There are 4 passages and 40 questions. The situations in the test are usually related to aspects of student life in the UK. This could be a meeting in a student party or the first day at a university. There are sometimes short extracts from lectures or people talking about accommodation or a weekend trip to a museum. If you familiarise yourself with the topics you can build up related vocabulary. You also need to be familiar with the question types.

You should also:

• Underline key words and use them to help you keep up, as it is easy to miss something under exam pressure
• Look at the vocabulary in the question and think of related words and expressions.
• Look at any gapped texts and think about both the type of word missing and the meaning.
• Judge how well another learner has done and see where they have gone wrong and see if you can do better yourself.  You should also look at some typical problem features like spelling and distinguishing between similar-sounding words and numbers.
• The sections get progressively harder. Don’t make any careless mistakes in the easier sections.

IELTS LISTENING PRACTICE EXERCISES: