Get Band 9 After Using These Listening Tips

You've just found the Ultimate Guide to Listening to IELTS. This is the longest, most detailed and complete guide to

listening

to IELTS on the Internet. It will help you succeed by helping you understand the exam format

tips

and strategies that only nine students really understand. We'll also show you where to find real IELTS practice tests for free and how to use those practice tests to steadily improve your score to a

band

9. And at the end we'll also give you one of our IELTS VIPs. Free

listening

practice tests, so all you have to do is sit back, watch this video and get the score you need for the IELTS listening test.

Let's start by talking about the format of the IELTS listening test because level 9 students understand things about the format of the test. and then they adapt their preparation to match that format, the IELTS listening test is the same for general and academic training, and

band

9 students understand this and what they do is use a variety of different sources to practice with situations both academic and general social skills for listening. So that they are exposed to all of these different inputs, which means that on test day they are totally comfortable with what they hear. On exam day you will have to answer 40 questions and the goal is to answer 40 out of 40 correctly so that you can understand the format of the exam, so part one, part two, part three, part four, as you go through These four parts progressively become more and more difficult.

Online students understand this and what they do to combat it is that they will spend a lot more time during the exam. preparation in Parts Three and Four because Parts Three and Four really separate band seven from band eight from band nine now normally band eight band nine students are getting one hundred percent of their answers correct in part one and part two and then they really focus their preparation on part three and part four to feel one hundred percent comfortable and know that they will do well on test day and band 9 students also understand the different script listening styles that go to listen. exam day, part one, part two, part three and part four are all different, so let's look at each of those parts.

The first part will be in a general or social setting with more than one speaker, usually two speakers and often it will be a caller. another person and then fill out or write down information such as writing down a phone number or license plate number or address. This is a rather unusual way of listening to English. In normal situations, we don't normally hear someone typing a phone. number, so the best way to prepare for this and practice it is to use the official listening test that you get from Cambridge and I'll show you where to find them for free later in this video, but if you really want to nail the first part practice those, Get used to those practice tests in the first part and you should be absolutely fine.

The second part becomes a little more difficult in the listening comprehension test. This is where you are again listening to a social or general situation, but only one person is speaking. This time, it could be someone talking about their vacation or reviewing a book or something. What successful students do is listen to this type of social situation with a person speaking when they practice their listening. Examples of this could be a podcast where someone just talks to themselves on the podcast, these are great for practicing your listening skills or there are lots of YouTube channels like this where there is a person talking to the camera and again this is great practice so What I would recommend doing is choose something that you like, choose a YouTube channel that you like, not an IELTS channel because IELTS is quite boring or a podcast that you like, think of something that you like to listen to and when you are on the bus, on the way to work or during lunch. break, you can just listen to this and you are improving your ability to do the second part of the listening comprehension test.

Part 3 gets a little harder again. The context changes to an academic context, but don't worry, you don't have to be an academic person. You don't have to be at University studying a very academic subject to do well in this part. Remember that the academic and general training is exactly the same for the listening comprehension test. The key here for the third part of the listening test is that you are going to have to listen to several people speaking at the same time, so where can you find that successful students generally listen to podcasts? There are tons of podcasts out there that will invite guests, so two, three, four guests, and everyone will do it. debate a topic again, what I would recommend doing is finding a podcast, either on your podcast app or on YouTube, where you have several people discussing an academic topic, this could be history, science or health, anything that interests you slightly and that really interests you.

What we try to do is differentiate between different accents, the way people interject, the way people show their opinion, the way people agree or disagree with each other, that's what you should think when you practice on the one hand. three of the listening comprehension test the fourth part is the most difficult part it is an academic context and there is only one person speaking normally this will be an academic lecture like someone giving a lecture at a university a great way to practice this is through TED Talks go Visit ted.com or go to their YouTube channel and look for some TED Talks that you like to listen to and think you could benefit from or are just interested in and try to listen to how the person makes their points in their presentation.

What they are saying they are probably going to use words like first or first we are going to talk about this and then we are going to talk about that think about how they use this type of language to express what they are talking about more clearly to you, the listener, so now Since we know what each part is made up of and we know what will come up in each part of the listening test, we need to think about the types of questions that will come up in the listening test because If you know the context, how many people are speaking in each part and are comfortable

using

the different types of questions, then you will be in a very good position to get a band 8 or a band 9 on test day because you know exactly what. is coming, you are not stressed and you will feel very comfortable and just listen, get the answer, write it down and get the score you need.

Now the most important thing when it comes to the different types of questions is to understand. that there are many different ones, there are over 10 different types of listening questions that you can receive, for example you can receive a multiple choice question, you can fill out a summary or you can label a map or fill in information, the key thing to remember here is that you're being asked a variety of different questions to test a variety of different listening skills, so the most important thing not to do is just show up for the exam and have a strategy for all the different types of questions because they're all very , very different, so what we're going to do in this video later, we're going to give you strategies for all the different types of questions.

Right now, all you need to know is that there are different types of questions that require different strategies later in the video we'll give them to you, but keep watching because there's some really important information coming up. You will have to listen to the IELTS listening test for 30 minutes. This is really crucial. You should understand it because many people do it for the first time. in their lives they are listening to 30 minutes of English continuously on exam day. You don't want the first time to continually focus on listening to English for 30 minutes. You don't want that to be exam day.

Many students we work with have great listening skills, but lack the stamina and concentration to listen continuously for 30 minutes. So what can you do about it? You have to get used to listening and concentrating on what you are listening to for long periods of time, but on what you should not do. It's just the first day, do some practice tests, try to listen for 30 minutes and then what will happen is after five or ten minutes you'll lose focus and then you'll beat yourself up and say, Oh, I'm terrible. I'm going to fail, don't do that, okay, imagine you're running a marathon race, how long is a marathon race?

I don't know exactly, let's say it's 25 miles on the first day, don't go try and run 25 miles, you can run five miles, then eight miles, then 12, then 16, then 20 and finally you get to 25. You should do exactly the same when you are preparing for the exam. What I would do is get a little watch like this. You know, spend five minutes and do some practice tests or listen to a podcast or a TED talk and focus completely on that, listen to what the person is saying and then the next day try to go to seven minutes or ten minutes and then the next day.

The next day, listening for 12 or 15 minutes is like a muscle that you need to develop over time, and if you do it over the course of a few weeks, you will be able to concentrate 100% for 30 minutes and that's what we need if we want to buy nine, yeah we skip one or two questions or three questions, then we are unlikely to get that score. We need to be able to concentrate fully for 30 minutes, another common reason why students don't. well and don't put a band aid or a nine it's because they are not used to listening to recordings in English once on exam day you will only listen to it once it's because Cambridge are horrible people and they want you to do it fail no what are they doing they are recreating real life in real life if you go to university the university professor will not repeat himself several times if you get a job and someone asks you to do something they will not repeat it several times if you are in an airport and you hear that you know information about your flight, They won't do it five times because you don't know what they're really saying.

Many English teachers spoil their students. Most English teachers want their students to like them. So what they do is they play the recordings two, three, four times. This is like a mother or father spoiling her child. They want to do well, but they need to be a little tougher to really get the child to act and not. being spoiled that's exactly what you need to get used to when you're practicing when you're listening to podcasts when you're listening to YouTube when you're practicing your listening try to get used to listening to things once and thinking about the answer and what they said once and then you can check your answer , you can listen to it, but don't be the first time on exam day that you listen to things once because you will get a very low score, right? headphones very, very important on exam day, they will give you a pair of headphones like these or you will play the recording from a large speaker in a room.

What I would recommend doing is trying to book the computer based test because on the computer based test you will be in a smaller room with less people and you will have headphones, we guarantee you will have headphones on the computer based test. I have done both tests on paper on the computer. The technology based test and headphones dramatically improve your concentration so it doesn't so much make the test easier it just makes it easier to listen and it is a listening test so it improves your score if you live in a part of the world that doesn't.

Have IELTS exams delivered by computer and you must take a paper test. Try to choose the exam center that will have the best audio quality available, so what you can do is know when to book your exam with IDP or the British. console, whoever it is, ask them about the audio quality, tell them you're worried about it and if on exam day and this happens, either they give you terrible headphones or the recording is of terrible quality or you're in a big room full of people and you can't hear the complaints on test day, if you don't complain on test day it doesn't matter, you wouldn't believe how many students send us emails with the advantage of IELTS and say we had a problem with the audio , What I can do?

Don't know. I'm not the British console. I'm not an IDP. You are paying money to the IDP. You are paying money to the British Council. They don't give you good service. enough service complain to them on the test a big difference between the reading test and the listening test is that with the reading test you can manage your own time you can go at your own pace but with the listening test because you are listening to a recording You have to go at the pace of the actual listening script, this means there are no time management

tips

or strategies that can help you.

I have worked with hundreds of bar nine students who are around nine on the listening test and none of them implemented any typeof time management technique or strategy on exam day. when the listening test came, what they did was they got better at listening, they improved their listening skills, they became more aware of the different types of listening questions. and refined their strategy for each different type of question. If you do that, you won't get lost. You don't really need any time management tips. And that's what we're going to help you with in the rest of this video.

Finally, I have good news about the IELTS Listening Test when you hear people speak in the IELTS Listening Test, which is a very unusual way of speaking, kind of like I'm talking to you right now. I'm concentrating on being as clear and as slow as possible and that's what most about the IELTS listening test is like it's not like listening to real native English speakers talking to each other but what I would recommend doing is not just practicing the IELTS listening test, which is important, it is an easy way to listen to the IELTS. What you would do is expose yourself to how real native English speakers talk to each other again

using

real forms of English like a podcast for example, and that will give you a huge advantage because there is a saying, you know, train hard, fight easy, arrives. from the army okay when you train hard when you hear more difficult English the IELTS listening test will actually be very easy so most of the band 9 students I work with listen to native English speakers speak all the time. and that makes the listening comprehension test very easy for them.

Ok, now that we know the format of the test, let's think about the different tips and tricks you can use on test day to improve your IELTS score. Tip number one for the IELTS listening test. is to read the instructions carefully, especially when it comes to word content. When you look at the questions, it may say something like writing only one word or writing no more than two words or a number. Students often get very confused about this, so let's show you exactly. What this means, first of all, every word counts, so even prepositions and even articles can't do it, for example, airport, which is one word, airport, which is two words, airport, which is two words. is three words, the only exception to this is words with hyphens, like a nice little table for you and you can memorize this table if you get confused on the day of the exam and use do it during your preparation so that it becomes second nature and second nature to you and you don't even have to think about it on the day of the exam, so The instructions say to write a word.

A correct answer would be, for example, airport because it tells you to type one. word, but if you wrote airport or air port two different words, that would be incorrect, so if the instruction was to write a word or a number, Terminal 2 would be correct because that is one word, the number and the number two they would be correct there too. because it is one word or one number in Terminal 2 it would be wrong because that is more than one word and one number in an airport terminal two that would also be wrong because it is two words and one number so if the instruction was do not write more than two words and/or a number Terminal 2 would be correct 2 would be correct and Heathrow Terminal 2 would also be correct because they do not have more than two words and/or an incorrect number would be Heathrow Airport Terminal 2 because it has more than two words are three words and a number don't write more than three words outside of Heathrow arrivals that's three words so it would be correct outside of Heathrow arrivals tomorrow that's incorrect because it's more than three words now that may sound confusing right now students often find that confusing The best way to do it is simply through practice, so when you are practicing and you see some instructions like that, be very careful and think about it and you will get used to it like anything else, don't just watch. on that table and I think it's very confusing.

I won't be able to use it. You will do it if you practice it. My next tip is to try taking the listening comprehension test on the computer. I have done both and spoken to many. students who have done both and find the computer-based exam easier for many different reasons. First of all, it won't dramatically improve your score; You'll still be doing the same exam, but there are some practical considerations that make it a little bit easier, so first of all you have to write less because it's on a computer screen, for example, it can be multiple choice, you just have to Click b or c or there will be a drop-down menu where you can choose. the right option that takes a lot less time and you just have to think a lot less and you're reducing the number of different things that you're doing at the same time and that makes it practically easier for a lot of students.

I also commented that on the paper test they constantly have to look up and down and think about what they are doing, whereas it is much more natural for them to listen while looking at a computer screen. the correct answers I don't know why, but I agree with these students. I think it's a lot easier if you go back to doing less things on test day, that's what I think and that's what a lot of students who got around nine have said. We've already talked about this in the formatting part of this video, but because you have headphones it's often much easier to hear what the person is saying and at the end of the day it's a listening test, the better you can hear . listen to what is said, the higher your score will be.

Additionally, many students have just said that it is less stressful to take the exam on the computer because there are fewer people in the room when I take the exam. I think there were about seven or eight people compare that to some of the big testing centers where you know there are 50 to 100 people doing the test at the same time in a big room some people find it extremely stressful and anything that causes Stress will usually lower your score and there are other advantages of the computer based test which you will mention again later in this video, so the next one is, if you are doing the test on paper, use a pencil, because they will often play tricks on you. pass.

You have traps there and you will have to change your answer, so what I would recommend doing is using a pencil so you can easily change your answer back. Speed ​​is very, very important. You will have to move on to the next question. and you don't want to panic and say, oh, how do I delete this? The fewer things you think about on test day, the higher your score will be. Probably the most common question we get asked is: Can I write everything? caps and my answer is very different than most teachers I see online so most teachers will give you a yes or no answer if you really search the internet there are very different views on this and it is very difficult. to find the right information about this and what happens on test day is that students think too much about this and again the more you think the lower your score will be you want all your brain power to think about your brain like a computer or think in your brain. like a battery, everything you think about drains that battery, so if you go into the test thinking whether you should use capital letters or not, or whether you should put a capital letter at the beginning, it's draining your battery and you.

We're not actually going to waste time just listening and getting the right answer, so make a decision that eliminates all other decisions and that decision is to just write everything in capital letters, if you do that you don't have to worry about that and then you can focus on getting the score you need. The next tip is about spelling. Spelling is very, very, very important. A large number of students I have worked with had excellent listening skills. A great strategy. They were set to get around nine, but because they were spelling some words incorrectly, they were getting a lower score, so here is a system that we give our students number one when they practice.

Be very honest with yourself when you give yourself a correct answer or a wrong answer if you misspelled a letter. That is completely wrong. What a lot of students do is they are very soft on themselves and say, "Oh, I wrote that wrong, but I'll mark it." I will give me a correct answer. I will spell it correctly on test day. you're probably not that honest with yourself, secondly, go through all your spelling mistakes, all the questions you got wrong due to spelling and put those words in a document, set up a google doc or whatever you want in your phone or your computer and call it spelling mistakes, you can also do this with writing, if you constantly make spelling mistakes, put them in your base so you have a document with all the words you spelled incorrectly, then what you need to do is show the spelling correct next to it and then you know that once a week or once a month you review the ones you cover the ones that are correct and you try to spell those words correctly over time you will notice common words that you always spell incorrectly and then you will eliminate those spelling mistakes and You will improve your ability to spell these words correctly.

My next tip is probably the most important, but the one that sounds really obvious and not very helpful. Your job is to find the correct answer. How is that useful? Well, your job. It's not understanding every word and understanding everything that happens in the listening test, many students will do a listening practice test and especially in the third and fourth part there will be words or phrases or maybe a whole sentence that you don't understand. I don't understand it and they will panic and think I don't understand this and then they will get all these questions wrong again.

Stress is your enemy, you don't want to be too stressed and you don't want to be second best. I guess you don't want to have too little confidence just because you don't understand certain words well. I am a native English speaker. I am an IELTS teacher from time to time I will listen to the IELTS listening tests and there will be some words in there that I do not understand the English language is huge there are English teachers at the University of Cambridge who do not know some words in the IELTS test it is not your job to understand each word, it's your job to understand them the correct answers so if you hear a word that you don't understand you can do two things number one ignore it is essential that you understand that word it is essential to help you answer the question if you don't forget it or number two You can guess the meaning of that word from the context of the words surrounding it from the sentences surrounding it.

If it is crucial to help you answer the question, doing so will reduce stress and improve your vocabulary because you will constantly improve. your vocabulary by guessing the meaning of new words guess what this is how you learn languages ​​and how you improve vocabulary you hear words you don't understand guess what they mean check it out later here and you will have learned a new word, so when you hear a new word, go back to check later, look at the script on the practice test, think about the meaning of that word and then you will constantly improve your vocabulary, but if on test day you don't understand something, don't panic, the next tip I have. is and I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by looking at a real question: prepare for the answers, it's okay if I took the test and I didn't prepare for the answers and I'm going to show you What that means in a second.

I wouldn't go online. What you want to do is look at the questions and read them before you listen to the listening. You'll have time to do it, and as you practice with real practice tests, you'll get used to it. to this, but let's look at this question and think about what we could do here and how that will help us, so the first thing we're going to do here is think about the type of question that So, this is a sentence completion question and they just want one word, so this is preparing your answers, what type of question comes and how many words, letters or numbers will have to be entered here the next time you read the title.

The title will give you context this will help you prepare your brain for what is coming. Why do we have titles in books? Why do we have titles on audiobooks? Why do we have degrees in anything? Because it makes it easier for our brain to digest something if we know what's coming so there are different subtitles here some 19th century manufacturing transportation retail this will help us understand where we are in listening it will help us or prevent us from let's lose then the next thing we do What we can do is think about the types of words that might arise, so for the first time people's possessions were used to measure space inwhite from Britain, so just looking at the sentence structure here and thinking about the grammar, it's probably going to be a noun. remember it's just a word and then the next one here developments in the production of goods and so again it will be something similar to the production of goods it will probably be something known and when they talk about production of goods we know the answer will be in and around that area you can also predict the response that might emerge, it won't always be exactly what you predict but it often is, for the first time people's possessions were used to measure Britain's wealth.

GDP, so before you hear this, you're thinking about the types of answers that might come up and that makes it much easier to find the right answer. In fact, I looked at the back of the book and it's richness and I haven't done this test before, so that shows you. I promise. I did not do it. I'm not kidding. It was very, very easy to predict. So how do you develop that as a skill? Well, like any skill you practice, you can't just listen to that. Tip and then do it for the first time on exam day.

You should get used to it every time you see a question by preparing yourself. Do you know what type of question it is, How many words, how many letters or how many numbers am I going to make? put in there what a title is what kind of words might appear predict the word that will probably come up think about the staging of what they will be talking about when they are talking about that answer and that will really help you and then, on the day of the exam, the nine students Of the band I work with they don't even think about those things, they do them naturally, so the next tip is about Concentrate, so we already talked about listening to English for 30 minutes at a time, but let's talk about concentrating with a little more detail because by being able to listen to something, I am one hundred percent focused on what you are hearing, they are two different things. things, I'm sure you've been listening to your mother or your wife or your sister or your brother or your husband or whoever and they're talking and you kind of lose focus on what they're saying, sorry for what they're saying.

I may get a little upset with you for not paying attention to them, but as human beings, our brains are not 100% focused on what we read or hear, you need to develop that as a skill, but the good news is that you can develop it number one, which you've already talked about, think of listening and concentrating like a muscle, so again get yourself a stopwatch, focus on listening for five minutes, then the next day 10, then 15, then 20 and build it like a muscle. The second thing is meditation: Meditation will not only help you with concentration, but it will also help with your mental health, help with your overall happiness, and give you a little break when you're studying so often. students email us and tell us that they know their exam is next week or their exam will be in a few days, if that's the case they will probably study and practice a lot, a good way to split up their practice sessions and your study. sessions is for meditation there are many many applications do not ask me which ones there are you know a large number of applications that you can use or if you know how to meditate already do it for five or ten minutes between study blocks it will improve your cognitive capacity, everything is a very, very Good practice for learning, but definitely helps you focus.

Another great way to improve your concentration is to reduce stress on exam day. The number one reason students get stressed is because they don't prepare. They already know enough that they are going to fail or could fail the students that we work with in our VA course that get a bonus eight 8.59. They usually go to the exam and it's just a normal day for them. They don't feel that. a lot of stress why because they're 100% prepared they've practiced a lot and they've learned all these strategies and they've practiced all of this to the point where they know it because they have a band aid or about nine ten times during the actual practice tests they know.

All you have to do is put into practice what you have learned now. I'm not saying you have to join our VIP course, but don't take the test until you're 100 ready. You'll know you're 100 ready by doing real practice. exams under exam conditions, if you consistently get the score you need, you won't be as stressed, but if you need a band eight and you consistently get 6.5 or 7, stop lying to yourself, you won't magically achieve it. skip and grade on exam day, it's better to delay your exam or console it, you know, do it later in the year, wait a couple of months and do it when you're fully prepared, that will mean you're not thinking about I'm going to fail I'm going to fail, you're just totally focused on getting the score you need.

I have also worked with many students who couldn't concentrate and what we did was reduce the amount of distractions. In their lives, the big distractions we find are social networks number one. We literally had them delete all social media from their phones and made them install, bro, you know, browsers that they couldn't access. Signs of extreme social media, but you know these ones. apps are designed to steal your attention, another is the news and TV shows and things like that, especially the news, we have students just stop watching the news because they don't want to think in the back of their brain, you know who has bombed.

Who or you know what the stock market is doing or what climate disaster occurred this year? Just cut all that out of your life and you know that when you combine those two, looking at social media all day and getting news in your brain all day, it's impossible. To focus, another big distraction is people who are wearing you down. The people in your lives who create more problems than they solve. The people in your life who make their problems your problems. You don't want those people in your life, especially when you are taking an IELTS exam.

Because you know that if you're a friend or loved one is having a big problem in their life and you have to solve it for them, you won't be able to prepare for the exam and you won't be able to concentrate on test day, it's probably a good idea to exclude them. those people for life, but if you can't do it, sit down and explain to them that you have an important exam and you need to concentrate for a few weeks or a few months and you know that as a bonus, they might leave you alone completely, but the news Social networks and people with a lot of problems reduce your concentration, so the next tip is to concentrate on the question you are asking, but think about the next one that comes up.

What does that mean in practice? For example, this question, the first part of this question is about the 19th century, when they talk about the 19th century, you want to focus totally on that part to get the right answer, but you want to have part of your brain thinking about the main areas of change that the Industrial Revolution makes because when they start talking about it, that is your signal, that is the flag to move on to that part and concentrate totally on that part now, you might think that that is very difficult and it is, but let's think in other areas of life where when you're driving a car you're totally focused on the road in front of you and maybe the car in front of you, but you're also on your periphery. thinking about what's coming this way what's coming that way is that kid is going to ride a bike right in front of me what's going on behind me is someone who's going to eat ramen behind me if I break down so you are 100% focused on the road in front of you, but you also have a part of your brain thinking about other things, you do this all the time in normal life, you need to practice this before exam day, by looking at real questions and practicing this technique , you will feel strange and it will seem difficult when you do it, but like anything else, the more you practice it, the easier it will become and that is why practice does not make perfect, perfection, practice makes perfect, when you practice , you're not just testing. what most students do they just take tests they take tests they take tests they say why is my score not improving when you are taking tests you are trying to improve these things you are trying to improve these techniques like preparing for the questions that come up by focusing on the question that you're doing while peripherally thinking about the question ahead, the next tip is that you can get a question wrong and still get a nine right, so you can get up on a nine and get a question wrong, why?

This is important, as I have said many times, human brains are not perfect, we are not robots, robots have not replaced us yet, so you will lose focus from time to time when I took the test, I think I was wrong on The first question. then the test was about to start and I was looking out the window thinking where I was going to go for a drink after the test like I wasn't concentrating on what I was doing and then the test started and it was a tuition. number and I thought, oh, they're only going to say this once and I've completely missed it.

There are two things you can do in that situation. Eighty percent of the students, if they didn't answer the first question, they would panic and think I'm I'm going to ruin my whole exam uh, let's go now, let's go to the bar and get drunk. Now this is such a stupid thing. I am stupid. I'm going to suspend. All my friends and family are going to think that. I'm stupid, if you do that you are guaranteeing that you won't get the score you need. What you should do instead is what I did, I just think okay, I got one of them wrong, but I need to focus on the rest of them and get all the others right, so if you get a question on the one who loses focus or, especially in the fourth part, you might get a question that is really very difficult, don't beat yourself up. and don't obsess over this question, guess, leave it and then move on to the next question.

The next tip for the listening test is keep moving or you're dead, so I read a lot of books on history, especially military history and The best people in the world walk into a room and kill a lot of bad guys: the SAS, the Forces British Specials, they are incredible at entering rooms and killing everyone there except the hostages, and what they knock on the door is murder. hole and their technique is to enter the room, get out of that killer hole and keep moving until they are safe. That's the exact same technique you should use during the listening test if you freeze in the kill hole and stop moving.

You stop thinking about what you're doing, you're dead, but if you keep moving and keep thinking, then you'll do very, very well and you'll be safe. The next tip for the IELTS listening test. It's always giving an answer even if you don't know, so a lot of the questions will be multiple choice or you know choose a different option, even if you don't know, you have to guess because you know if there are three options that you have. a 33 and a third chance to get the score right now if we want to buy nine, we don't want to guess, you know, most questions we want to answer correctly, but even the students I've worked with are around nine did a couple of guesses and they still got about nine, so there is a strategy you can use that will help you give educated guesses.

These are strategic guesses, they are guesses that have a higher probability of getting the correct score. less than a third, so the first way to do it is by elimination. So let's say, for example, that you're asking this question and you get stuck on question 23. In relation to modern refrigerators, both Annie and Jack are concerned about A the complexity of the technology B the fact that some are disposed of irresponsible or C the large amount that break down quickly so let's say they are talking about the technology being very complicated and because of this many of them break down but not talking about how they are disposed of and they are not talking about that at all, which What you can do is eliminate B and then guess whether it will be a or c.

Now again, you're only doing this with questions that are very, very difficult or you lose focus or you get lost, but you just increased your chances from 33 percent to 50, the next thing you can do is predict, so if we look at this example again for the first time, people's possessions were used to measure the wealth of Britain, you can guess from the context what the correct answer is, so even if you lost focus, let's say you started thinking, you started daydreaming about something while they were talking about it, I would write in wealth, it could be right, it could be wrong. but if you don't write anything you are one hundred percent guaranteed that it is wrong if you write something at least you have a chance the next tip is to use the example recording to get used to the voices get used to the accents and get used to the question they are giving you, sothat in some parts of the listening test they will play an example recording and it will usually be the same people speaking with the same accent answering the same type of question, for example it could be typing a phone number. so listening to that and what it will do will not only help you understand how to answer the question, but it will also help you tune into the person's cues, especially their accent, because sometimes the accent can be quite unusual for you, you probably will. be.

I'm not going to be able to hear all the English speaking accents in the world, there are too many, but if they play this example, always listen carefully because you wouldn't tune into the accent, especially if it's an unusual accent the final tip is not to worry too much about the accents As I said before the listening test, it's not like listening to real native English speakers talk to each other. If you went to my local coffee shop or my local bar you wouldn't understand. 90 of what is said but when I speak to you I am an English teacher I speak with a neutral accent very clear and very slow that is probably what you are going to hear in the listening comprehension test it is a lot It is better to spend your time practicing and preparing the different Strategies we'll talk about in the rest of this lesson involve trying to perfect listening to the hundreds, if not thousands, of different English-speaking accents in Ireland. and in the UK alone, there are hundreds of different types of accents that you won't get and don't need to worry about.

In the listening test, get familiar with it. You can listen to different podcasts. Different news programs. Listen to the local. news in United States Canada United Kingdom South Africa Australia New Zealand Ireland whatever you want to do, but don't worry too much, people won't speak with your very, very unusual accent on the listening test. Now let's talk about common traps or tricks or distractors that you may encounter in the IELTS listening test and there are a number of these that can trick you into giving the wrong answer before you go through them all. Let's talk about mindset first which is very very important.

Many students get frustrated with the listening test, especially because they think that IELTS and the people at Cambridge are trying to trick them into getting a lower score than they deserve if they think they are You will just give up and your preparation will get you. It will be very, very frustrating. We don't want that, let's see what is really happening. What they are doing is trying to recreate real life. That's what the whole IELTS exam is about. What it is doing is recreating what will happen when you move to an English speaking country, so for example, let's say you are working as a doctor or nurse and they ask you for a particular medication or something, then you are in the operating room and They tell me to give me 25 cc of adrenaline.

Obviously I'm not a doctor that's just an idea I had and then they say no we actually need 50 cc so what they've done is change the answer there if I said 25 it would be wrong but if you give 50 and you think about the trick they just pulled on you, you'll be fine, so don't see it as a trick, see it as a challenge, all these things I'm going to talk about. about the challenges they have set for you, so even if I say trap or trick, try to think of a challenge, it will be much easier for you to learn this, so the first trap they set for you or the challenge they set set for you is changing the correct answer from one answer to the next normally, what this will mean is that they will give an answer that could be correct and then later in the recording they will change it to something different, let's see how they could do that.

Do that with a real question, so if we take a look at this question, it says the name of the station they return to, they might say something like we start in London and then we get to Manchester, so you were listening to a place, a town, a city. new station here in London and then they say, well, we start in London and then we get to Manchester later because you're so focused on trying to find a place or a city, you only listen to London, write down the first thing you say. You need to be aware of this and aware that they could change it, so don't focus too much on predicting and finding the right answer, allow yourself to listen to the words and sentences related to what they say and make a decision based on that, another trap or challenge. common could be that they use synonyms or paraphrasing, so what happens is you're looking at the question, you see a word or phrase in the question and you're hearing that exact phrase, sometimes it will be that exact. phrase or that exact word, but sometimes it will be a paraphrase or a synonym, now synonyms are just the words that mean the same thing but are different, for example, man, man, woman, woman, they mean exactly the same thing even in 2023 and There are synonyms for each other. so let's look at this example again name of the station you are returning to so instead of station you could use destination or instead of return you could say return instead of return to you could use the phrase return when you will return so if you are just listening the station you return to and they say something like return to your final destination, you will be completely lost, so keep an open mind when looking at the questions, don't just think about what I'm looking for. exactly in the question think about what it could be what synonym they could use what different phrase they could use that means the same thing but it's a different word another challenge is plurals, especially plural nouns, so for example, let's say you're listening to people that they offer to each other. a cup of tea, so they're having a cup of tea and a very common question and that scenario is: do you drink sugar?

So in this scenario, sugar is an uncountable noun, but then the person might say yes, I'll take two sugars. or I take two sugars, so you have two different words here, sugar and sugars, the only difference is a little s at the end, but one will be correct and one will be incorrect and there are two ways you can overcome this problem: one is by listening to what What do you hear if there's an s at the end or a z at the end then it's probably the plural form you're talking about, but you can also think grammatically I take two sugars grammatically incorrect I take two sugars grammatically correct so you need to pay attention to the pronunciation, your listening skills, grammar and spelling, all at the same time.

Another challenge is the unusual spelling of names or places normally, so this happens a lot with popular surnames, so English surnames for example, we have very popular names. like Smith Jones brown, but there are standard spellings of those names and then unusual spellings of those names, so for example, Brown, the standard spelling is brown, but an unusual but fairly common spelling is b-r-o-w-n-e and you shouldn't worry too much about This is because if there is an unusual spelling it usually appears in the first part where someone is on a call with someone they are on a phone call with and they ask their name if it is an unusual spelling of their name or maybe a city or a town or something like that then they will spell it they will say my name is Brian and how do you spell that brown so the trap many students fall into is Herobrine oh I know how to spell brown they will write it immediately as the standard spelling and then they will miss the person that spells it, especially in the first part, if the people you are listening to ask you for a spelling or spell something, then you should listen to exactly how they spell it and then put There is a challenge that many people have when I talk to them is my last name which sounds similar and this is a big trap that a lot of students fall into, there are words that sound very similar to each other, so my last name is pel p-e-l-l and every time I meet someone new, they're like Belle, tell Dell, hell, it's everything, they all sound similar again, you don't need to worry too much about this because this usually comes in the first part and if the person has an unusual last name like Yo, what I'll do when I'm on the phone with someone is: I'll explain it to them.

I'll say P for Papa e for Echo L for Lima L for Lima again. How you overcome this is by not listening to the first one. What is the first word you hear Mr. Pale and write? Bell listens if they spell it and writes the exact spelling. The final trap that many students fall into is not being aware of not hearing negatives and double negatives, so what are they? Well, a negative is when you use a word like not or don't or not was. You should also take into account double negatives in English. This can be very, very unusual if your native language doesn't have this, for example, simple. not bad in English means good not negative bad negative not bad means good Now I've heard a few double negatives from time to time on practice exams but most of the time it's like no or it wasn't or it didn't So what does that mean?

I mean, let's take a look at a particular question, so here we have a customer satisfaction survey. Satisfaction with trip least satisfied with, so imagine someone is on a call with another person being asked about their trip. What were you least satisfied with if it said food? It wasn't bad or they said what you thought of the food and they said it wasn't bad. Some people may hear that and think that the food was what they were at least satisfied with, but they're actually saying the opposite, they're saying the opposite. the food was pretty good, often what will happen is they will use a negative and then say the correct answer after that, for example they might say something like well the food wasn't bad but the drinks were terrible so in that sentence the food wasn't bad, but the drinks were terrible.

What they were least satisfied with were the drinks. The main thing to remember is that not all questions will have these challenges, but you should be aware of them. Let's use a driving analogy again when you're. When driving a car, you're not very focused on what's going on right in the front of the car, you're more focused on it having most of your attention, but you're also paying attention to the periphery that you're paying attention to. What's happening behind you to your right and to your left should be the same thing you're doing acoustically and audibly when you listen to the transcriptions, so most of your attention should be on what the correct answer is, but pay attention to what's happening. about what you think might be the right answer because it might change, they might spell it differently, there might be a synonym or it might be negative and that's not actually the right answer, the right answer is coming up, you're probably very confused. now and I am very frustrated but with practice this becomes much easier, we are going to show you where you can find real practice tests so in this part it is extremely important that more students fail the IELTS test using fake and unreliable tests than Anything to do with your listening ability or your English ability, about 90 percent of the tests you'll find online on YouTube are actually fake, don't worry, we'll show you how to spot the fake ones so you know 100 of the time whether they are real or not and we will show you exactly where you can find real free practice tests.

I've also put together links to all the places on the internet where you can find these real free practice tests that are reliable. I put them all in one document and I put them in the description below so that it's really useful for you, but before I give you that, before I show you the four places where you can find these reliable ones, I want to talk about why. Fake tests are very dangerous because when I simply show people where to find the reliable ones, most of the time they will use them too quickly and then use the fake ones, the fake ones are produced by people who don't know. what they are doing well, I am not criticizing anyone or saying that I am better than anyone, but there is a big difference between a teacher trying to help people improve their scores to a YouTuber trying to increase the number of views on his channel or a blogger who is trying to increase the number of views on their website, more than 90 percent of the tests you will find online are fake, these people don't care if you improve your score, so they don't care .

They put in as much effort or don't even have the experience to do reliable tests, so what is reliable means that the test you take today will have the same difficulty in the same challenge as the day of the test and it is extremely difficult to actually do this and it takes a lot of time and that's why these people don't do it because something difficult and it takes a lot of time. Most people don't want to do it, so why is this a problem? The tests will be very long. too easy or too hard if they are too easy you will be full of false confidence you will go into the exam thinking I am going to get around a nine.

I got around nine a few times and then get your test score and it's like 5.5, that's because you weretaking exams that were not very easy, even worse, many people will not even take the exam because the exams are too difficult. If you get tests that are too difficult, you will lose. If you are fully confident, you will give up on your dream of moving to a new country because you think you are not good enough. I've seen this many times where students email us and say I'm terrible at listening and then we'll do it. give them a real test and it turns out that they are pretty good listeners, they were just using fake tests and the final reason is that a lot of them are completely misleading with questions that you will never see in different formats and what happens is you are used to this fake format and then You'll walk in on test day and take a test you've never seen before and aren't familiar with at all.

Our goal with you is that on test day we are completely sure that you know exactly what's coming because you're only using really reliable tests, so there are four places in only four places that have reliable tests and they're all free. The first is IDP on the IDP website. You will find many free practice tests, the second one is British Council and the same, the next one is ielts.org. It's a little bit harder to find them on the ielts.org website, but I'll give you those links below and finally Cambridge English makes these expensive ones for most people, but they also have some free ones on their website.

I'll give you the links now, but you might see this video in a few years and they are constantly adding free stuff to their website, so the easiest way to find this information at any time is to just go to Google, enter IDP or the British console or ielts.org or Cambridge on Google and then add the IELTS listening tests. Google will take you to the latest genuine free tests, anything else, even if it's your favorite YouTuber or your favorite IELTS guru, anything else is not trustworthy, it doesn't matter if these people have millions of subscribers, it doesn't matter if they have big companies. of IELTS if they are not. of those four organizations, then you are taking a big risk, especially with YouTube, most of the YouTube channels that have the IELTS listening practice test say that they are real, they are completely fake, they are too easy, too difficult or completely misleading or a combination of those who don't use them, you're wasting your time now when I say what comes back to students is good, there aren't enough free practice tests, what you want to do is completely change your strategy and mindset towards practice , you won't get it. better just practice practice practice practice practice practice doesn't make perfect perfect practice makes perfect now we're going to give you the perfect practice strategy so we're going to show you how to practice to abandon this strategy this system that I'm a point to show you has produced hundreds and hundreds of Bandai students and it's the best IELTS practice strategy I know of and I've helped hundreds, if probably thousands, of students get online, so first you're going to need something, you're going to need the exams of practice, probably not.

Don't get the ones that are covered in brown like mine, buy new ones, buy them from a trusted bookstore, don't buy them, you know, photocopies of them, they can be fake. When I say this to students, you know, if you come from a background, I totally get it. But you already know that it is more expensive to spend ten and twenty dollars on reliable tests or to spend 200,250 to fail the test. Don't see this as a cost, see it as an investment. It's worth not downloading the PDFs that you will find online, they are often fake.

I'm not saying this because I make money from them. I am not affiliated or associated with Cambridge at all. I earn zero dollars if you buy them. The reason I tell you this is because I care about you. improve your scores that is the best way to do it so once you have your practice exams you are going to take three practice exams under exam conditions. What do the exam conditions mean? Which means you've never seen that exam before. Don't buy the book and, on the way home, read the questions, familiarize yourself with them, and look up words you don't know.

You want to recreate exactly what will happen on test day, so don't cheat and time it exactly. at the same time as what will happen on the day of the exam and you are going to do three of them because what you want before you book the exam is that you constantly get three times in a row the score you need or probably half band or a link above the score you need, if you can do it three times in a row then you are practically guaranteed to get that score on exam day, not only will it be great for you because you know you will get the score you need, but on exam day you will have completely eliminated any stress and you will be able to perform your best because do you get nervous and stressed when you tie your shoelaces?

Not because you know you can do it you know you've done it thousands of times before our students who do this system or use this system get the score they need so many times that doing it is like tying your shoelaces but if you don't get the score you you need three times in a row, you must move on to the next part of this system. The next part of this system goes at the end of the book. Find the audio script. The transcription of. the exam you just took and you will find the correct answers and what you are going to do is correct your exam honestly, you will check why you were wrong in each question, to do this you can simply watch the question, think about the recording, but the most important thing is that what you need to do is look at the actual audio script and think about why you went wrong and the goal of this exercise is to find your weaknesses to detect patterns, what are your common weaknesses, so let's go.

Go through a few of them just so you realize what to listen to and what to look for. One of them is very common: spelling, know to be honest with yourself and you should honestly rate your answers if several of them are written incorrectly. Don't mark yourself wrong if you notice that you are not getting the score you need due to multiple spelling errors then that is good news because it is quite easy to fix and you can also detect that particular type of questions and We will talk about those later in the video are causing you a problem, for example, every time you get a multiple choice question, you get it wrong because most of them are wrong or every time you get a Maps question or a diagram question. most of them are wrong, that's a strategy problem, it's not that your listening skills have a problem, there is nothing wrong with your language, you probably just need a strategy that works, practice that strategy and then you won't have problems the day of the exam, you can also think back and you might have made some mistakes in a row when you lost focus, so for example when I took the test and I was looking out the window looking at the birds and thinking about what I was going to do later that night and got the first one. question wrong, not because there is any problem with my listening comprehension or my English, but because I completely lost focus.

If that's your problem again, that's good news because you can improve your concentration. I talked about that earlier in the video. A very, very common problem is students. They will come back to me using this system and say I can't find the particular reason. I don't know what my weakness is. If that's the case, it's probably vocabulary, so what you can do is look back and look. the question, but actually read the audio script and if there are a lot of words or phrases that you've never heard before and don't understand that were causing the problem, you couldn't find the right answer because you didn't understand them. you understand the words then that's a vocabulary problem, not really a listening problem, you need to improve your vocabulary and I will put a vocabulary improvement plan in the description, so the last step is the step that most students don't They like it, but it's where you should see the most improvement Take that weakness and work on it Turn each weakness into a strength Don't do any more practice tests until you've improved that strength, so, for example, if you have a big problem with spelling, taking more listening practice tests will not improve your spelling If you struggle with vocabulary, taking more practice tests will not magically improve your vocabulary.

You should focus on that and if you have any problems or need help with that, please feel free to contact us. We'll give you free resources or talk to you about joining one of our courses, but we always have ways to help you improve your weaknesses, so don't hesitate to get in touch now. We will provide you with the step-by-step strategies that we provide. The VIP students a lot of them used to get around nine, so before we give them these strategies step by step, let's see how our students use them because what you can't do is just look at the strategy once and then apply it.

On test day you need to do a few different things, so what we're going to do is show you real questions and these questions that we're going to see are maps and multiple choice. There are other types of IELTS listening questions and we. At the end we will show you where you can find strategies for all of them, but we will focus on these two because they are the ones that help students the most, these are the ones that students worry about and we want to reduce their stress and anxiety as much as possible, so Before looking at the questions, let's look at how our students use these strategies.

The first thing they think about is what are the unique problems, what are the specific problems related to these questions. For multiple choice for example, one of the problems is that all the options look the same or similar, it is a unique problem that you need to be aware of so that on the day of the exam, when you see it, you can conquer. that problem you will be able to solve that problem or with maps what is very difficult for people is to visualize in their brain walking through that area or walking through that map that is a unique problem so first we must think about what those are your problems and then how we solve them and then how we use the strategy and the strategy is designed to overcome all these problems and then all you have to do is practice using that strategy until it becomes a habit until it becomes second nature. you learn it by heart, don't go into the exam trying to think of these strategies because we want to reduce the thinking as much as possible.

You go into the exam knowing the strategies automatically, so when you're driving a car, if you've been driving for many years you don't think about the signal, check the mirror, how to change gears, how to use the pedals, you just use them automatically, that's it. the same approach you should have if you want to buy nine for strategies, so let's start by looking. In Maps, on the test you may get a question like this, where they show you a simple map or diagram. They will usually take you on a tour of somewhere, so you will listen to a guide telling you where to find things or where to go. during this tour or taking you on a tour of this place in this example it's a park but it could be a library it could be a college campus it could be a shopping center anywhere you know you could take a tour there.

Think about the key problems associated with listening to maps. The first is not being familiar with the specific language used to describe the maps. For example, you may hear someone say east or west. You may hear someone instead of saying next to adjacent to for. example so you don't want to think what these things actually mean and be totally confused so you need to familiarize yourself with these words and phrases and what I will do is put a link below in the description and the description will go through all of these if there are any in that list that you don't understand.

Look for their meaning and get used to hearing and understanding them. This will make your job much easier. The next problem that comes your way. What many students face when it comes to Maps is that they are doing too many things at once. Now think about what you're doing when you ask a Maps question. You are not only listening, but you are thinking about this unusual thing. vocabulary you have to visualize imagine walking around the map you have to understand what is being said you have to understand the map you have to decide the correct answers all at the same time and you need to take notes now what we just talked about learn to drive a car and what easy it is after a few years of driving it, but when you were first learning to drive that car everything seemed very very difficult when you were a little girl or boy, just tying your shoelaces seems very very difficult when we do things new things that are new to our brain, it's hard to do these things, but how do you overcome that problem?

You overcome that problem through practice.household appliances, so you compare refrigerators, refrigerators, with other household appliances, like a vacuum cleaner, a vacuum cleaner, a toaster, a kettle, all those things, while B refers only to household products. There are many different types of refrigerators, so by underlining the key words and thinking about the differences, it will be much easier to think about what they say, the next thing to remember is that you should not think about what is the first answer I hear and write the first answer I hear, so let's take the first question, for example, what did Ami discover when reading about ice houses?

Why were they first created? So in the recording they could talk about why they were first created or how they were created. was first created but that might not be one of the options related to what Ali discovered when reading about the ice houses, maybe she heard something or her father or mother told her why they were created first and then she speaks of what it was. When reading about where they were located, if you just write down the first thing you hear and don't think about the specific question, then you will have problems, so it is not a listening comprehension test.

Write down the first thing you find. Listen, that's not what a multiple choice listening test is, it's not just a listening test, it's a thinking test, so you need to read the question, understand the question, and then think in relation to the question. recording, what is the correct answer. listening test is a test of listening and thinking the following is what not to do don't focus on one question lose the panic and then you miss the rest of the questions so for example if you are doing 21 wanted Annie If you find out by reading about ice houses and you lose focus or you get confused or you don't understand what's going on, then it's very, very important that you leave that question behind, make an educated guess and move on to the next ones because what happens is you get lost.

You lose. the focus and you focus on that and you're like, "Oh my god, I missed that" and then you're like, "Okay, which one should I choose" and then the recording goes on and you just messed up 22, 23, and 24. They'll be in order, so You must decide which is the correct answer. Be decisive. I know it's hard for many people in the world to be decisive and choose the right answer, but if you don't choose one answer you are sacrificing the rest. of the questions, the next thing is to be very careful with qualifying statements, these are words like but or however, if we go down to 24, she might say something like yes, overall they are good value for money, however, in recent years or recently.

It's become very, very expensive, so you might hear the first part of that sentence and think, "Good value for money" and mark that as the correct answer, but then she says but but changes her mind , qualify what he's about to say and you've just ruined everything, so listen to those words but or however and if you hear them, think about what the whole sentence means, not just the first part of the sentence, okay, Now that we know what is going to arise, let's think about our step. -Step by step strategy for multiple choice questions number one always never changes whatever the question is read the instructions carefully choose the correct letter a b or c I know it is very obvious and you are a very smart person but make sure you read the instructions.

The next step is to read each question and think about what is really being asked, so let's say 24, for example, what do Jack and Annie agree on regarding household refrigerators, not what do they think? separately what do they agree on if you don't read the question it will be very difficult for you to find the answer to number 24 because the key word there is agree and that is the next step highlight the key words the next step is to look at each option and To understand the difference between each option, the next thing is to think of synonyms or paraphrases that you may hear, for example, it took a long time to become popular, a long time, it could be 50 years, 100 years, you could say it took forever to become popular. you could say famous or widely used or used by the masses, there are a lot of things that could come up now, you won't be able to sit there and think of synonyms and paraphrase forever, but try to be aware of them and think of the obvious ones don't start with 21A and try Think of 20 different synonyms for the word created, just think of the obvious one created, made and keep moving forward, move on to the next one, if you can predict the correct answer, this one is a bit difficult for multiple choice questions so I wouldn't try Do this too much because often all three answers are very possible, but if you have time try to make predictions, but if you can't predict anything, don't worry too. much about this, not even listening is going to start what you are hearing are keywords, synonyms, part of the phrase, so don't just listen to the keyword, listen to the synonym of that keyword, then there you will know when they are talking about it.

So, for example, what did Annie discover when reading about ice houses? So she could literally say when she was reading about the ice houses or she could say I read a book or I was studying when you hear you know, okay, she's going to start talking about the ice houses. different options, then listen to the different keywords within the different options and choose the correct answer that takes us to the next step. Listen to the whole section so that the section where she talks about reading about ice houses don't listen to the first thing she says listen to the whole section and then decide your correct answer because there will be distractions, she might change her mind, she might talk about other things , you're trying to divide the recording into four parts, so here are four parts, there are four questions that you need. to divide the recording into four parts, okay, she's going to talk about this, listen to that whole part, choose the correct answer, then 22 listen to that whole part, choose the right answer and continue that way if you think you'll find the answer correct. answer, mark the answer so that you think it's probably this one, but keep listening because she might change her mind or the answer might change, but if you are 100% sure in the end, choose that as your correct answer and finally the final step be an informed response. guess, if you're not sure, choose the one you think is most likely to be correct, move on to the next one and that's it.

Hi Chris, here from IELTS Advantage and in this special video what we do. What we're going to do is give you an IELTS listening practice test for free, so what this video will do is give you that listening test so you can practice your listening skills at home and what we're going to do at the end of the video gives you the answers so the rest of the video will be the listening test and then at the end I'll give you those answers so good luck and I'll see you at the end for the answers for the listening part of IELTS.

Hello and welcome to the Klein Museum, which was the actual home of Mr. Klein and his family before he became the famous author as we all know him today. Before we begin, there are a few questions I would like to ask you. For our records, would you be fine sir, yes, I would be more than happy to help you, that's great, thank you first of all, what is his name? My full name is John Horton John Hort, spell his last name please of course, it's h-o-r-t-o-n Horton is actually a pretty popular name where I come from and where exactly you come from.

I just flew from London yesterday specifically to come visit me. It's very exciting, well it's great to have such a dedicated fan. I need to ask you. for his phone number since our director has plans to take some special exhibits on tour next year, that sounds very interesting. I definitely like being kept informed about that. My number is 064-145-354 oh six four one four five three five four is that Okay, that's exactly it, thank you. Next, could you tell me if this is your first visit to the Klein Museum? Yeah, well, actually my parents brought me here when I was really young and I don't remember, but technically this is my second time here, oh my god, so your whole family is a Klein fan, so yeah, they were definitely my parents who helped me get started with it and what is your favorite client book.

I love all of his popular books like Heyday and the knocking, but my absolute favorite has to be the final push which wasn't as popular as the others but really left a lasting impression on me. I know exactly what you mean. It really is surprising that it is not better known and while you visit you will need the services. from our in-house photographer no, that will not be necessary. Do you know that personal cameras are not allowed in the museum? Oh, really, it wasn't right in that case. I guess it will be better. How much does a photo cost?

It's five dollars. but you can get five for only ten dollars which option suits you best. I'll go with a photo since I really just need it as a reminder of my visit here. This is a bit embarrassing. Actually, what do I need to set today's date? the form but I can't actually remember what date it is today you have nothing to worry about well I flew yesterday which was February 15th so today is February 16th so thanks for your patience I started with the tour as You can see that the main entrance is furnished with the standard double doors of the period and leads us directly to the guest room, which is the largest room in the house;

In fact, he says it is the same room where he signed his first publishing contract in 1894. At the opposite end of the room we have the fireplace in the center where he and his family would gather during the cold winters to keep warm. . To the right of the fireplace is the entrance to the utility room, but unfortunately we don't have one. any of the objects that were stored there by the Klein family as the house changed hands several times before it was finally converted into a museum in his honor. To the left of the door leading to the kitchen you can see this hatch that was used as a service window as usual so that the staff did not interact with the guests.

If you follow me into the kitchen, here you can see that the stove is placed directly against the wall at the back of the fireplace and this is because when the fire is lit, the heat can be used in the oven of the stove and a On the left the sink is located directly below the window, so that this area is well lit for preparing food and washing dishes, at the back of the kitchen is the The entrance door to the bedroom in those days the beds They weren't as popular as they are now, so people slept on thin wooden mats placed on the floor like the ones you see here and the whole family slept here together except on the coldest nights when they would move into the guest room. to take advantage of the heat that remains from the night's fire.

You will notice this small cubicle that at first may look like a private bathroom, but is actually our great Mr. Klein's office, as he found this to be the quietest place in the house and he could concentrate on his work without interruption, finally if could follow me back through the kitchen, here we can go out the back door of the house towards the woodshed where the Klein family is kept, obviously it would be there. However, it was the staff who were the only ones who really had any reason to be back here and that pretty much concludes our tour.

Does anyone have any questions they would like to ask? IELTS listening to the second part. The first thing is that clean energy. has been increasing over the last 20 years, this is electricity from clean energy sources, but when we look at the percentage of global electricity coming from clean energy sources, it has actually decreased from 36 percent to 31 percent and if we care about climate change, we have We have to go in the opposite direction to one hundred percent of our electricity from clean energy sources as quickly as possible now one might wonder, come on, what could five percentage points of electricity be? world?

Well, it turns out to be quite a bit, it's the equivalent. from 60 nuclear plants the size of the last Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California or 900 topaz-sized solar farms, which is one of the largest solar farms in the world and certainly the largest in California, well, a big part This is simply that fossil. Fuels are increasing faster than clean energy and that is understandable, there are simply a lot of poor rural trees that still use wood and coal as their main energy source and need modern fuels, but there is something else going on, which is one of those clean energies.

Sources in particular have been declining in absolute terms, not just relatively, and that is nuclear. You can see that their generation has decreased by seven percent in the last 10 years. Now solar and wind have made great strides and that's why you hear a lot about how it doesn't really matter because solar and wind will make up for it.the difference, but the data says something different when you combine all the electricity from solar and wind, you see that it actually barely represents half of the decline in nuclear electricity, well, let's take a closer look at the United States over the last few years really 2013 2014 we prematurely retired from nuclear power plants, they were almost entirely replaced by fossil fuels and so the consequence was that we removed almost as much electricity from clean energy that we get from solar and It's not unique to us, I mean, people think that California is a leader in clean energy and climate, but when we looked at the data, we found that, in fact, California reduced emissions more slowly than the national average between 2000 and 2015.

What's happening? Germany is using a lot of clean energy, but when you look at the data, German emissions have increased since 2009 and there is really no one who is going to say that they are going to meet their climate commitments in 2020. The reason is not difficult to understand. Solar and wind energy provide power 10 to 20 times the time, which means that when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, you still need power for your hospitals, your homes, your cities, your factories and while the batteries are running. have manufactured. Some really interesting improvements lately, the truth is that they will never be as efficient as the electrical grid.

Every time you put electricity into a battery and take it out, you lose between 20 and 40 percent of the energy. That's why when we in California try to deal with all the solar power we've put online, we now get about 10 percent. percent of our electricity from solar energy when the sun sets and people come home from work and turn on their air conditioners and televisions. Televisions and all the other appliances in the house need a lot of backup natural gas, so what we've been doing is sticking a lot of natural gas up the side of a mountain and that worked pretty well for a while, but eventually Last year a leak emerged, this is Aliso Canyon and so much methane gas was released that it was the equivalent of putting half a million cars on the roads.

It basically exceeded all of our climate commitments for the year. Well, what about India? Sometimes you have to go to different places. to really get the right data, so we traveled to India a few months ago, met with all the senior officials in Seoul or the rest of the nuclear sector and what they told us is that we are actually having more serious problems than Germany and California. we have no backup, we start, we say we want to get to 100 gigawatts by 2022, but last year we only did five and the year before that we did five, so let's take a closer look at nuclear energy, the United Nations intergovernmental panel on Climate change has looked at the carbon content of all these different fuels and nuclear power is really low, it's actually lower even than solar and nuclear power obviously provides a lot of energy 24 hours a day, seven days a day. a week for a year, a single plant can provide energy. 92 percent of the time and the interesting thing is that when you look at the countries that have implemented different types of clean energy, there are only a few that have done so at a pace consistent with managing the climate crisis, so the Nuclear power seems like a pretty good option, but there's one big problem that all of you, I'm sure, know, and that is that people don't really like it.

There was a study, a survey done among people around the world, not just in the United States or Europe, about a year ago. and a half ago and what they discovered is that nuclear energy is actually one of the least popular forms of energy, even oil is more popular than nuclear and although nuclear energy surpasses coal, the thing is that people don't really He is afraid of coal. in the same way that they feared nuclear energy, which really operates on our unconscious, so what do we fear? I mean, there are really three things, the safety of the plants themselves, the fear of them melting down and causing damage, and the waste. of them and then there is the association with weapons and I think, understandably, engineers look at those concerns and want to look for technological solutions.

I mean, that's why Bill Gates is in China developing advanced reactions, that's why 40 different entrepreneurs They are working on this problem and I myself am very excited about it, we did a report on how to make nuclear energy cheap, in particular, the thorium reactor shows a lot of That's why when climate scientist James Hanson asked me if I wanted to go to China with him and see the Chinese advanced nuclear program, I took advantage of the possibility of us being there with engineers from MIT and UC Berkeley and, you know, I had in mind that the Chinese could do with nuclear energy what they did with so many others things, just start cranking up little nuclear reactors on assembly lines, they can ship like iPhones or MacBooks and ship them around the world.

I would buy one at my house in Berkeley. um, but what I found was something different. The presentations were all very exciting and very promising. They have multiple reactors they are working on. It was time for the thorium reactor and many of us were excited to have gone through the entire presentation. to the timeline and they said we are going to have a thorium molten salt reactor ready for sale to the world by 2040. IELTS listening to part three, so let's look at the four decisions we are making right now, the first one, the By far the most consumed seafood in the United States and much of the West is shrimp.

Shrimp in the wild is a wild product. It is a terrible product. Regularly 5 10 15 pounds of wild fish are killed to bring one pound of shrimp to market. They are also incredibly inefficient in terms of fuel to bring to market. A recent study at Dalhousie University found that Dragon shrimp fishing is one of the most carbon-intensive forms of fishing you can find, which is why they can be farmed and people do. Grow them and they Grow them a lot in this same area. The problem is where shrimp are farmed in these wild habitats in the mangrove forests.

Now look at those beautiful roots coming down. Those are the things that hold the soil together. They protect the coasts. They create habitats for everyone. young crappie, young shrimp, all kinds of things that are important to this environment, well this is what's happening to a lot of coastal mangrove forests, we've lost millions and a lot of coastal mangrove forests, we've lost millions of acres. Coast. mangroves in the last 30 or 40 years that rate of destruction has slowed down but we still have a large deficit of mangroves. The other thing happening here is a phenomenon that filmmaker Mark Benjamin called Nemo grinding.

This phenomenon is very, very relevant to anything. that you have ever seen on a tropical reef because what is happening now is shrimp trawlers trawling shrimp catching a lot of bycatch which in turn is ground up and turned into shrimp feed and sometimes Many of these vessels are crewed by slaves. They are capturing these so called trash fish that we would love to see on a reef by grinding them up and turning them into shrimp feed, an ecosystem that literally eats itself and spits out shrimp, the next seafood you should consume in the United States and also throughout the West is The tuna, therefore, tuna is the global fish par excellence.

These huge management areas must be observed so that the management area is called a regional fisheries management organization and is called icat, the international invention for the conservation of Atlantic tuna, the great naturalist Carl Safina once called it the international tuna . conspiracy to catch all the tunas of course we have seen incredible improvement in icat in recent years. There is a lot of room for improvement, but it remains to be said that tuna is a global fish and to manage it we have to manage the world well. We could also try growing tuna, but tuna is a spectacularly bad animal for aquaculture.

Many people don't know it, but tuna is warm-blooded. It can warm your body to 20 degrees above room temperature. It can swim at more than 40 miles per hour. How nice. too much eliminates all the advantages of raising a fish, like it's a farmed fish or a cold blooded fish, it doesn't move much, that's great for growing protein, but if you have this crazy wild creature that swims at 40 miles an hour hour and it warms your blood it is not a great candidate for aquaculture the next creature and the most consumed seafood in America and throughout the West is the salmon now the salmon was also plundered but in reality it did not necessarily happen through fishing this is my Connecticut's home state Connecticut used to be home to a lot of wild salmon, but if you look at this map of Connecticut, every dot on that map is a dam.

There are more than 3,000 dams in the state of Connecticut. I often say this is why people in Connecticut are so so I am tense if someone could unlock Connecticut's chi. I feel like we could have an infinitely better world, but I once made this particular comment at a convention of national park officials and this guy from North Carolina sidled up to me and said, "You know you should be like that." tough on Connecticut because here in North Carolina we have 35,000 dams, so it's a national epidemic, it's an international epidemic and there are dams everywhere and these are the very things that prevent wild salmon from reaching their spawning grounds. , so as a result, We have turned to aquaculture areas and, as a result, we have turned to aquaculture and salmon is one of the most successful, at least from a numerical point of view, when they started farming salmon, up to six pounds of wild fish could be needed to produce it. a single pound of salmon, the industry has improved enormously, they have gotten it below two to one, although it is a little misleading because if you look at the way aquaculture feed is produced, they are measuring pellets in pounds of pellets per pound of salmon, those pellets are in turn reduced fish, so it is difficult to say what is called FIFA, the fish and the fish, but in any case, you have to give credit to the industry because it has reduced the amount of fish per pound of salmon.

We have also gone crazy with the amount of salmon we are producing. Aquaculture is the fastest growing food system on the planet, it is growing at a rate of around seven percent per year and although we are doing less per fish to bring it to market we are still killing many of these small fish and If we also feed fish to chickens and pigs, then we have chickens and they eat fish, but interestingly we also have fish that eat chickens, because the byproducts. of chicken feathers, blood bones are ground and fed to fish, so I often wonder if there is a fish that ate a chicken that ate a fish.

This is sort of a reworking of the chicken and the egg question all together, although it results in a terrible disaster. Well, what you're talking about is something between 20 and 30 million metric tons of wild creatures being taken out of the ocean and used and ground up, that's the equivalent of a third of China or the entire United States of humans taken from the sea every year, the last of the four is a kind of amorphous thing, you know, what the industry calls whitefish, there are a lot of fish that cycle into this whitefish thing, but I think the way to count the story is through that classic piece of American culinary innovation Culinary innovation the fish fillet sandwich, so the fish fillet sandwich actually started out as halibut and it started because a local franchise owner discovered that when he served his McDonald's on Friday Nobody came because it was a Catholic community.

They needed fish, so Ray Kroc um, he went to Ray Kroc and said, I'm going to bring you a fish sandwich that will be made with halibut. Ray Kroc said: I don't think it's going to work. I want to make a hula burger and there will be a slice of pineapple on a bun, but let's do this, let's bet who ever made a sandwich, you know, sells more, that will be the winning sandwich, well, it's a little sad for the ocean that the hula burger has not won. He made his halibut sandwich, unfortunately, although the sandwich was 30 cents, Ray wanted the sandwich to be 25 cents, so he turned to Atlantic cod.

We all know what happened to Atlantic cod in New England, so now the fish fillet sandwich is made from Alaska Pollock, it's the largest fish fishery in the United States. Two to three billion pounds of fish removed from the sea for every billion pounds of fish removed from the sea each year. If we go through Pollock, the next option is probably going to be tilapia. Tilapia is one of those fish ofwhich no one had heard of 20 years ago is actually a very efficient converter of vegetable protein into animal protein and has been a blessing for the third world is actually a tremendously sustainable solution goes from an egg to an adult in nine months The problem is that when you look at the West it doesn't do what the West wants it to do, it doesn't really have what's called an IELTS bluefish profile listening to the quarter, but the question is why do we sometimes do it?

We fail to perform to our potential under pressure, it's especially disconcerting for athletes who spend so much time physically perfecting their craft, but what about their minds? This is also true off the field of play, whether we are taking a test. or giving a talk it's easy to feel like we're ready at the top of our game and then perform at our worst when it matters most. It turns out that we rarely practice under the types of conditions in which we will actually perform. and as a result, when all eyes are on us, we sometimes fail in our performance, of course, the question is why is that so and my experience on the playing field and in other important facets of my life really pushed me to the field of cognitive science.

I wanted to know how we could reach our unlimited potential. I wanted to understand how we could use our knowledge of the mind and brain to create psychological tools that would help us perform at our best. So why does it happen? Why do we sometimes fail? perform to the best of our ability when the pressure is on, it may not be so surprising to hear that in stressful situations we worry, we worry about the situation, the consequences, what others will think of us, but what is surprising is that sometimes They often get in our way precisely because our worries prompt us to concentrate too much, that's right, we pay too much attention to what we are doing when we worry about doing our best, we often try to control aspects of what we are doing.

It is better to leave them on autopilot outside of consciousness and, as a result, we make mistakes. Think about a situation where you are shuffling down the stairs and what would happen if I asked you to think about what you are doing with your knee while you are. By doing that, you are very likely to fall on your face. We as humans only have the ability to pay attention to many things at once, so by the way, it is not a good idea to drive and talk on a cell phone and under pressure. When we worry about performing at our best, we can try to control aspects of what we are doing that should be outside of conscious control.

The end result is that we ruined my research team and I have studied this phenomenon of excessive attention. and we call it paralysis by analysis in one study we asked college soccer players to dribble a soccer ball and pay attention to an aspect of their performance that they otherwise wouldn't pay attention to we asked them to pay attention to which side of their foot Al was on. touching the ball we showed that performance was slower and more error-prone when we called their attention to the step-by-step details of what they were doing when the pressure was on.

We often worry about performing at our best and as a result. We try to control what we are doing to force the best performance, the end result is that we really make mistakes in basketball, the term unconscious is used to describe a shooter who cannot miss and San Antonio Spurs star Tim Duncan, has said when "You have to stop and think, that's when you make a mistake in dance", the great choreographer George Balanchine used to urge his dancers, don't think, just do it when the pressure is on, when we want to do our best, ironically, We often try to control what we do.

We're doing it in a way that leads to worse performance, so what do we do knowing that we have this hyperactive attention? How do we ensure we perform at our best? Much of this comes down to the prefrontal cortex, that front part of our brain that sits above our eyes and generally helps us focus positively. It often gets hooked on the wrong things, so how do we unhook it? Something as simple as singing a song or paying attention to your little toe. It was rumored to have been done by professional golfer Jack Nicholas. Help us stop thinking about those annoying details.

It is also true that practicing in the conditions in which we are going to perform, closing the gap between training and competition can help us get used to that feeling that everyone is watching us. This is true outside of the game. field too, whether it's preparing for an exam or preparing for a big talk, something that can have a bit of pressure associated with getting used to the types of situations you're going to perform in, really matters when you're taking a close exam. the book practices retrieving the response from memory in timed situations and when you are giving a talk, practice in front of others and if you can't find anyone to listen, practice in front of a video camera or even a mirror, the ability to get Getting used to what it will feel like can make the difference in whether we drown or thrive, we've also discovered some ways to get rid of those pesky worries and doubts that tend to arise in stressful situations that researchers have shown to simply write down your thoughts and worries. before a stressful event can help you unload them from your mind and make them less likely to arise in the moment.

It's like when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're really worried about what you're doing. you have to do the next day you're trying to think about everything you have to accomplish and you write it down and then you can go back to sleep, journaling or writing those thoughts down on paper makes them less likely to come up and distract you in the moment, The end result is that you can perform at your best when it matters most. that's the end of the test as promised here are the answers good luck number one John Horton number two London number three zero six four one four five three five four number four the final push number five you can have February 16th or February 16th February o 16 February 6 B 7 d eight e nine C ten h 11 B 12 e 13 a 14 d 15 C 16 India 17 is nuclear 18 coal 19 with weapons 20 China 21 trim 22 Market or the market 23 Mangrove 24 global 25 40 miles 26 more than 3,000. 27 spawning grounds or their spawning grounds 28 pig or pigs or the pig or pigs 39 or 9 months 31 playing field 32 too much 33 awareness or control 34 through analysis 35 step-by-step details 36 C 37 B 38 B 39 to 40 C Chris here again and thank you very much for watching our sample listening test.

I hope you did very, very well and if you made some mistakes, here is a video that will help you reflect on your mistakes and improve. I'm going to help you out, what I would like you to do is put your scores in the comments below. It's great to see what level you all are at and also, if you'd like to see more sample listening tests, let us know in the comments below. or if you have any other recommendations for future videos, feel free to comment below and if you have any questions or need help with the IELTS exam, help with preparation, materials, courses or anything like that, feel free to send us an email, Chris. ilesadvantage.com is my email address.

We respond to 100 percent of the emails we receive and I look forward to reading your emails. Thank you guys so much and as always if you need anything please don't hesitate to get in touch and don't forget. like and subscribe