Advanced Listening Practice

1. How does Catherine read the sounds her building makes in winter?
    She resents the cold for damaging the spines of older stock
    She hears the creaking as a kind of settling patience in the quiet
    She welcomes winter for the chance to catch up on admin
    She feels trapped and often thinks of moving to a city

2. Why did the wording of the first annotation unsettle her so much?
    Tuesday was historically the worst retail day in the area
    She'd been secretly negotiating a sale for that exact weekday
    She'd seen that handwriting on a document back at university
    The specific weekday made it feel targeted, not vague

3. What was the consequence of the radiator failing in January?
    It forced her to close the Canadian section over water damage
    It led her to confront the engineer about earlier faulty repairs
    It physically confirmed the phenomenon was beyond coincidence
    It made her regret not selling the building when she could

4. Why is the front-window annotation so impossible to explain?
    She was forced to move the books because the sun was wrecking them
    She'd told no one the plan, so the note feels impossibly prescient
    She was following an instruction written inside the note itself
    She meant to test the prediction by doing the opposite

5. What logic drove her decision not to get a shop cat?
    Purely private, unspoken reasoning about the havoc an animal could cause
    Allergies she'd discussed with several regular customers
    A lease that explicitly banned keeping pets
    It showed her loneliness and need for company in winter

6. What did the chemist conclude about the annotations?
    The ink was a modern synthetic blend made to mimic old writing fluid
    The hand belonged to a local author who vandalises bookshop stock
    The chemistry showed it was written in the last fourteen months
    The ink was as old as the printing around it, so could not have been added recently

7. How did the sister's visit differ from the annotation's prediction?
    They had a vicious, screaming row over their mother's money
    They carefully avoided confrontation through practised diplomacy
    They ignored each other the whole visit out of resentment
    They found the notes were written by their mother before she died

8. What does the final Alice Munro annotation suggest?
    She should use the events to launch a journalism career
    It proves the author works for the public broadcaster
    It accuses her of omitting a key detail, leaving her unsure of herself
    It forbids her from sharing the story outside her family