Part 1 short exchanges: corrections and clock times
Listening Part 1: seven short recordings, each with a three-option question, played twice. You are on Recording 2. Q2 asks: 'What will the woman do first?' A email the venue, B phone the venue, C visit the venue. In the first playing she says: 'I'll email the venue with the numbers - actually no, I'll ring them, the email can wait until Monday.' You wrote A. Recording 3: Q3 asks for a collection time. The man says: 'I'll be at the depot at half six - sorry, make that quarter to seven.' You wrote 6:30 for option B. Recording 4 is next and you have not yet heard it. The whole part runs as one continuous track - you cannot pause or rewind, and you must not fall behind.
1. You wrote A for Q2 after the first playing. What should you do during the replay, and why is A wrong?
Read the worked answer
A is wrong because it is the abandoned plan. The speaker proposes emailing, then self-corrects with 'actually no, I'll ring them, the email can wait'. The first-mentioned action is the classic distractor; the correction carries the answer, so B is right.
During the replay, listen for the pivot word - 'actually', 'no wait', 'sorry' - rather than for the whole exchange. When you hear it, put a small cross beside A and circle B on the question paper.
Do not change anything until you hear the correction again. The replay exists for confirmation; if you rewrite from memory, you may overwrite a correct answer with a guess.
Then re-read the stem. 'Do first' versus 'do next' matters more than it looks: if she rings first and emails on Monday, 'first' is the phone. Whenever a correction changes the order of two actions, check the stem before committing.
2. Should you answer during the first playing or wait for the second, and how does that change what you write?
Read the worked answer
Answer during the first playing, in pencil, on the question paper. Waiting means you listen to the first playing with nothing to anchor your attention, and you risk falling behind on the next recording - the more serious error.
What you write differs by pass. First pass: a decisive mark plus a note of any correction heard ('email → phone'). Second pass: confirmation or change. The answer sheet is filled only in transfer time, so nothing is final until then.
Practical habit: one eye on the next stem as the current recording ends. Part 1 recordings follow one another with only a short gap, and candidates who finish a question 'properly' lose the opening seconds of the next one - which is where the answer often sits.
If a recording is genuinely unclear on both playings, mark your best option and move on. A blank is worth nothing, and the marks lost through panic usually fall on the following two questions.
3. For Q3, the speaker says 'half six' and then 'quarter to seven'. What do you write, and how do you check the arithmetic?
Read the worked answer
'Half six' is 6:30 in British usage - a frequent trap for candidates who read it as 5:30. 'Quarter to seven' is 6:45, and it is the correction, so the answer is 6:45.
The check is to convert as you hear: 18:30 and 18:45. Converting forces you to commit to a value instead of holding a phrase in working memory, and it exposes the 'half' ambiguity immediately.
During the replay, listen for the correction marker and confirm that 6:45 is offered as the final arrangement, not as an alternative the other speaker rejects. If the second voice says 'quarter to seven is cutting it fine', the answer may revert - so track who has the final word, not who spoke last.
Also scan the options for near-neighbours. When two options differ by 15 minutes, the recording will usually contain both; the discriminator is the correction, not the first number spoken.