Zapp! English Colloquial MP3 2.6 - City Life
Taught by Katie Wood — Cambridge CELTA · Cambridge DELTA · Cambridge-accredited Teacher Trainer
Recorded and taught by a team of British and North American English teachers, based in Oxford (UK) and Barcelona (Spain).
In this episode: Katie asks Laura and Clare to guess ten colloquial ways to describe cities — packed, rammed, mental, dead and a ghost town — in 20 minutes of real English.
What you'll hear in this episode
We recorded two separate conversations for this unit, both built the same way: Katie describes a colloquial expression, and her guest has to produce it.
In the first, Katie talks to Laura. They open with small talk about the city they're in — "It's a very nice city." — before moving on to the shops during a sale. Laura gets packed straight away and adds "Ah. Or jam packed." She also describes exactly why crowds are unpleasant: people "nudging against you" and reaching across you for clothes on the rails, because "They don't really care about, personal space anymore." When Katie sets up the fish expression, Laura's face gives her away: "I thought you were going to say that." She then explains like sardines properly — packed into a tin, "No room to move at all."
The second conversation is with Clare, and it covers the opposite end of the scale. Clare lands mental and can't quite believe it: "I did surprise myself, I didn't think it was right". She volunteers "choc-a-bloc" as an extra, then works out dead by reasoning that it might be "maybe related to...death". Katie starts singing a line about a town coming like a ghost town; Clare laughs and calls the expression "a bit...science fiction isn't it really?" Asked whether she's a city slicker, she settles on "half and half".
Quick facts
| Episode | Zapp! English Colloquial MP3 2.6 - City Life |
| Number | 2.6 |
| Pack | Colloquial 2 |
| Level | 2 |
| Duration | 19 minutes 59 seconds |
| Workbook | Included in the all-in-one pack (€39) |
What you'll learn
Ten expressions for describing towns and cities, sorted into two useful groups: too many people, and nobody at all. That symmetry is the point — once you know mental and dead are opposites, you can describe almost any place you walk into.
You'll also hear how these words behave in a sentence. Notice how often an intensifier comes first: "Oh God it was absolutely packed!", "It was absolutely dead in there." Notice that some expressions take like — like sardines, like Piccadilly Circus, like a ghost town — while others are plain adjectives. And notice the register warnings: Katie flags rammed and mental as more informal than the rest, and Clare confirms mental is "Very very informal, erm...but very normal" with friends.
Because this is unscripted speech, you get the hesitations, the false starts and the wrong guesses too — Laura's "Wind me up?" before she reaches stress me out is a genuine near-miss, and Katie accepts it as a real alternative. After each conversation, the Meaning and Pronunciation tasks ask you the same questions again and give you a beep to repeat after, so you say every expression out loud in a full example sentence.
The vocabulary
The workbook glossary rates each item 1 to 3 for how informal it is:
- packed (1) – very busy, with lots of people, crowded
- rammed (2) – very busy, with lots of people, crowded
- like sardines (1) – lots of people are together in a small area so there is very little space
- like Piccadilly Circus (1) – busy, with lots of people coming and going
- mental (2) – so busy it is crazy
- to stress someone out (1) – to make someone feel stressed and anxious
- dead (1) – empty, with no or very few people, very quiet
- a ghost town (1) – a place that is now totally empty of people, with no one living there
- cardboard city (1) – areas of cities where homeless people live
- a city slicker (1) – a way to talk about someone from the city who has no idea or understanding of the countryside
In the workbook
The Colloquial 2.6 workbook contains the full transcript of both conversations, so you can read exactly what Laura and Clare said, hesitations included, and check the expressions you didn't catch.
After the glossary there are two practice exercises. In the first, you underline the odd one out in five sets of three — so you have to decide whether rammed and packed sit together against dead, and work out why like Piccadilly Circus doesn't quite belong with like sardines and packed (the answer key explains it: that one is about people coming in and out and moving).
The second exercise puts five bold expressions in the wrong sentences and asks you to swap them back. It's harder than it looks, because packed and city slickers both fit grammatically in more than one place — you need the meaning to sort them. Full answers follow at the end.
The workbook for this episode is part of the Zapp! English all-in-one pack, along with every other unit.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Common questions
Is the audio scripted?
The conversations with Laura and Clare are unscripted — that's why the guesses go astray. The teaching sections that set up the tasks and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.
What level is this episode?
Level 2, from the Colloquial 2 pack. It runs just under 20 minutes.
Can I use these expressions with anyone?
Mostly yes, but check the glossary numbers first. Rammed and mental are rated 2 — best kept for informal situations with people you know well.
Do I need the workbook to follow the audio?
No. The audio works on its own, but the transcript and the two exercises are where the expressions actually stick.
What's a cardboard city?
An area of a city where homeless people live, often using boxes for shelter. Katie leads Clare to it by asking what the boxes are made of.
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