Food and Ingredients Listening Practice: Real English Audio
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: Six speakers talk about puttanesca, veggie lasagne, "stoups" and Thai food in this Level 2 listening episode, with a workbook of tasks and vocabulary.
Check your understanding
Four questions on what is said in the recording. Every answer is in the audio. No sign-up, nothing to buy.
The workbook for this episode has more practice, with answers, and the full transcript. See what’s in the workbook
What you'll hear in this episode
Zapp! English Listening 2.16 is a 13½-minute recording of six people talking about the food they cook and eat, in unscripted English. Nicholas and Jesse each describe a dish they make often. Katie and Ronny compare what they usually eat, sweet things included. Then Sandra and Hannah are asked which one type of food they could eat for the rest of their lives.
Three short listening tasks, six speakers, British and American accents.
First, Nicholas and Jesse describe a dish they make often. His is the puttanesca; hers is lasagne with soya veggie mince, "just to make it a bit healthier", carrots and mushrooms sometimes, made on a Sunday night so it's ready for Monday. The task is simple but the language isn't: you have to decide whether the dishes are sweet or savoury while the details fly past.
Then Katie and Ronny compare typical diets. Ronny prefers chicken to beef, describing the beef available to her as "inedible" — then softening it with a joke: "if you like to chew and chew and chew it's fine." There's rice versus pasta, thick healthy soups, and a nicely honest exchange about sweet things. Ronny only needs a couple of bites: "my downfall is great bread." Katie can't do moderation at all — she has to have "a packet of cookies and a tub of ice-cream".
Finally, Sandra and Hannah answer the same question: one food for the rest of your life. Sandra's answer has changed over the years, and she lands on Thai: "I could live the rest of my life on just Thai food". Hannah loves basil and pesto, but craves spice too — "I don't think I could choose between them."
Quick facts
Zapp! English Listening 2.16, Food and Ingredients, is a free English listening lesson at intermediate level (B1). It runs 13 minutes 40 seconds and has three listening tasks and six speakers, with each task set and answered in the recording. The workbook, with the full transcript and extra exercises, is part of the €39 all-in-one pack.
| Episode | 2.16 |
| Pack | Listening 2 |
| Level | 2 |
| Duration | 13 minutes 40 seconds |
| Topic | Food and ingredients |
| Speakers | Six, British and American accents |
| Workbook | Included in the all-in-one pack (€39) |
What you'll learn
Zapp! English Listening 2.16 trains you to hear how people soften an opinion about food, as Ronny does with "I'm not really into meat", and to follow a long list of ingredients through the hesitations. It also checks the difference between sweet and savoury before the first task, and lets you hear conditionals at natural speed in the third task.
The useful thing about food talk is how much of it is hedging and self-correction. Ronny doesn't say "I dislike beef" — she says "I'm not really into meat", "I never...did eat a lot of beef", "I'm not major into sweets, no." Hannah does the same with her opinions: "I would possibly choose Italian", "I don't know if I could." Learning to hear these softeners, and to use them yourself, is what makes an opinion sound natural rather than blunt.
You'll also work on a genuinely hard listening skill: holding a list in your head. Nicholas lists his ingredients in one long, unbroken stretch with "er" and "erm" scattered through it, and the extra questions ask you to name three of them. That means listening past the hesitation to the content.
And there's the sweet/savoury distinction, checked before the first task, plus the everyday grammar of habits: what you usually eat, what you tend to cook, what you could live on. The third task uses second and third conditionals throughout — "if you had asked me that question maybe three years ago, I would have said Mexican food" — spoken at natural speed, not drilled.
Vocabulary from the workbook
- capers (noun) – a small round green, strong tasting food. In Nicholas's puttanesca sauce.
- anchovies (noun) – a small salty fish. The one ingredient he leaves out.
- extravagant (adjective) – something that is very expensive, often more expensive than it needs to be. Ronny uses it about imported beef.
- inedible (adjective) – not good enough to eat, too bad to eat.
- chew (verb) – use your teeth to cut food into small pieces in your mouth so you can swallow it.
- pesto (noun) – a green Italian sauce made from herbs, oil and cheese. Hannah says she could eat it forever.
The workbook
The workbook that goes with this episode is part of the all-in-one pack. It sets up each of the three listening tasks with a question to answer before you listen, then gives the answers with an explanation — including why Ronny is probably the healthier eater of the two.
After that there are six extra listening questions for a second, closer pass: three ingredients in the puttanesca, what Jesse puts in her lasagne, the three countries Sandra mentions, and whether Hannah prefers Thai or Italian. Answers are at the back, so you can check yourself against the transcript.
The vocabulary work has two parts. A guessing-from-context exercise takes three lines from the recording — "bung it in the fridge", "a combination of soup and stew", "you really crave it again" — and asks you to decide the word class first, then match a definition. There's also the glossary above, and the full transcript of every conversation.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Frequently asked questions
Is the audio free?
The audio of Zapp! English Listening 2.16 is free: the English conversations are free to download. The workbook that goes with the episode is not free; it is part of the €39 all-in-one pack.
Is the conversation scripted?
The conversations in Zapp! English Listening 2.16 are not scripted, which is why you hear the pauses, the false starts and a word like "stoups". Only the teaching sections, which set up the tasks and give the answers, are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.
What level is this episode?
Zapp! English Listening 2.16 is a Level 2 episode from the Listening 2 pack, which is intermediate level (B1). Each task asks for one answer at a time, so you do not need to catch every word.
How long does it take?
The audio of Zapp! English Listening 2.16 runs 13 minutes 40 seconds. With the extra questions and vocabulary exercises from the workbook, allow around half an hour for the whole unit.
What if I can't follow the fast parts?
If you cannot follow the fast parts of Zapp! English Listening 2.16, listen three times: once for the task answer, once with the transcript in front of you, then once more without it. The transcript is in the workbook, which is part of the paid all-in-one pack.
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