How many words do I need to write for my answer?

Some Listening questions require you to write your answer as a word / words / a number.

The most important thing is to read the instructions and follow them. For example, the instructions might say:

Complete the notes.

Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND / OR A NUMBER for each answer. 

This means that your answer could be:

• one word (e.g. company)
• two words (e.g. regional manager)
• three words (e.g first aid kit)
• a number (e.g. 53 )
• one word and a number (e.g. 21st January)
• two words and a number (e.g. 5 working days)
• three words and a number (e.g. 40 degrees below zero)

You do not usually need to include words like articles (the, a, an) or possessive adjectives (my, your, her) in your answer. Do not include these words if they take you over the word limit.

You should avoid unnecessary words, such as descriptive adjectives that are not essential to the meaning. For example:

   Question: Tom is going to search for ....................................... to use in the project.

Recording: Tom: "Okay, so if you take out the necessary books from the library, I'll go online and see if I can find some useful websites that we can get information from."

The word 'useful' is not essential to the meaning here, so the answer 'websites' would be enough.

However, sometimes we need all the words in a noun phrase. For example:

   Question: Tom is going to search for ....................................... to use in the project.

Recording: Tom: "Okay, so if you take out the necessary books from the library, I'll check out the archive of publications and see if I can find some scientific papers which contain what we need."

The correct answer here would be 'scientific papers'. Just writing 'papers' would not be enough, because 'scientific' is essential to the meaning, i.e. there are many types of possible papers but Tom is looking specifically for scientific papers.