Edexcel A-Level Urdu: Listening, Reading and Writing — Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, testing exam technique and understanding of Paper 3’s structure rather than providing genuine Urdu listening or reading material, since language content cannot be reproduced here. Use these alongside genuine Urdu audio and text practice and official past papers.

Related: Paper 3 revision notes

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Section A

1. State Paper 3’s total duration and total marks. [2]

2. State the recommended time for Section A and for Section B. [2]

3. State the one skill tested in Papers 1 and 2 that Paper 3 does not test. [1]

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Section B

4. A candidate has scored highly on Papers 1 and 2’s translation tasks throughout their course, and assumes this means they are well prepared for Paper 3.

(a) Explain why this assumption may not be correct. [3] (b) Recommend a specific preparation activity that would address the gap. [2]

5. A candidate spends most of their revision time on Section A listening drills, treating Section B as something to revise “if there’s time left.”

(a) Identify the problem with this revision plan, given the paper’s structure. [2] (b) Explain how revision time should instead be allocated, and why. [3]

6. During a Section A listening task, a candidate misses a specific detail partway through the audio and spends the next 30 seconds trying to recall it instead of listening to the rest of the passage.

(a) Identify the risk this creates. [2] (b) Describe the better approach. [2]

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Section C

7. Explain the specific technique of reading the question before the audio plays in Section A, and evaluate why it is more effective than trying to process and remember an entire listening passage before knowing what will be asked. [6]

8. A candidate has only ever practised Section B by reading a passage calmly and writing a response with unlimited time and repeated access to the source text. Evaluate why this practice routine may not adequately prepare the candidate for the actual demands of Section B. [6]

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Worked answers

1. 2 hours 15 minutes; 60 marks. [2]

2. Section A: recommended 45 minutes; Section B: recommended 1 hour 30 minutes. [2]

3. Translation (Paper 1 tests translation into English; Paper 2 tests translation into Urdu; Paper 3 has no translation component). [1]

4. (a) Translation proficiency and real-time listening comprehension draw on genuinely different processing speeds and skills, so strong performance on Papers 1 and 2’s translation tasks does not automatically transfer to Paper 3’s listening demands; a candidate may be highly accurate at translating written Urdu at their own pace but still struggle with the real-time processing speed listening comprehension requires. [3] (b) Dedicated listening practice with authentic or course-level Urdu audio of varying speed and register (formal news-style Urdu and more conversational spoken Urdu), rather than relying on translation practice alone. [2]

5. (a) Section B carries the larger share of the paper’s time and marks (1 hour 30 minutes out of 2 hours 15 minutes total) and combines three skills together, so a revision plan that prioritises Section A’s shorter, single-skill component works against the paper’s actual weighting. [2] (b) Revision time should be allocated proportionately to each section’s share of the paper — meaning Section B, which carries the larger share of both time and marks and combines listening or reading with writing, should receive the greater share of practice time, including specific practice at taking notes from a source and building a written response from those notes, not just isolated writing practice. [3]

6. (a) The listening audio continues regardless of whether the candidate is ready, so the 30 seconds spent trying to recall the missed detail is very likely time during which further relevant information in the passage is being missed as well, risking a second lost detail on top of the first. [2] (b) Stay with the current point in the passage and continue listening for the information still to come, rather than dwelling on a missed detail — a listening exam does not pause or wait, unlike a reading passage a candidate can return to. [2]

7. Reading the question before the audio plays allows a candidate to identify in advance exactly what specific information they need to listen for (for example, a time, a name, or a list of items), so that when that information occurs in the audio they can recognise and note it immediately, rather than having to process and mentally retain the entire passage in full before knowing which parts of it will actually be asked about. This is more effective than trying to remember everything, because human working memory during a single, uninterrupted listening pass is limited, and a candidate attempting to retain the whole passage equally risks losing the specific detail the question actually requires among everything else they were trying to hold in mind; targeted listening for known, specific information is a more reliable strategy than undirected, whole-passage recall. [6] (Marks for correctly explaining the technique’s mechanism and a genuine comparative evaluation against the alternative, not just describing the technique.)

8. This practice routine does not reflect the actual conditions Section B tests: real exam conditions provide the source material with limited repeats (or a single listening pass, in the case of audio) and require a written response to be built from notes taken during or immediately after that limited exposure, not from continued free access to the original source while writing. A candidate who has only practised with unlimited time and repeated access has not developed the specific skill of taking accurate, sufficient notes from a single or limited exposure and then constructing a response from those notes alone — a skill genuinely distinct from being able to write well when the source remains freely available throughout. A more realistic practice routine would restrict access to the source material to match the exam’s actual conditions, exposing gaps in note-taking technique that unlimited-access practice does not reveal. [6] (Marks for identifying the specific mismatch between the practice routine and actual exam conditions, and for a genuine, reasoned evaluation of why this matters.)

Official syllabus

Pearson Edexcel GCE A-Level Urdu (9UR0) specification, 2018, Paper 3: Listening, Reading and Writing in Urdu — the same source cited by the Paper 3 study guide and its revision notes. Verified 2026-09-05.