[General] IELTS listening

[samz97]

hello,
I was wondering about how accurate should I be in the listening test there is a question that asks about something happened in the late nineteen eighties so I wrote late 1980 but it marked me wrong because the answer was late 1980s another one says parking space I wrote parking lot it marked me wrong also. Is it really how it's going to be in the real test or is it just because it's on computer?
Thank you

 

[bhaisahab]

hello,
I was wondering about how accurate should I be in the listening test there is a question that asks about something happened in the late nineteen eighties so I wrote late 1980 but it marked me wrong because the answer was late 1980s another one says parking space I wrote parking lot it marked me wrong also. Is it really how it's going to be in the real test or is it just because it's on computer?
Thank you

"Late 1980" means towards the end of the year 1980. Something that happened in the late nineteen-eighties happened in the last years of the decade; 1988, 1989, for example.

 

[Tdol]

It could happen in the test, though I don't know if it was a genuine past paper or one created by the site. There are two differences in the phrases- yours (in 1980) consists of two words and the one in the text consists of three words (in the 1980s), and also has the plural ending. They mean something very different, so I think it's a legitimate thing to test. IELTS is a test to see if someone can study in an English-speaking environment, so being able to hear and knowing the difference between, say, November or December 1980 and 1988 or 1989 is important. It's a difference of several years and could be important in many contexts.