Part 4: News Item
The register changes without warning. A single newsreader, formal and factual, and five questions that only appear once the clip has finished.
Two things change at Part 4
Part 4 is Listening to a News Item, and it is where the section turns. Two separate things change at the same time, and candidates who are only braced for one of them lose marks to the other.
The first change is register. Parts 1 to 3 are conversations. Part 4 is a single voice delivering a prepared news report in the manner of radio or television: formal, factual, descriptive, with no interlocutor to slow it down, ask for clarification, or repeat a point. Nobody is going to say 'sorry, how much was that?' on your behalf.
The second change is the question format, and it is the larger one. From Part 4 onward, the questions are not spoken to you one at a time. They appear on screen together after the recording has finished, as sentence completions with a gap and four options, and the whole set shares one time limit. You can answer them in any order and revisit them freely until the budget runs out.
So Part 4 is the first part where your notes are not a safety net but the primary record. The clip runs about a minute and a half, you will be answering minutes after it ends, and there are five questions competing for the same recall.
News structure tells you where the answers are
A news report is one of the most predictable structures in spoken English, and learning it is most of the work in this part.
The opening sentence or two carry the core: what happened, to whom, where, and roughly when. Broadcast writing front-loads deliberately, because listeners tune in and out. If you catch nothing else, catch the first fifteen seconds, because the general-meaning question is usually answerable from them alone.
The middle expands: the sequence of events, the numbers involved, the people named, the cause if one is known. This is where the specific-information questions come from and where your pen should be busiest.
The report then usually turns to reaction, often a quoted or reported comment from someone involved or an official, and closes with what happens next: an investigation, a reopening date, a council decision due. That closing sentence is a favourite source for the question about future action, and it arrives when candidates have started to relax.
Names, and the full-name rule
Broadcast convention introduces a person by their full name once and then refers to them by surname alone for the rest of the item. You will hear 'Fire chief Daniel Osei said' and, thirty seconds later, 'Osei confirmed'.
This trips people in two ways. A candidate who did not catch the full name treats the later surname as a new person and ends up believing the item involves more people than it does. And a candidate who wrote only the first name cannot match it to an option that uses the surname.
Write surnames, not first names. When a full name is given, capture the second part, which is the part that will keep being used and the part an option will quote. If you can only get one syllable, get the right one.
Roles matter as much as names. News items routinely feature two or three people with different relationships to the event: a participant, an official, a witness. Questions frequently turn on which of them said or did something, so a surname with a two-letter role tag beside it is worth more than a name alone.
Write surnames rather than first names. Broadcast convention gives a full name once and uses the surname thereafter, so the surname is what later sentences and the answer options will both use.
Reported fact against attributed claim
News language distinguishes carefully between what the reporter asserts and what someone else has said, and Part 4 uses that distinction.
'The bridge will reopen on Monday' is the report stating a fact. 'The contractor says the bridge will reopen on Monday' is the report attributing a claim, which carries an implication that it is not confirmed. 'Residents have expressed concern that' is weaker still, and 'it is understood that' weakest of all.
Distractors are built in this gap. An option can state as settled something the clip presented as a claim, or attribute to the authorities something a resident said. Both are false, and both contain material that was genuinely in the audio.
In your notes, mark attribution with something minimal: the surname before the claim, or an arrow from the person to the statement. Reconstructing who said what after the clip is over is not realistic once five questions are competing for your attention.
Mark who said what as you go, with the speaker's surname next to the claim. Options that turn an attributed claim into a settled fact, or move a statement from a resident to an official, are standard here and cannot be caught after the clip has ended.
Working the question screen
When the five questions appear, resist the urge to work down the list. Read all five quickly first. They are sentence completions, so each one shows you the frame of what is being asked, and reading the set tells you which parts of your notes you will need.
Then answer the ones your notes settle outright, marking nothing and hesitating over nothing. With five questions on one budget, the cost of going in order is that a hard second question eats the time the easy fifth one needed.
On the second pass, use the completion frames properly. Sentence completion gives you grammatical and semantic constraints that a question stem does not. If the frame reads 'The council has agreed to ___ before the end of the month', an option that is not something a council can agree to is out before you have thought about the audio at all.
And remember the paraphrase rule. The correct completion will not repeat the newsreader's wording. An option that reproduces a phrase you clearly remember hearing deserves more suspicion, not less, because verbatim echo is the standard distractor in this section.
Preparing for the register
The best preparation for Part 4 is simply listening to Canadian news radio, in short items, once through, without reading along.
Use a specific drill. Play one ninety-second item, take notes as you would on the test, and then write from your notes alone: what happened, who was involved by surname, one number, one thing someone said, and what happens next. Those five slots match the shape of what Part 4 asks, and filling them from notes rather than memory is the exact skill the part measures.
Do not study news vocabulary as a list. The words that recur in reporting, such as officials, residents, investigation, disruption, underway, confirmed and expected, are learned faster and held better by hearing them in three real items than by memorising them out of context.
One last habit: news items often start before you expect. There is no greeting and no warm-up sentence. The first clause is content. Have your pen on the paper when the clip begins.
Read all five sentence frames before answering any of them. The frames constrain the answers grammatically and semantically, and reading the set tells you which parts of your notes each question needs before the shared clock starts costing you.
Practise it
Five questions on the register shift and the question screen that follows it.