Part 3: Information
One speaker knows something the other needs. The clip is two to two and a half minutes and it is the densest audio in the first half of the section.
The information exchange
Part 3 is Listening for Information. Two speakers again, one man and one woman, in a single clip running about two to two and a half minutes, with six questions afterwards. The questions are spoken one at a time with about thirty seconds each, in order, as in Parts 1 and 2.
What defines this part is the asymmetry. One speaker has information, expertise or authority: a technician, an administrator, someone who has done the thing before. The other speaker wants that information and asks for it. The clip is a transfer of content from one person to the other.
The register sits between Parts 1 and 2. It is polite, and it can run from informal to fairly formal depending on the setting, but it is not the relaxed friendliness of Part 2 and it is not the careful mutual explanation of two strangers solving a problem together. It is closer to a good service interaction.
The practical consequence of the asymmetry is that one voice does most of the talking and almost all of the answerable content comes from that voice. The questioner's role is mainly to prompt, clarify, and occasionally to misunderstand, which is a device the test uses to make the expert restate something.
Density is the difficulty
Part 3 does not usually contain hard words or complicated argument. It contains a great deal of specific content in a short time: costs, timescales, conditions, sequences, requirements, opening hours, what to bring, what happens if you do not.
That density is what makes it demanding. Where Part 2 might produce four or five facts worth recording in two minutes, Part 3 can produce fifteen, and you cannot write fifteen things while continuing to listen. The skill is not capturing everything, it is capturing the right things fast enough that you are still present for the next sentence.
Prioritise in this order: numbers first, because they are unreconstructable; then conditions, because they change what a number means; then sequence, because questions about order are common when a procedure is being explained. Descriptions and reasons come last, since they are usually recoverable from general understanding.
Write fast and write raw. A number goes on the page as digits before you know what it refers to. If you wait until you have heard the noun that the number attaches to, you will often have lost the number.
The confident wrong number
The characteristic Part 3 error is answering with a number you definitely heard, said clearly, which was not the answer to the question asked.
Three versions of this recur. The first is the number that was superseded: a price quoted and then corrected, a date offered and then adjusted. The second is the number attached to the wrong thing: the deposit and the monthly figure are both stated and the question asks about one of them. The third is the conditional number: an amount that applies only in a case that does not apply here.
All three feel identical from the inside. The candidate hears the option, recognises the figure, and selects it with confidence, because recognition is a powerful and completely unreliable signal in a section where every plausible wrong answer is built from something that was actually said.
The defence is labelling. A number in your notes with no label attached to it is a liability, because it will match an option and you will have no way to check whether it matches the question. Even one word is enough: a currency figure with 'dep' beside it, a time with 'close' beside it.
Never write a number without a one-word label beside it. An unlabelled figure will match an option and give you no way to tell whether it answers the question, which is the exact mechanism behind the confident wrong number.
Conditions, exceptions and the small words
Part 3 leans heavily on the language of conditions, because that is how procedures actually work. 'Unless you booked online.' 'Only if it is within thirty days.' 'After the first visit.' 'As long as you bring the card.' 'Provided it has not been opened.'
These words are short, unstressed and easy to lose, and they invert the meaning of everything around them. A candidate who hears 'there is no charge if you cancel more than a day ahead' and records 'no charge' has recorded the opposite of the rule.
Train your ear to treat these as high-alert items. When you hear unless, only, except, provided, as long as, otherwise or after, something is being restricted, and the restriction is far more likely to be the answer than the general statement it modifies.
The same applies to negation carried in ordinary words: 'we used to do that', 'that changed last year', 'we no longer offer it'. Past-tense framing of a service is a standard way to plant a distractor that is factually mentioned and currently false.
Treat unless, only, except, provided and after as alarm words. They invert or restrict whatever they touch, they are short and unstressed, and the restriction is more often the tested point than the general rule it modifies.
Answers come in roughly the order they were said
The questions in a part tend to follow the sequence in which their answers appeared in the audio. This is a genuinely useful piece of structure and it helps in two ways.
It tells you where to look in your notes. If you are on question four of six, the relevant content is likely to be from the later part of the clip, so you can start reading your page from the bottom rather than the top. In a part this dense, knowing which half of your notes to search saves real seconds inside a thirty-second window.
It also warns you when you have drifted. If question two seems to be about something you noted near the end, either you have misread the question or you have attached the detail to the wrong moment. That is a useful prompt to reread the question rather than commit.
Treat it as a tendency and not a guarantee. General-meaning questions about the conversation as a whole can appear anywhere, and they are not located in any single place in your notes.
How to drill Part 3
Practise with material that is genuinely information-dense rather than with conversation. Recorded service calls, how-to explanations, and transit or health information lines all have the right shape: someone explaining a procedure with figures and conditions in it.
The core drill is the labelled-number drill. Play two minutes of dense audio once, and write only numbers with a one-word label on each. Then check against the source. You are measuring two separate things: whether the number is right, and whether the label is right. Candidates are usually surprised at how often the digits are correct and the label is not.
A second drill targets the conditions. Play the same kind of clip and write only the restrictions: every unless, only, except and after, with what it restricts. This feels artificial and it is highly effective, because it forces attention onto exactly the unstressed function words that carry the meaning and that ordinary listening skims.
When you reach question five or six of Part 3, start searching your notes from the bottom. Answers tend to appear in the order they were spoken, so the later questions live in the later notes and you do not have a spare ten seconds to read the whole page.
Practise it
Five questions on the densest clip in the first half of the section.