Short Talks
Format
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In Part IV, you will hear a number of talks on the audio program. There are two, three, and sometimes four questions for each talk. The questions are written in your test booklet. There are four answer choices following each question. You have to choose the best answer to the question based on the information that you hear in the talk. Before each of the talks, there is an introductory statement.
Examples of introductory statements:
Questions 80 and 81 are based on the following announcement:
Questions 93 to 96 refer to the following lecture:
Following each talk, you'll hear instructions to answer particular questions, with eight-second pauses between each of them. (You do not have to wait for these announcements to answer the questions.)
Because this part of the test consists of both spoken material on the tape and written questions and answer choices, it tests both listening and reading skills.
1. The talks: The talks are all monologues -- that is, they are delivered by one speaker. They are fairly short -- most are less than one minute long.
2. The questions: Three main types of questions are asked about the talks: overview questions, detail questions, and inference questions.
* Overview questions require a general understanding of the lecture or of the situation in which it is given. Overview questions ask about the main idea or purpose of the lecture, or about the speaker, the audience, or the location where the talk is given. Some typical overview questions:
Who is speaking?
What is the purpose of the talk?
What kind of people would probably be interested in this talk?
What is happening in this talk?
Where is this announcement being made?
* Detail questions relate to specific points in the talk. They begin with question words: who, what, where, why, when, how, how much, and so on. Some ars negative questions; they ask what was not mentioned in the talk:
Which of the following is NOT true about... ?
* Inference questions require you to make a conclusion based on the information provided in the talk. These questions often contain the word probably or forms of the verbs imply or infer:
What is probably true about... ?
What does the speaker imply about... ?
What can be inferred from this talk?
3. The answer choices: All the answer choices are plausible answers to the questions, in many cases, the distractors are mentioned in the talk. Just because you hear an answer choice mentioned in the talk does not mean it is the correct answer for a particular question.
Tactics
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1. Listen carefully to the introductory announcement that is given before each talk. It will tell you what kind of talk you are going to hear (an announcement or a commercial, for example) as well as which questions to look at during that talk.