Listening (PEIC B1)
What this paper tests
PEIC B1 Listening has three parts. Part 1 uses short dialogues or announcements with multiple-choice questions, often three pictures. Part 2 asks you to complete a note, form or table while listening to a monologue or conversation. Part 3 is a longer conversation with multiple-choice questions about opinion, reason and detail. Each recording is heard twice, so the second listening is for checking, not for starting from scratch.
Core rules
- Use the pause before each recording to read the questions and predict what is missing: a time, a price, a place, a name, a number?
- Write an answer in every gap on the first listening, then refine it on the second.
- Obey the word limit exactly. If it says "no more than two words", "half past six" fits but "at half past six" does not.
- Speakers often correct themselves mid-sentence; the corrected word is the answer.
- Check plurals, numbers and the spelling of names before you move on.
Worked example
Note: "Meet at the ______ at 6.30."
Audio: "Shall we meet at the station at half six? Actually, there's a new café opposite - let's go there instead."
Answer: café. "Station" is the distractor: the speaker changes the plan within the same turn. "Opposite" confirms the café is a different place, and the time 6.30 tells you that you are listening in the right place in the recording.
Traps that cost marks
- Writing the first number or price you hear when the speaker later corrects it.
- Dropping final -s: "two tickets", not "two ticket".
- Losing your place after a missed answer, so the next two items go past. Leave the gap and follow the next question.
- Ignoring the question stem, which often asks what the woman, not the man, thinks.
- Copying a word that appears in the options rather than the one that actually answers the question.