The Corrected Number in a Repair-Shop Call
On a Tuesday timed practice set, a student working on listening item 11 hears a call to a washing-machine repair shop. Her notes read: 'noise every 30 minutes - then 13 - then 3?' The transcript she makes afterward contains: W: 'It used to thump about every thirty minutes, but now it is more like thirteen.' M: 'Thirteen? That is nearly three times as often.' The four choices are 'every 3 minutes,' 'every 13 minutes,' 'every 30 minutes,' and 'every 33 minutes.' She marked 30 because the first number was clearer and because the man's line seemed to repeat it; she also considered 3 because 'three times' was the last number she heard. The woman's 'thirteen' is spoken quickly, with the first syllable weak, and the correction is carried by 'but now' rather than by stress. She has 40 seconds left and is deciding whether to change her answer.
1. Which choice should she mark, and which parts of the script make the other numbers plausible distractors?
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Mark 'every 13 minutes.' The operative number is the woman's second one, introduced by 'but now,' which contrasts the present interval with the past. 'Every 30 minutes' is real text but belongs to 'It used to,' so it is a past frequency, not the answer. 'Every 3 minutes' comes from the man's 'three times as often'; that is a ratio, not an interval. If the machine ran every 3 minutes, it would be ten times as often as 30, not three. 'Every 33 minutes' is not in the script at all; it blends the two spoken numbers. Phonetically, 'thirteen' carries stress on the second syllable and 'thirty' on the first, but the woman's fast delivery weakens the first syllable, so the correction marker is more reliable than the vowel. In CSAT listening, a number followed by a correction is a standard pattern: the corrected number governs.
2. How should the man's follow-up be used to check the answer without being misled?
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Use the man's line as a consistency check, not as the source of the answer. 'That is nearly three times as often' tells you the new interval is shorter than 30 minutes but much longer than 3. Thirteen fits: 30 divided by 13 is about 2.3, close to 'nearly three.' Three does not fit: 30 divided by 3 is 10, which would be 'ten times as often.' The man is reacting to a change, so his word 'three' describes a ratio, not a clock interval. The student's error was to treat the last number heard as the answer. In listening items, the final number in a reaction line is often a distractor precisely because it is fresh in memory; the answer is the number attached to the fact being asked about. She should change 30 to 13.