Listening Skills: Understanding pros and cons

Pros and cons are the positive and negative opinions or judgments the speaker has about an idea or a thing. You may hear in various situations people discuss, examine, and weigh the pros and cons of the issue concerned, especially before they make a decision. For example, when people consider whether they will work in a big city, they may look at its pros and cons.

Understanding pros and cons is a very important listening strategy for you to identify a speaker’s point of view. To recognize pros and cons in listening material, one method is to listen for evaluative language which makes either positive or negative evaluation of the person or the thing concerned.

Some adjectives are used to express positive evaluation: good, great, fantastic, perfect, comfortable, elegant, competent, impressive, profitable, sensible (明智的), remarkable, productive, innovative, significant, constructive；

Some adjectives are used to express negative evaluation: bad, terrible, reckless (鲁莽的), irresponsible, questionable, unsatisfactory, weak；

Some sentence structures are also used to express a speaker’s point of view: The good thing / advantage is…, The problem / disadvantage / downside / limitation is…

Look at the following examples, and identify whether the speaker has a positive or negative point of view.

e.g. It is a great city to live in. (pro)

Public transport systems is terrible. (con)

The good thing is that the food is cheap. (pro)

The only problem is traffic. (con)

Apart from the above-mentioned lexical device, there are some other ways of identifying the speaker’s opinions or judgments.

First, some verbs can be used by the speaker to show evaluation.

e.g. Television can trap us on the couch and stop our brains from working hard.

These words in red carry negative judgments and attitudes and are very effective for arguing and persuading listeners about the cons of watching TV.

Second, pay attention to conjunctions like however, nevertheless, but, because these words indicate the change in the direction of argument. And the opinions precede and follow these conjunctions may be totally different.

Third, you can recognize the speaker’s opinion from the particular position or order of some blocks of language in a text. For example, if a speaker presents two alternative solutions to a problem, one of which he / she agrees with, while the other he / she does not, the speaker will usually talk of the one he / she does not approve of first and then the one he / she wants to promote second.

e.g. People think it’s very expensive to live in Tokyo, but actually you can buy Japanese food in the supermarkets quite cheaply and eating out in Japanese restaurants isn’t expensive either.

Since pros and cons are positive and negative sides of an idea or a thing, when taking notes, it is advisable to divide a piece of paper into two columns, writing the pros in one column and the cons in another, thus providing a clear visual guide that helps you take every aspect of a situation into consideration, and make a sensible decision, especially when one side overwhelmingly outweighs the other.

In the following exercise you are going to listen to three interviews in which interviewees are asked to talk about their life in Dubai, Tokyo, and Sydney respectively. Listen to what when say about life in each city and identify the pros and cons of the life in each city.