IELTS Listening: Numbers, Dates and Times Without Errors

The easiest marks to lose

Numbers, dates, times and spelled-out names are the most mechanical part of Listening. Nothing is being tested about your understanding of an argument; the audio says a number and you either write it correctly or you do not.

Which makes them the easiest marks in the test to lose, and the most satisfying to fix. A candidate who is stuck at 6.5 on Listening usually has no comprehension problem at all. They have a hearing problem with two specific numbers.

They also cluster in Sections 1 and 2, which are the shorter, less pressured sections. Fixing them puts points in the easiest part of the paper.

The teen and tens problem

Every IELTS candidate has lost at least one mark to this, and it is nearly always the same pair.

The stress tells you which. Teen numbers stress the second syllable and end in a long /iː/ sound. Round tens stress the first syllable and end in /i/ with a flatter vowel.

Fourteen against forty and fifteen against fifty are the two that cause most damage, because a missing or misheard digit in a phone number or a price is a whole wrong answer.

One habit fixes it: when you hear a number you did not expect, wait for the second syllable before you write anything. The stress pattern arrives before the number is complete, and a candidate who waits has the information. A candidate who writes on the first sound does not.

Dates

The dates that cause trouble are the ambiguous ones, where two things sound alike.

• "the third" and "thirteen"
• "the fifth" and "fifty"
• "the eighth" and "eighteen"
• "the ninth" and "ninety"
• "the twelfth" and "twelfth"

The saving move is to listen past the day number for the month. You do not need to know whether it is the third or the thirteenth if you know it is followed by "of March" and the sentence makes sense either way. Usually it will not, because "we meet on the thirteenth of March" and "we meet on the third of March" are being used for different things.

Then write the month as a number. A blank that says MAY will not accept "May" in some formats and will in others, so check the format the questions require and be consistent.

Times and durations

Times come in two registers and the audio switches between them without warning.

Quarter to is the one that catches people. Quarter to five is 4:45, not 5:15. Get that one right and the rest of the clock follows, because quarter to any hour is always 45 minutes past the previous one.

Durations are a separate trap. "The course lasts for three terms", "a fortnight", "twice a week", "every second Thursday". Converting these into a number is often what the question asks, and a fortnight is 14 days.

Prices, measurements and references

Prices are the most commonly misheard category, because the audio is usually giving you a figure you want to write quickly.

• £12.50, not £125
• $1,240, not $12.40
• 30 per cent, not 3 per cent
• 45 minutes, not 4.5 minutes

Measurements follow the same pattern: 2.5 kilometres, 1.8 metres, 60 degrees. A decimal point lost is a whole wrong answer.

Reference numbers, phone numbers and postcodes are spelled out on screen in the audio. Use them. They are the one category where the answer is genuinely given to you slowly.

Spelled-out names and places

Names come with a spelling, and the spelling is what is marked.

Listen for the letter-by-letter delivery and copy it. The pattern is predictable: "that's C-A-R-T-E-R" for Carter, "the second letter is a V" for anything with an awkward letter in it.

Places are the same, plus one detail: a street name is usually followed by its type, so "42 Oak Road" gives you the number, the name and the type in sequence. Write all three in that order and you will not transpose them later.

A drill for all of it

Five minutes, daily, and it is all of this:

• Have someone read twenty random numbers at natural speed. Write them down.
• Same with ten dates, mixed formats.
• Same with ten times, half digital and half spoken.
• Have them spell five words and write them.

The point of the drill is not the accuracy at the end. It is that your ear stops treating the stress pattern in a number as noise. Do it for two weeks and the teen-and-tens confusion stops being a decision you make under time pressure, because you will have stopped hearing the two as the same sound.

Three rules on the day

Wait for the second syllable before writing a two-digit number.

Write the day, then the month, in the format the question shows.

Never leave a blank. No negative marking means an empty is always zero. If you have to, put a plausible answer and move on, because the next question is worth exactly the same and you can still get it.

Why this is worth the time

Listening is scored out of 40, and half a band is about three marks. This category is worth more than three marks if you are careless and close to zero if you are not, and it requires no months of study, only attention and about a week of drilling.

That is a better return than any other single change most candidates can make to their Listening score.

The IELTS Practice Portal runs computer-delivered Listening with a band calculator, so a misheard number shows up as a lost mark instead of as a feeling that something went wrong.

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