Part 2 of IELTS Listening is a monologue — one speaker, no interruptions, usually something like a tour guide describing a site, a manager explaining a new building, or a radio announcement about a local facility.
It is also the one part of the test where you mostly choose rather than write. And when the choosing takes the form of a map, it is where candidates lose marks in runs rather than one at a time.
Where Part 2 sits in the paper
We counted the question types across 71 Cambridge Listening papers, books 4 to 21. Split by part, the shape is very clear:
| Part | Completion blocks | Choose-from-a-list blocks |
|---|---|---|
| Part 1 | 74 | 6 |
| Part 2 | 17 | 64 |
| Part 3 | 24 | 46 |
| Part 4 | 59 | 11 |
Parts 1 and 4 are where you write things down. Part 2 is where you point at things. Map labelling, plan labelling, matching features to options, and multiple choice all live in that 64.
So: a map is likely in Part 2, but not certain. Prepare for one and be ready for matching instead.
Why a map hurts more than it should
Every other question type in IELTS Listening is independent. Miss question 14 and question 15 is still there, intact, waiting.
A map is not like that. The speaker is walking a route, and each instruction is relative to the last one:
…so from the main entrance, go past the café on your right, and the first room you come to is the reading room — that is the one marked B. Directly opposite that, you have the computer suite…
If you lose your place at "go past the café", you do not know where "directly opposite" is measuring from. You have lost the next answer too, and probably the one after that.
That is the whole difficulty. Not vocabulary, not speed — chaining. One bad moment costs a run.
The thirty seconds before the audio
Every part of IELTS Listening gives you a short time to look at the questions. In most parts this is mildly useful. In a map question it is decisive.
Use it in this order:
1. Find the starting point. The entrance, the gate, the reception, the "you are here" arrow. The speaker will almost always begin there, and if you know where "here" is, the first instruction lands somewhere.
2. Find north. If there is a compass, note it. Some papers give directions as "to the north of the library" rather than "opposite the library", and you cannot convert one into the other during the audio.
3. Read the labels already on the map. The map always has some places named. Those names are what the speaker will use as landmarks to position the unnamed ones. If canteen is printed on the plan, expect to hear "just past the canteen".
4. Say the options to yourself. Lettered options A to H sit around the map. Look at where each one is. If you have located them beforehand, you are matching a described position to a letter you already know — not hunting for a letter while the voice moves on.
That is thirty to forty seconds of work, and it is the highest-value half-minute in the whole Listening paper.
The twenty-five words
Map questions run on a small, repeating vocabulary. These are the ones that come up again and again:
| Position | Movement |
|---|---|
| opposite / facing / across from | go past / go through |
| next to / beside / adjacent to | bear left / bear right |
| between X and Y | take the first turning |
| behind / in front of | carry on / continue |
| at the far end of | just before / immediately after |
| in the top left-hand corner | turn back on yourself |
| on your left as you enter | head towards |
Two of these are worth isolating because they catch people out.
"Opposite" versus "next to." Opposite means across a gap — a road, a corridor, an open space. Next to means sharing a wall or an edge. Candidates who treat them as roughly the same lose marks on papers that use both in one route.
"Just before" versus "just after." These depend entirely on the direction of travel, and the speaker often changes direction mid-route ("now, coming back the other way…"). When you hear a reversal, redraw your own position on the map with a pencil mark. On the computer test, note it on the paper you are given.
Follow the voice, not the layout
Your eyes read a map the way they read a page: left to right, top to bottom. The audio does not.
The speaker walks a path, and that path crosses the page in whatever order the route takes. Question 11 may be at the bottom right and question 12 at the top left, because that is where the walk goes.
So the single most useful physical habit is this: keep a finger, a cursor, or a pencil point on where you currently are. Move it as the speaker moves. The questions follow the route, so your marker follows the route, and the next answer is always near your marker.
Candidates who read the map with their eyes while listening with their ears lose their place almost immediately. Candidates who track one position through the whole walk usually do not.
When you lose it anyway
You will, sometimes. The recovery rule is simple and most candidates get it wrong:
Go forward, not back.
The instinct is to reconstruct the step you missed. That is the wrong move, because the audio does not pause while you reason. Every second spent recovering question 14 is a second in which question 15 is being described and lost.
Instead: look at the next question number, listen for its landmark, and rejoin the route there. The speaker names places constantly, so there is always a handhold coming. Mark the lost question and guess at the end — with lettered options, a blank is never better than a guess, and often one or two letters are already eliminated by the answers you did get.
A ten-minute drill
You do not need full papers to get better at this.
Take any map question from a paper you have already done. Play just that section, with the map in front of you, and do nothing except move a pencil point along the route. Do not answer anything. Just track.
Play it twice. The second time, answer.
What you are training is the tracking habit in isolation, away from the pressure of producing answers. Most candidates find that once the finger-tracking is automatic, the answers come without extra effort — because the answers were never the hard part. Knowing where you were standing was.
What Part 2 is really testing
Not your English. The vocabulary in a map question is ordinary and the speaker is clear and unhurried.
It is testing whether you can hold a position in your head while new information arrives — and that is a skill you can build in a week of ten-minute sessions, independently of your level.
Which is why Part 2 is worth attention out of proportion to its length. Ten marks sit there, they tend to move together, and the thing that moves them is a habit rather than a vocabulary list.
