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[IELTS-Community]

This is a frequent question from many students whether synonyms or similar words are ok to use in the listening test as IELTS is about your vocabulary and paraphrasing skills?

Answer
No, IELTS may be a test to assess your vocabulary and paraphrasing skills. But, in the listening test, your answer must be exactly the same as spoken in the audio. That being said, it should be even in the same tense (if the answer is gone, writing went is wrong) and we are not even supposed to modify singularity or plurality (car cannot be the right answer if the speaker in the audio says cars).

I hope it clarifies the doubt of many students/test takers.

 

[mmahira]

I was just practising the listening from the Cambridge IELTS book 9 test 1, and there was a question number 34 where I wrote the answer as I heard it. However, it appeared that the speaker said in Present perfect continuous tense and that's why used "been feeding" (and I wrote it down), but the context was given in the past continuous form (which I noticed late), and the answer should have been just "feeding" (context was "animals were not ....... when they.."). So, as I understood, not always should we write down exactly what we hear; we also should pay attention to the context, which might be given in a different structure than what a speaker uses in his speech.

Or this kind of situations do not appear in the real IELTS exam?

 

[IELTS-Community]

The best practice is to check whether your sentence still makes perfect sense after putting your answers in the blanks.

 

[IELTS-Community]

I understood, not always should we write down exactly what we hear

You have to use what you hear but sometimes you need to extract the most suitable word choice that makes the sentence error-free. For example, in this case, having 'were' and 'been' in a single sentence would not make sense. Initially, you can note down anything you hear but while posting the final answer make sure to double-read the sentence.