What’s new in 1.78.0: exam-room noise comes to reading

On test day, the cough next to you doesn’t stop when the listening section ends. Starting with this version, your reading practice can include it too.

These instructions use the English app interface. Update once your store offers 1.78.0; availability may vary by platform.

Exam-room noise for reading: practice focus in Parts 5–7

When you start Part 5, 6 or 7 practice, a question-type drill, or a retry of your mistakes or bookmarks, you’ll first see the Exam-room noise sheet. Pick a level from 0 to 5; 0 is silence. You’ll hear the sound of a test room plus random coughs, sneezes and page turns.

Preview on that sheet uses a listening clip, so you’ll hear speech there. Reading itself has no speech, only the room and those sounds.

A few things worth knowing:

• Reading and listening keep separate levels. Practice listening at level 3 and reading still starts at its own level, which is 0 by default. To change the preselected level, open Settings and find Exam-room noise for reading.
• Mocks always start at 0. Reading mocks can now use noise too, and the level you pick for a full mock carries into the reading section. The break between sections stays quiet. A mock taken with noise is labeled in your history.
• Smart Practice asks once per session. A plan with regular listening uses your listening level; any other plan uses your reading level.
• Answers at level 2 or above don’t count toward your score estimate or the skill and question-type charts. They still count toward daily totals, streaks, the mistakes book and review scheduling.
• Levels 4 and 5 are far noisier than a real test room. They’re there to build resilience, so a lower score at those levels isn’t your real level.

The diagnostic and warm-up rounds stay quiet. The web app doesn’t have exam-room noise yet.

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Part 6 cleanup: every option explained

The explanations for all 680 Part 6 questions now cover every option, so you can see why the wrong answers are wrong as well as why the right one is right. More than 100 questions were adjusted so that each has one clear answer.

Evidence highlights changed too. After you answer, a sentence that supports several questions now shows all their numbers side by side at its start, such as 1️⃣4️⃣. Overlapping highlights used to keep only one number, so some questions looked as if they had no evidence. You can now find them in both reading and listening review.

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Listening and vocabulary: sound where you expect it

Part 3 and 4 questions keep playing after a pause. If you paused a conversation or talk and then resumed it, that set’s questions could stay silent. The same could happen if you left the screen for a moment during the recording, for example to pull down Control Center. Both cases now play on. If the recording ends while you’re still out of the app, the questions wait for you to tap them rather than starting in the background.

Words are read aloud when a clip won’t load. Flashcards and Smart Review could go silent before. Now your device’s voice reads the word instead. Some Android devices can’t detect this failure yet, and we’re still working on those.

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Glossary: more words to find

The Glossary now includes about 4,200 more words from the built-in dictionary, searchable by the word or by its meaning. Results show the word exactly as you typed it first, then spelling matches, then meaning matches. Words you open also appear in your recent list.

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Backup and download

Your iPhone finishes uploading after you leave the app. Switch away right after practice and it finishes sending your progress within the time iOS allows. Brief interruptions from iOS suspending the app no longer count as sync failures.

Answers, bookmarks and notes hold up better. They’re less likely to go wrong when a save fails or when devices sync, and vocabulary answers now stay in your practice history.

The iOS download is smaller. The grammar-book comics were recompressed and look the same as before.

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Once you’ve updated to 1.78.0, try level 1 the next time you start reading practice. For the previous release, read What’s new in 1.77.0.