The purpose of the rephrasing is to ensure that you fully understand each option before matching the recording to them: this should help to minimise guesswork
2 According to the speaker, with a canoe it may be difficult to:
A control its direction of travel
B keep it level in the water
C set it in motion
Does that help?
2 is harder than 1, please try 1 yourself, and I'll let you know how well you did :-)
Note that the instructions make clear that this should be a group activity, so if you followed them you would be discussing the meaning of these sentences and options and discussing possible alternatives, this would be much easier and more useful than doing it as a paper exercise by yourself.