Do such tasks make sense to natives? (the task is in the body text)

Native English speakers are never taught where to apply stress in sentences; it's something we pick up on subconsciously from growing up around other native speakers. I suspect most native speakers would have a hard time with this task without just saying the sentence out loud and hearing where they automatically put the stress (and, doing so myself, I don't come up with all the same answers as the answer key here--I stress "Niagara" and "drinking", not "Falls" and "water" in sentence c and e respectively).

This task makes sense to me, although I disagree with the answers. B) I would stress the (1), because if you are asking for a place to stay, hotel is assumed as the default. Bloomsbury is more specific, and more helpful. E) I would stress the (1), because using drinking as an adjective tells me that the other water is not drinkable (Or is not for drinking. Maybe it is for washing my hands, even if I can drink it.). So in my opinion, it makes more sense to stress the part that says which water I need.

Native speakers don't think about which words to stress in a sentence, we just instinctively stress the "right" ones when speaking. Labeling them like this is unintuitive to me, but the answers given are correct, and stressing the other word in each pair is a little unnatural.

For me, in b & c I would stress both words. For e I would stress 1. The other two are correct. 

The answers seem right to me, but I don’t usually pay attention to it because it’s second nature.

The only one that feels off to me is the last one, as I would stress the word “drinking” over “water”, since we’re making that distinction clear it’s not just any water we’re asking for.

I don’t really understand the assignment. It might be (1) for (a) to emphasize she’s an estate agent over other kinds of agents, but I typically wouldn’t stress either, (b)-(e) I wouldn’t stress either of the words, and for (e) we typically drop “drinking” unless typically you’re in a survival situation. In casual conversation it would just be “I need some water”. This is a weird assignment in my opinion

All I can think is "why are you saying it weird like that?" We don't really put stress on words like that unless there's a reason.

I had to say them out loud. Agree with all answers, except (e). Generally, would say 'water', unless there were a choice of waters. In that case, my emphasis would be on 'drinking'.

I know the answers (and that they’re slightly different from what the key says they are) but I have absolutely no idea why you’re being tested on this. Stress is something that’s picked up through immersion, and while stressed *syllables* can be important to get right, stressed *words* don’t affect ease of understanding at all.

A, D, E are all compound nouns, which almost always have the stress on the first word, whether the compound noun is two words (light meter), hyphenated (x-ray), or one word (football.) Drinking water is no exception, and should also have the stress on the first word, so this exam is incorrect. Geographical features that state the type of feature(Lake Tahoe, Nile River, Death Valley) generally have the stress on the second word. The same is true for businesses/institutions that state the type of business (Hilton Hotel, Northwestern Bank, Supreme Court.) I’ve been a teacher of English as a second language in the USA for 15 years, and I practice word intonation with my students. They often doubt whether this really matters in English. I always tell them that native speakers will probably understand them whether they say CHEESEburger or cheeseBURGER, but they will sound more “foreign” if they use the second version.

Yes I understand the task but I don't agree with E-2, I would say E-1 for certain. I know the rule they are thinking of for the emphasis to often fall on the noun not the preceding qualifier, but there are plenty of times when the qualifier takes the emphasis for added clarity.

Not really. I suspect this exercise was put together by a Russian speaker who has a very poor grasp of natively spoken English themselves and assumed Russian speech patterns apply. They don’t. Even if we assume some of these words need to be unnaturally stressed, however, the answers are… Questionable to put it politely. One would never stress the word “hotel” above the hotel’s name, for example, because it’s clear from the context it’s a hotel one is talking about. One might even drop the word ”hotel” entirely, just say “I recommend the Bloomsbury“.

Does it specify British or American English? I'm British and would stress Niagara, but I think an American would stress Falls.

I think this is a point which is "nice to have" but not "need to have."

Honestly, this is not really an English skill IMO, I'm sure it works similarly in Russian: you stress the word with the most relevant information. for b, of course you'd recommend a hotel, what's interesting is that you're recommending the *Bloomsbury* Hotel... and I see in the answer key that that's not what they want haha. So I suppose perhaps not! I also think it's quite hard to decide where the stress actually *is* in a set of long words. When I say Bloomsbury Hotel the stress is on "Bloom" and "tel". is one of those more stressed than the other? Not really!

Being south of Niagara Falls implies this is happening in America. "Estate agent" is a British term; over here we say "real estate agent" or "Realtor".

It makes sense. Just say the phrases out loud to find the answer. Stress in compound nouns is not straightforward. The general rule is: Noun + noun - stress the first word. Adjective + noun - stress the second word. However - stress can change depending on what you are doing with the noun. For example: Red wine (adjective + noun) - stress ‘wine’. But: A: Would you like white wine or red wine? (Stress ‘red’ and ‘white’ = contrastive stress - to show the contrast) B: I’d love a glass of red.

As a native speaker the flow and stresses of a sentence are more natural to us so we do not need to learn it in the same way that a language learner would need to do. I looked it up and it seems that the main difference between stressed and unstressed words is typically (but not always) based on if the word is conveying information or is a word that is functional in the grammar of the sentence (like a, an, the, and, etc.). Following that guideline I would say that in all of these questions, both 1 and 2 are stressed. I'm not really sure why the book gives the answer it gives.

What kind of monster alphabetizes the questions and numbers the answers?

You can change the meaning of a sentence by stressing different words in it. Virtually any of the words in any of these sentences can be stressed, though obviously some sound weirder than others in the given context. The most ambiguous ones presented here are **b** and **c**, which are both multi-word proper nouns and I don't think there's a strong consensus on which word is stressed. It's really up to the speaker which word they find to be the "most important" of the two.

It makes sense, but I don't entirely agree with the answer key. E should definitely be 1. What do you even need this kind of knowledge for? Are you training to be a spy?

I guess the only phrase that sounds a bit odd for me (as a Brit) is 'e' because it's pretty rare you'd be asking for water where you'd need to specify what you're using it for but yes, you would stress 'drinking' if you were asking for drinking water. In the other four cases it would not be normal to emphasise the particular noun -estate, Bloomsbury, Niagara, passport - before the generic unless you were in a situation where there was some reason for confusion around the generic. e.g. talking about 'agents' or 'hotels' or 'waterfalls' or 'offices'. And in each of these cases I'd have thought these are fairly niche.

It makes sense after a second. I can tell which one is supposed to be emphasized by mentally trying it both ways and seeing which one sounds weird. But usually native speakers handle this intuitively. The last one is wrong. "DRINKING water" functions as a noun, but "drinking WATER" functions as a verb.

My answers were esTATE agent (1), BLOOMSbury hoTEL (both), niAgara FALLS (both), PASSport office (1), and DRINKing water (1).