🎧 IELTS Listening – Practice 3

Section 3 · Academic discussion · Questions 21–30. Two geography students discuss a fieldwork report on a river restoration project.

🎧 Academic & General Training🔍 Matching + Multiple choice⏱ ~7 minutes🔊 AEn4U voices

Why Section 3 is the hardest part of the test

Section 3 is where most candidates lose their band. It is not because the English is harder – it is because two people are talking, they change their minds, and the answer is never the word printed on your question paper. Read these three rules, do the two short drills, and only then press play.

Rule 1 – Underline the difference-word before the audio starts. In a matching task the options look alike on purpose. In the 30 seconds you are given, underline the ONE word in each option that separates it from the others: more data / shorter / appendix / finished. Once the speakers begin you will have no time to read.

Rule 2 – Expect to hear the wrong options out loud. There are always more options than questions. The unused ones are not decoration: a speaker suggests them and the other speaker turns them down. Hearing the word “appendix” does not mean the answer is “appendix”.

Rule 3 – Track WHO thinks it, not just what was said. Two speakers means two opinions. If the question asks what Nadia found surprising, Callum’s opinion is a trap that is deliberately placed right next to it. Write a small N or C beside your notes as you listen.

Warm-up A – Spot the paraphrase 5 questions

In Section 3 the answer is almost never said in the words printed on the paper. Read each line and choose what it actually means. (These examples are not from the recording below.)

Warm-up B – Will they actually do it? 5 questions

Section 3 speakers suggest things and then reject them. For each short exchange, decide what the students will really do. (Again, not from the recording below.)

Listening – Section 3 Questions 21–30

You will hear two geography students, Nadia and Callum, discussing the fieldwork report they are writing about a river restoration project. You will hear the recording once only, exactly as in the real IELTS test. Pause where the narrator tells you to, read the questions, then press play again.

💡 Tip: on your first attempt, do not rewind. Mark the questions you missed, then replay and open the transcript to see exactly which distractor caught you.

Questions 21–30 – Matching

What do the students decide about each part of the report? Choose FIVE answers from the box and select the correct letter, A–H, next to questions 21–25. You will not need every letter.

A It needs more data.
B It should be made much shorter.
C It should be moved to the appendix.
D It is already finished.
E It should be rewritten by one person alone.
F It needs a graph or chart.
G It should be checked by the tutor before submission.
H It should be deleted completely.

Questions 26–30 – Multiple choice

Choose the correct letter, A, B or C.

#	Your answer	Correct		Why

Open the transcript below and find each answer for yourself – the distractors are marked so you can see the exact moment the trap was set.

📜 Audio transcript (open after you check your answers)

Narrator: Section three. You will hear two geography students, Nadia and Callum, discussing the fieldwork report they are writing about a river restoration project. First, you have some time to look at questions twenty-one to twenty-five.
Narrator: Now listen carefully, and answer questions twenty-one to twenty-five.
Callum: Nadia, have you got ten minutes? I've printed the draft of the river report and there's more red pen on it than I expected.
Nadia: Ten minutes is about all I've got, so let's be quick. Shall we go through it section by section?
Callum: Please. Starting with the literature review.
Nadia: Honestly, I'd leave that one exactly as it is. It's referenced properly, it's the right length, and Doctor Okafor ticked it off in the tutorial.
Callum: That's a relief. Although I did wonder whether we should add those two extra papers on flood risk. ← trap for A
Nadia: We could, but they're not really about restoration, are they? No. The literature review is finished. Move on. ← Q21 = D
Callum: Right. Next, the site description. The bit where we describe the stretch of river and the land around it.
Nadia: It's nicely written, but it's four pages, Callum. Four. Nobody needs four pages of hedgerows.
Callum: So shall I move the whole thing into the appendix? ← trap for C
Nadia: No, the marker wants to know where we were, so it has to stay in the main report. We just make it much tighter. One page, maximum. ← Q22 = B
Callum: One page. Understood. Then the water quality results.
Nadia: Those are the strongest part of the whole report. The problem is that at the moment it's a wall of numbers. A reader simply can't see the pattern.
Callum: I could put the figures in a table. ← trap: a table already exists
Nadia: There's already a table. What's missing is something visual. A line graph showing how the nitrate levels changed month by month. ← Q23 = F
Callum: A graph. I'll do that tonight. Now, the interview findings. The twelve people we spoke to by the bridge.
Nadia: Twelve is exactly the problem. Eleven of them were dog walkers. We've got almost nothing from the people who fish the river, and nothing at all from the farmers.
Callum: So do we take the interviews out completely? ← trap for H
Nadia: Absolutely not, they're interesting. But we have to go back and speak to a lot more people before the deadline. Another ten at least, and from different groups. ← Q24 = A
Callum: Saturday morning, then. And finally, the conclusion.
Nadia: I read that conclusion three times and I still couldn't tell you what we're claiming.
Callum: I wrote it at two in the morning, so that's fair. Should we send it to Doctor Okafor and ask her to check it before we submit? ← trap for G
Nadia: She's marking all week, she won't have time before Friday. And honestly, the two of us editing the same paragraph is why it's confused in the first place. Let me take it away and write it again from scratch, on my own. You can look at it when it's done. ← Q25 = E
Callum: Deal.
Narrator: Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions twenty-six to thirty.
Narrator: Now listen, and answer questions twenty-six to thirty.
Callum: One more thing. Doctor Okafor is bound to ask why we moved the sampling point downstream.
Nadia: Because of the bridge works, obviously.
Callum: Well, partly. The path down to the old point was slippery too. And there was that second-year group using the site on our first visit. ← traps for A and C
Nadia: They'd finished by week two, and we managed the path perfectly well in boots. The real reason, the one that goes in the report, is that the contractors were pumping silt straight into the channel where we were sampling. Any reading we took there was meaningless. ← Q26 = B
Callum: Fair enough. Construction it is. And what surprised you most in the data?
Nadia: Every paper we read predicted that a restored stretch would take about five years to recover. Our nitrate figures were down to the target level in under two. ← Q27 = C
Callum: That was quick. I was more struck by how similar sites two and three looked. ← trap: that is CALLUM's view, not Nadia's
Nadia: They were similar, but that's what you'd expect. They're only four hundred metres apart. And I'd assumed August would show a summer spike, and it simply didn't. No, the speed is the story.
Callum: Right. Now, when we redo the interviews, should we rewrite the questions? Some of them ran to three lines. ← trap for A
Nadia: Shorten them by all means, but that's cosmetic. And yes, going at nine on a Tuesday morning didn't help. That's why we got dog walkers. ← trap for C But the weakness a marker will actually circle is that eleven of our twelve people came from one single group. That isn't a community view. It's a dog-walking view. ← Q28 = B
Callum: Point taken. Then there's the presentation. Twenty-two slides for twelve minutes.
Nadia: Far too many. But before we cut anything, who is speaking?
Callum: I assumed we'd split it fifty-fifty. ← trap for C
Nadia: We tried that in semester one and we both ran over. You take the methods and the data, I'll take the background and the conclusion. That isn't an equal split, but it plays to what each of us actually knows.
Callum: Agreed. And the slides themselves?
Nadia: Down to about ten, and make the photographs big enough to actually see from the back of the room. The interview quotations can go in the handout instead. ← Q29 = A (and the trap for B)
Callum: Ten slides, big pictures. Last thing. In the tutorial Doctor Okafor said something about what she's looking for this year.
Nadia: She said a great deal. She likes projects that compare their findings with the published literature, and she always asks whether the method could be used on another river. ← traps for A and C
Callum: So which of those do we lead with?
Nadia: Neither, actually. What she said she'd be marking hardest this year is whether students can see the holes in their own method. So we're honest about what twelve interviews can and can't tell anybody. That's where the marks are. ← Q30 = B
Callum: Weaknesses first. Got it.
Narrator: That is the end of section three. You now have half a minute to check your answers.

What to do next

Scored 8 or more? Move on to a full timed test. Scored 5 or fewer on the matching half? Do this recording again tomorrow with the transcript open first, then a third time with it closed – the aim is to recognise the moment a suggestion is rejected, not to memorise the answers.

🎧 Section 1 – Form completion

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