Listening Part 3: Exact-Word Traps and the Second Listening
During the first listening of Part 3, Nadia has matched speakers 1–3 to options A–C. Speaker 4 says: 'At first I thought the weekly lessons were pointless - I mean, I could already read music - but then our teacher stopped giving us pieces and asked us to improvise. That changed everything.' Nadia hears 'teacher' and chooses C: 'realising that a teacher's approach mattered more than the instrument'. She ignores F: 'being allowed to experiment'. Speaker 5 says: 'I'd tried piano and violin, and I was about to give up, but my grandfather's old guitar was sitting in the attic.' Nadia is torn between G 'discovering an instrument by chance' and B 'encouragement from a family member'. The options are A–H; two are not used. She has two blanks. The recording will be played a second time after a 45-second pause. She has already used one option twice by mistake in her notes.
1. What should Nadia choose for speaker 4, and how does the option set create the trap?
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She should choose F: being allowed to experiment. The speaker's turning point is that the teacher 'stopped giving us pieces and asked us to improvise', and 'That changed everything'. The change is in what the learner was allowed to do, not in a comparison between teacher and instrument. Option C is a lexical trap: it repeats 'teacher', which Nadia hears clearly, but it adds a comparison the speaker never makes. Option C also sounds evaluative and mature, which makes it attractive. Reasoning routine: match the option to the speaker's main point, not to a repeated word. Check whether the option introduces a relationship (teacher vs instrument) that is absent from the recording. 'At first I thought ... but then' signals that the early negative view is not the answer; the 'but then' clause carries the meaning.
2. With 45 seconds and two blanks, what should she do before and during the second listening?
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She should mark tentative answers now - F for speaker 4 and G for speaker 5 - and not leave blanks. Then she should use the pause to check only the decisive clause for each speaker, not re-read all eight options. For speaker 5, 'my grandfather's old guitar was sitting in the attic' presents the family member as the source of the instrument, but the action is accidental discovery while she was 'about to give up'. G fits that; B would need someone actively urging or supporting her. On the second listening, she should change an answer only if she hears a specific contradiction, not because she feels uncertain. Reasoning: uncertainty is not new evidence, and exact-word matches are often distractors. She should also fix the duplicated option immediately, because each option can be used only once and a duplicate leaves another speaker without an answer.
3. Why is using an option twice a problem, and how should she correct her notes without losing time?
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Using an option twice is a problem because Part 3 normally uses each option once, with two options left unused. A duplicate means at least one speaker has no valid answer, and the error can spread if she keeps matching later speakers to the same option. She should not erase everything; she should identify the two speakers involved, keep the match she is most confident about, and reassign the other speaker from the remaining unused options. She should do this in the pause, not during the recording. Reasoning: the task tests matching by meaning across five speakers, so the answer set is a closed system. Cross-checking the set - five speakers, five different letters, two unused - is a quick consistency check that catches duplicate-letter errors.