Listen and Choose a Response: practice questions with transcripts and answers
The shortest task in the 2026 Listening section, and the one prep sites skip. You hear a single line of speech and choose the reply that fits it. Every recording below is published with its transcript and its keyed answer, so you can study it without guessing what you just heard.
What Listen and Choose a Response asks you to do
- You hear one short utterance — a question, a request, an apology, an offer — and choose the reply that a competent speaker would give.
- The recordings are seconds long, not minutes. There is no passage to hold in memory and no note-taking to do.
- The difficulty is pragmatic rather than academic: the wrong options are usually grammatical, on-topic and still socially wrong.
What ETS states
The 2026 specification lists the Listening section at 47 items and 35 raw points, with task types Listen and Choose a Response, Listen to a Conversation, Listen to an Announcement, and Listen to an Academic Talk.
These are published blueprint values, which the specification states are subject to minor revisions until the official launch. The item count includes non-scored items, so items do not equal raw points — the specification lists a maximum of 1 point per scored item.
The specification lists an estimated Listening time of an 18 minute router plus a second-stage module of 7 minutes (lower) or 11 minutes (upper).
The times are estimated, and the two module lengths are discrete listed values — not a sliding 7-to-11-minute range.
Listening items are machine-scored selected responses, evaluated by rule-based algorithms per the specification’s item-type notes.
Machine-scored is not exclusive to Reading and Listening — Build a Sentence is machine-scored too. This says nothing about how Reach120 scores your practice.
Sourced from the ETS 2026 test specifications, read 2026-07-27. Everything outside this box is Reach120’s own reading of it.
What the task actually measures
- Whether you caught the speaker’s intent, not only their words.
- Whether you can tell a literal answer from an appropriate one.
- Whether an unfamiliar idiom derails the whole item.
How this task type is scored
Every item on this task type is a selected response with one keyed answer, so a practice attempt is either right or wrong and there is no rubric to argue with. What the practice is worth is the reason a distractor pulled you — which is why every question below publishes why the key is right and why each wrong option looks right.
How to practise it without wasting the material
- 1Play the recording once, choose, and only then open the transcript. Reading first turns a listening item into a reading item.
- 2When you miss one, read why the distractor was written — the rationale under each question names the trap rather than restating the key.
- 3Practise these in short bursts. Ten seconds of audio rewards frequency, not endurance.
Listen and Choose a Response: common questions
- How many Listen and Choose a Response items are on the test?
- ETS publishes the Listening section as a whole — 47 items across four task types — and does not publish a per-task-type count. The section is also adaptive, so the number of items an individual sees depends on the module they are routed to.
- Can I see the transcript before I answer?
- On this page, yes — every transcript is published beside its question so you can study the item. In the test itself you hear the audio and do not see a transcript.
- Is this the same as the old TOEFL listening questions?
- No. Listen and Choose a Response is a task type of the format that took effect on January 21, 2026. Pre-2026 material does not contain it.