You need numbers (watch the pairs thirteen/thirty, fourteen/forty), days, months, clock times such as half past six, prices, colours, and position words: in, on, under, behind, next to, in front of. You also need the present continuous, because speakers describe what someone is doing or wearing: 'the girl who is wearing a blue coat'.
Traps
Speakers usually mention two or three options before they decide. Numbers and names are chosen to sound similar. In the colouring part, the colour and the object are given separately, so 'colour the bag under the table blue' goes wrong if you colour the bag on the chair. In the writing part, a name may be spelled out letter by letter, and candidates often miss the last letter.
Rule of thumb
Wait for the word 'but', 'actually' or 'sorry'. The answer is almost always the last thing the speaker says.
Worked example: the question is 'Which is Anna's favourite drink?' with pictures of milk, juice and water. The recording says: 'I have milk every morning, but juice is my favourite.' Milk is a distractor; the answer is juice.