Quarter Past, Quarter To, and the Day That Wasn’t the Trip
Bence, 17, practises the középszintű (intermediate) listening paper: two tasks, each recording played twice, eight items in total. The recording is a school-trip announcement. The coach leaves at 9:15 and returns at 17:30; the trip is on Wednesday; the registration deadline is Tuesday. The café is closed for renovation, so students must bring a packed lunch. Bence writes “9:50” for departure, ticks “lunch provided”, and writes “Tuesday” on the line marked “day of trip”. He also writes full sentences and loses the next two items while finishing the previous one. On the second playing he listens for the same words again rather than checking his notes. He understands the individual words but says the speaker “went too fast”. His teacher notices that he never looks back at what he has already written between the two playings.
1. Classify each of Bence’s three wrong answers as a different error type, and explain why the second playing failed to repair them.
Read the worked answer
9:50 instead of 9:15 - number processing under time pressure. He heard a time and wrote a plausible one; fifteen and fifty are acoustically close in fast speech, and he had no shorthand forcing him to record the digits precisely.
“Lunch provided” - negation and cause. The recording says the café is closed because of renovation, so lunch is not provided. He caught the topic (food) and missed the polarity (closed, bring your own).
“Tuesday” on “day of trip” - role confusion. Tuesday exists in the text, but as the registration deadline. The item asks for a different role. This is not a hearing failure; it is a slot-filling failure.
Why the second playing did not help: he re-listened for the same key words, which reconfirms the same wrong interpretation. The second playing only pays off if it is used to test a written hypothesis, and he had not formulated one.
2. Propose a shorthand system and a between-playings routine for him. Keep both realistic for a candidate who writes full sentences.
Read the worked answer
Shorthand: times as digits only (9.15), days as three letters (Wed), negation marked with a slash or an X before the word (X lunch), and a question mark beside anything uncertain. Abbreviate the item, not the message: “dep 9.15”, “deadline Tue”, “trip Wed”.
Between playings (about 20 seconds):
- Read back every answer as a full sentence in his head: “The coach leaves at 9.50.” If it sounds odd or clashes with another item, flag it.
- Mark the two items he is least sure of.
- On the second playing, listen only for those two, and stop writing once they are settled.
Reasoning: his problem is not writing speed overall but writing without a checking loop. Shorthand buys the seconds; the between-playings pass converts listening from repetition into verification.
3. The speaker says: “The coach leaves at nine fifteen - that’s quarter past nine, not a quarter to.” What should he write, and what general lesson about self-correction should he take from it?
Read the worked answer
Write 9.15 (quarter past). The speaker defines the term immediately: “quarter past nine” settles it, and “not a quarter to” rules out 8:45.
General lesson: in these recordings a speaker often paraphrases or corrects a time, price or date, and the correction is the answer. The signal phrases are “I mean”, “that’s … not …”, “sorry”, “to be clear”.
Practical consequence: when he hears a hesitation or a reformulation, he should stop writing and listen through the end of the correction before committing digits. Writing “9.15” early and then hearing “not a quarter to” would have left him with a half-erased answer and two lost items, which is exactly the pattern in his current notes.