Listening Part 3: the deposit that was not a correction
You are 25 minutes into the PEIC Level 4 Listening paper, Part 3. You hear a university accommodation officer briefing new international students. Your note sheet has three gaps: Deposit £____; Rooms available from ____; Laundry cost ____. The recording is played twice. In the first playing the officer says: 'The deposit is £250 - sorry, £215 if it's paid before 12 September; after that it goes back up to the standard £250.' Later: 'You can move into your room from Friday the 14th. Reception doesn't open until Monday the 17th, which is the official start of term, but the buildings and keys are ready on the 14th.' On laundry: 'A lot of students assume the laundry is included in the rent. It isn't - it's £1.50 a wash, card only, no coins.' You have written £250, 17th and 'included in rent'. Sixty seconds of checking time remain before the recording moves to the next section.
1. Decide what should go in each of the three gaps and explain the listening evidence that settles each one.
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Deposit: write £250 (or £215 if paid before 12 Sept). The word 'sorry' sounds like a correction, but the clause 'after that it goes back up to the standard £250' proves it is a condition, not a replacement. £215 alone is wrong for anyone paying late; £250 alone loses the discount. If the line allows one figure only, the unqualified standard figure (£250) is the safer entry.
Rooms available from: the 14th. 'You can move in from Friday the 14th' answers the gap directly. The 17th is when reception opens and term officially begins - a true statement planted as a distractor, not the answer to this gap.
Laundry: £1.50 per wash, card only. The officer pre-frames the trap - 'a lot of students assume the laundry is included' - and then negates it. After a negation ('it isn't'), the answer follows, not precedes.
The general principle: note-completion answers follow the grammar of the gap word (a date after 'from', a price after 'cost'), and repair markers ('sorry', 'I mean', 'actually') signal either a correction or an added condition. You have to hear the rest of the sentence before deciding which.
2. Sixty seconds of checking time remain and one note is uncertain. What do you do, and what should you avoid doing?
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Never leave the gap blank - a blank cannot be marked correct, whereas a plausible, grammatically shaped guess can. Write your best answer, mark it lightly, and spend the second playing listening only for that item. Re-verifying answers you are already confident about burns exactly the time you need.
Avoid erasing a defensible, evidence-based answer in favour of a vaguer guess: under time pressure the first answer you actually heard is usually better than a reconstruction. If the item is a number, name or date, check its shape rather than trying to recall the wording - currency symbol, singular or plural, day-then-month order. Also avoid adding commentary in the gap; an examiner needs an unambiguous answer, not a sentence.
When the check time ends, move on immediately. Part 3 items run in sequence with the recording, and losing your place costs more than one wrong note. Legibility and clear spelling matter more than certainty.
3. Why does the officer mention what students 'assume' about the laundry, and what does that tell you about distractor design?
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The clause puts a false proposition on the recording in a confident, plausible voice, using the exact vocabulary of the gap ('laundry', 'included', 'rent'). A candidate who matches on topic words rather than on the proposition writes down the false statement. The officer then negates it explicitly ('It isn't'), and only after that gives the markable information.
This is the standard distractor pattern in Part 3: true-sounding framing, a negation marker, then the answer. The same design produces the 'reception opens on the 17th' trap and the '£215' trap - each is a real fact, just not the fact the gap asks for. The skill being tested is not vocabulary recognition but proposition tracking: what is being asserted about this gap, and is it asserted or denied?
So when you hear attribution language - 'people think', 'students assume', 'it's often said' - treat everything until the next contrast marker as unmarked territory.