Listen to an Announcement: practice recordings with transcripts and answers
One speaker, a lot of logistics, and questions that turn on a room number or a date. The announcement task is where careful listeners lose points to a detail they heard correctly and misfiled. Every recording below is published with its transcript.
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Listening questions
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Listening recordings
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Listen to an Announcement practice recordings, with transcripts and answers
Each recording below is published in full: play it, answer, then read the transcript and the explanation for every option. Nothing is hidden behind a signup.
Recording 1
Bookstore Buyback Week Begins
Campus Retail · Medium · 22 sec · 2 questions
Transcript
1. What is the announcement about?
- A.A book club meeting
- B.The bookstore moving to a new building
- C.A sale on new laptops
- D.A textbook buyback week at the bookstoreAnswer
Why D (A textbook buyback week at the bookstore) is the answer: It is buyback week for used textbooks.
- A. No club is mentioned.
- B. No move is mentioned.
- C. No laptop sale is mentioned.
2. Which books earn the best buyback prices?
- A.Books with torn covers
- B.Books still on next term's course listAnswer
- C.Books older than ten years
- D.Any book, all priced the same
Why B (Books still on next term's course list) is the answer: Books on next term's list earn the best prices.
- A. Damage is not a positive factor.
- C. Age is not mentioned as a bonus.
- D. Prices vary by demand.
Recording 2
Career Fair Room Assignments
Career Services · Hard · 25 sec · 2 questions
Transcript
1. Where will health and education employers be located?
- A.The second-floor ballroomAnswer
- B.Outside near the entrance
- C.The main gym
- D.The library basement
Why A (The second-floor ballroom) is the answer: Health, education, and nonprofit tables are in the second-floor ballroom.
- B. The entrance area has printing, not tables.
- C. The gym is for tech and engineering.
- D. No basement is mentioned.
2. What can be inferred about students who need resumes printed?
- A.Resumes are not needed at the fair
- B.They must pay a printing fee
- C.They should print before noon, when the station closesAnswer
- D.They cannot print anywhere on campus
Why C (They should print before noon, when the station closes) is the answer: The free printing station closes at noon, so students should print earlier.
- A. Printed resumes are explicitly requested.
- B. The station is free.
- D. There is a printing station at the fair.
These are Reach120 practice recordings written for the 2026 task format. None of them is a real TOEFL test item, and nothing on this page is published, licensed, endorsed or reviewed by ETS. Difficulty labels and durations are our own bank’s values.
What Listen to an Announcement asks you to do
- A single-speaker recording delivering practical information — a schedule change, a facility closure, a procedure, an event.
- Questions ask what is happening, who is affected, what a listener has to do, and when.
- The register is public and impersonal, closer to a notice read aloud than to a lecture.
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 (link confirmed ). Everything outside this box is Reach120’s own reading of it.
What the task actually measures
- Whether you can hold several concrete details at once without confusing them.
- Whether you separated the instruction from the background around it.
- Whether a restated detail later in the recording overwrote the earlier one correctly.
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 practice it without wasting the material
- 1Write down every number, room and date as you hear it. The distractors on this task type are usually the other numbers from the same recording.
- 2Answer before reading the transcript, then check which detail you mis-assigned rather than whether you got the item right.
- 3Announcements are short. Do several in a row so the note habit becomes automatic.
Listen to an Announcement: common questions
- What is the difference between an announcement and a conversation item?
- An announcement has one speaker delivering information; a conversation has two speakers working through a problem. The questions differ accordingly — announcements ask what and when, conversations ask why and what next.
- Do I need to understand every word?
- No, but you do need the concrete details. The published rationales under each question show which detail the key depends on, which is a faster study path than re-listening.
- Is Listen to an Announcement new in 2026?
- It is one of the four Listening task types the 2026 specification lists. Pre-2026 practice material was not organised around these task names.
Built against the TOEFL 2026 test specification, re-read on a 30-day cycle.
Read the Trust Center — how scoring, figures and independence are handled.