Noun Plurals and IELTS Listening Module

🔵 Many IELTS students constantly struggle with whether to put an ‘s’ at the end of the word or not. This problem is faced in both Listening and Writing.

🔵 In Listening, for the blank filling questions, if your answer is SCHOOLS, and you just wrote SCHOOL in the answer sheet, your answer would be marked incorrect. You would lose one whole point just because of this careless mistake.

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO LET THAT HAPPEN?😥😥

👉 Let’s see this example over here:

• In the market, you’ll find many __________ (store / stores) that sell sporting goods.

What can be the answer here? store or stores? 🤔

💡Tip: Look at the signal word in the sentence. Here, it’s just before the blank – ‘many’.

Since many means a lot of, you know that the word following it would be a plural; like many people, many buildings, many cars.

We DON’T say many person, many building or many car.

So, the answer would be stores. 

• In the market, you’ll find many stores that sell sporting goods.

💡💡 One tip that I give my students in order to avoid such mistakes is setting the word grammatically with the sentence. You can do this at the end of the Listening test when you get 10 minutes to transfer you answer to the answer sheet. Practically, you don’t really need 10 full minutes to copy down answers to all 40 questions – it can be done effortlessly in just 4-5 minutes. Why IELTS gives you 10 minutes is because they are giving you time to recheck the correctness of every answer that you’ve written before copying it into the answer sheet.

👉MAKE OPTIMAL USE OF THIS ADVANTAGE.

👉It may be possible that due to the accent of the speaker in the audio, you may feel that they do not pronounce the ‘s’ at the end of the word, and so, you end up writing a singular word. In such cases, DO NOT pay a lot of attention to what you heard. Write both forms, singular and plural in the blank, see which word fits grammatically with the signal word in the sentence and then finalize your answer.