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 replays the whole recording from the beginning three times to find it.

(a) Identify the risk this creates. [2] (b) Describe a better approach, given how students can control the Section A recording. [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 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 to follow spoken Urdu at the speakers’ pace, even with the ability to replay sections of a recording. [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 half the paper’s marks (30 of 60, the same as Section A) but the larger share of its time (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 leaves an equally weighted, longer and more demanding section under-practised. [2] (b) Revision time should reflect what each section demands, not only its marks — the two sections carry equal marks, but Section B has the longer recommended time and combines listening and reading with writing, so it should receive at least as much practice time as Section A, and more for timed practice, 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) Each full replay uses time from Section A’s recommended 45 minutes, so replaying the whole recording three times to recover one detail leaves less time for the section’s remaining questions, risking more lost marks than the single detail was worth. [2] (b) Students have individual control of the Section A recording and may stop, revisit and replay sections of it as they wish, so the candidate should note roughly where the missed detail fell, finish the passage, then go back and replay just that section, recovering the detail without replaying the whole recording. [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 working memory while listening 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; although students may stop and replay sections of the Section A recording, each replay uses time from the recommended 45 minutes, so targeted listening for known, specific information is a more reliable and time-efficient strategy than undirected, whole-passage recall followed by repeated replays. [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 leaves out two of Section B’s actual demands. First, Section B is built on two sources on the same sub-theme, a listening source and a reading text: students summarise the different points of view in each and then answer a question that requires them to evaluate the viewpoints in both and draw conclusions, so practising with a reading passage alone never rehearses taking notes from spoken Urdu or comparing it with a written source. Second, the section has a recommended 1 hour 30 minutes for listening, reading, summarising and writing the evaluative response (approximately 220-270 words), so practice with unlimited time does not build the pace needed to complete every task. A more realistic routine would pair an Urdu audio source with a text on the same sub-theme, set the 1 hour 30 minute limit, and require summaries of both sources before the evaluation, exposing gaps in note-taking and time management that untimed, reading-only 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.