Drill L3 · Listening

Sentence Completion

Four levels, ten recordings each. The answer is always the speaker's own words. What changes is how far the printed sentence sits from the way they said it.

How to attack this question type ›

The answer is always the speaker's own words, exactly as they say them. You are never asked to change a word into another form — if you find yourself rewriting, you have the wrong answer.
Read past the gap. What comes after it is usually what tells you which of two plausible answers actually fits.
The grammar of the printed sentence does the pointing. a pair of ___ wants a plural; the reason was ___ wants a noun, not a verb.
The sentence is a paraphrase, not a transcript. Follow the meaning. The higher the level, the further the printed words sit from the spoken ones — at C1 one sentence on the page may be built from two the speaker said minutes apart.
Two answers can fall inside a single sentence. Finding the first does not mean you have finished with that line.
Check the word limit before you write.

Worked example — let's solve one together

You hear: “We stopped using the north gate in the end. The surface there kept flooding after any real rain.”

The sentence says: The north gate was given up on account of , which worsened after heavy rain. → flooding

Two things to notice. First, on account of needs a noun, so flooded is the wrong shape even though it is the word you heard. Second, the printed sentence is built from two spoken sentences joined together — and the half after the gap, which worsened after heavy rain, is what confirms you have the right one. Students who stop reading at the gap answer this from the first sentence alone and put the north gate.

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Level complete

Carry into the mock: read the whole sentence, including the part after the gap, before you decide.