How to Crack Section 4 of IELTS Listening

In the previous article, we discussed how to crack IELTS Listening Section 3. In this article, we will look at the next section in IELTS Listening test i.e. section 4. In this section, almost all the times, you find sentence completion type of questions. However, you may sometimes find some MCQs as well. In this section, you are going to listen to a monologue i.e. you will hear only one speaker talking about a topic, similar to section 2. But here, you will find that the monologue is about an academic context, for example, the speaker may be delivering a lecture in a university or college.
Let us discuss how to crack section 4 of IELTS Listening with the help of sentence completion question:
Recycling of Waste Material

1. By the year 2020, emissions of carbon dioxide are expected to ……………….reduced than 2000.
2. Recycling of wastes can be helpful to reduce the emissions from………………and…………………
3. According to some people, one major problem is insufficient amount of………………………………

You can see from the above questions that these are some notes about the topic “recycling of waste material”. In sentence completion questions, you may find them in the form of bullet points or lists of facts.

Underline Keywords

Firstly, you can adopt the strategy of underlining some keywords in the question. So, let us underline the important keywords as below:
Recycling of Waste Material

1. By the year 2020, emissions of carbon dioxide are expected to ……………….reduced than 2000.
2. Recycling of wastes can be helpful to reduce the emissions from………………and………………..
3. According to some people, one major problem is insufficient amount of……………………………..

In the above strategy, there’s one more thing you can keep in mind and that is to definitely underline the words that are near the blanks. We do so for a reason that many of the times, these words are almost the same as heard in the audio.
Another thing is that you should underline keywords in a way that you highlight the important information while ignoring the detailed information. When you pay attention on these highlighted words, you are able to focus on understanding the audio very well.

Important Tips on Cracking Section 4 of IELTS Listening:

1. The information is in the short notes form but you will hear more detailed explanation in the audio. So, be careful to identify the relevant information from the audio as per the keywords in the question and the expected answer in the blank.
2. Speaker in the audio would also be talking continuously in the order of the question. So, you should concentrate a lot to avoid skipping the audio. Do not look at your previous attempts to check if you have solved the question correctly or if you have skipped any question before.

Pay close attention to the words that are closer to the blanks, especially prepositions such as to, for, into, of etc. because your answer in the audio would be exactly around them, in most of the cases.