Quarter Past, Quarter To, and the Number Nobody Said
Listening Part 2. A conversation between a university student, Mika, and the manager of the café where she works part-time. The manager says: "About Saturday - the food market starts at ten, so we need you before that. Your shift moves from 10:15 to 9:45. Kenji, the new guy, comes in at 8:30 to set up the kitchen, but don't worry, you don't need to be that early. And you're not on Sunday this week." Mika's notes read: "Sat: 10:45 start. Kenji 8:30. No Sunday." The question asks: "What time should Mika start work on Saturday?" She hears the options 8:30, 9:45, 10:15 and 10:45, remembers writing 10:45, and picks it.
1. Identify the error in Mika's notes and the two clues in the audio that repair it.
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The note is wrong, and two clues fix it.
Clue 1 - the spoken pair. The manager says the shift "moves from 10:15 to 9:45." Two times are spoken together, and "moves ... from ... to" marks the second one, 9:45, as the new time.
Clue 2 - the reason. "The food market starts at ten, so we need you before that." 9:45 is before 10:00; 10:45 is after it. The cause makes 9:45 the only number that fits. When the audio gives a reason, the reason is a second lock on the answer.
Why she chose 10:45: she heard 10:15 and 9:45 and blended them under pressure. 10:45 was never spoken at all. That is a warning sign - in this section the correct time is almost always a number you can point to in the audio.
Drill: when two times appear in one sentence, write both with an arrow - "10:15 → 9:45" - then read the reason and keep the one it allows.
2. Why is Kenji's 8:30 in the options, and what note-taking habit prevents that error?
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It is a person-shift trap. The manager mentions three times close together: 8:30 for Kenji, 9:45 for Mika, and implicitly 10:00 for the market. The sentence "Kenji ... comes in at 8:30 to set up the kitchen, but you don't need to be that early" attaches 8:30 to Kenji, then explicitly detaches it from Mika.
The trap works because the listener is still holding "8:30" when the pronoun switches to "you." Under pressure the nearest number wins.
Fix - track who, not just when. Put a name or initial before every number in your notes: "K 8:30 / M 9:45." A number with no owner cannot be used. Listen for subject pronouns (he, she, you, they) immediately after a time; those are the labels.
Also notice the negative. "You don't need to be that early" is a spoken deletion of an option. In EIKEN listening, an option that is mentioned and then denied is almost always a distractor.
3. Mika realises she missed the number entirely while the audio is still playing. What should she do?
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Keep listening; one missed number does not lose the section. The question and options stay on the page, and the conversation continues.
Recovery steps:
- Do not freeze on the gap. Missing a time costs one question; stopping to replay it in your head costs the next two.
- Harvest the cause. If you heard why a time matters ("the market starts at ten," "we open at nine"), you can often rebuild the number or eliminate options.
- Pre-scan before the audio. Underline the time in the question and note the options' order from earliest to latest. A mental number line makes 9:45 and 10:45 much harder to confuse.
- If you truly cannot recover, pick the option the reason supports, not the number that sounds most familiar.
Practice move: after each listening section, replay only the sentences with numbers and write who / what / when. Ten minutes a day of this fixes person-shift errors faster than re-listening to whole dialogues.