Updated 2026-08-28hard

Duolingo English Test Interactive Listening Practice #14 — Hard Level

Free DET (Duolingo English Test) Interactive Listening practice #14 — Hard level. Just DET Listening questions, no grading — solve it yourself and check the answer or model response.

How to practice: This set collects only the Interactive Listening question type from the real DET (Duolingo English Test) — DET Listening questions. No grading, no timer — solve it yourself, then tap each question to reveal the answer or model response.
Conversation 1

Two museum curators are discussing the ethics of displaying artifacts from former colonies.

AThe repatriation debate has intensified significantly since several major institutions made voluntary returns last year.
BYes, and it's forced a genuine reckoning with the provenance of collections assembled under explicitly colonial conditions.
AThe counterargument — that these objects are better preserved and more accessible in large encyclopedic museums — strikes me as increasingly difficult to sustain.
BParticularly when source communities have developed sophisticated conservation infrastructure of their own.
AExactly. The 'universal museum' concept was always partly a rationalization for retention. So where do you think the field is heading?
Q1 · Interactive Listening
What does B say next?
  1. A. I suspect we'll see a gradual shift toward bilateral agreements that allow for shared stewardship rather than outright transfer.
  2. B. The legal frameworks governing cultural property are simply too underdeveloped to permit systematic restitution at scale.
  3. C. I think the public would be surprised to learn how many of these acquisitions were simply acts of looting.
  4. D. Most institutions are still prioritizing donor relations over any principled engagement with provenance questions.
Show Answer
Correct: I suspect we'll see a gradual shift toward bilateral agreements that allow for shared stewardship rather than outright transfer.
Conversation 2

Two literary scholars are discussing narrative techniques in a contemporary novel.

AWhat I find most formally interesting about this novel is its systematic unreliability — the narrator is constitutively incapable of perceiving her own situation clearly.
BWhich creates a fascinating readerly position, because we're simultaneously inhabiting her perspective and being positioned to see beyond it.
ARight, it's a sophisticated deployment of dramatic irony. The gap between what the narrator reports and what the text implies is where the novel's actual argument lives.
BThe implied author is doing considerable ideological work that the first-person voice can't access.
AExactly. And I think that's what distinguishes it from a more straightforward unreliable narrator like Stevens in 'The Remains of the Day.'
Q2 · Interactive Listening
What does B say next?
  1. A. There the gap between surface and depth is perhaps more emotionally legible, even if the suppression is equally complete.
  2. B. I actually find the Stevens comparison quite apt — both narrators engage in a form of motivated self-deception.
  3. C. Though I'd argue Ishiguro's formal choices are ultimately more conventional than this author's.
  4. D. The question is whether the reader's superior knowledge generates sympathy or critical distance.
Show Answer
Correct: There the gap between surface and depth is perhaps more emotionally legible, even if the suppression is equally complete.
Conversation 3

Two critics are debating whether popular culture can be considered 'high art.'

AThe distinction between high and low culture has been so thoroughly deconstructed theoretically that it's hard to understand why institutions still operationalize it so rigidly.
BI think there's a difference between dismantling the distinction analytically and abandoning it as a practical curatorial framework.
ABut the curatorial framework itself encodes the same hierarchies we're supposedly critiquing. Deciding what enters a museum collection is never a neutral aesthetic judgment.
BTrue, but treating all cultural production as equally meriting institutional attention seems to dissolve any meaningful criteria of evaluation.
AUnless we develop criteria that aren't built on class-coded assumptions about what constitutes aesthetic sophistication.
Q3 · Interactive Listening
What does B say next?
  1. A. That's the genuinely difficult project — criteria that are rigorous without being merely markers of cultural capital.
  2. B. I think the market has actually done a better job of this than critics typically acknowledge.
  3. C. Popular culture has simply never produced works of comparable formal complexity to the canonical tradition.
  4. D. The problem is that any evaluative framework will inevitably reproduce some set of power relations.
Show Answer
Correct: That's the genuinely difficult project — criteria that are rigorous without being merely markers of cultural capital.

More “Interactive Listening” sets at other levels · Browse the full DET question bank