Ask an English speaker whether they’d like to be a captain and you find out very quickly whether they know what a captain does. One of our speakers admits, cheerfully, “I have no idea what captains do or should do”, adding “I don’t believe I’ve ever met one”. Another pictures …
Listen nowZapp! English Listening Lesson 2.17 – Professions & Kinds of People
Nicholas talks us through his family’s spaghetti puttanesca — olives, capers, big chunky tomatoes, extra garlic — and then admits the recipe calls for anchovies, “which I don’t put in”. A few minutes later Ronny introduces a word Katie has to stop and query: “stoups”. Not a mistake, it turns …
Listen nowZapp! English Listening 2.16 – Food (& Ingredients)
Katie asks two friends what they spend their money on, and Sybil answers by singing: “Money, money, money, makes the world go round”. A few minutes later someone explains why a three-hundred-pound pair of shoes is unthinkable even with the cash in the bank — “That’s half a plane ticket!” …
Nicholas has a system for friends who are always late: if the meeting is at twelve, he tells them eleven thirty. Ronny takes the opposite approach and waits “till the eleventh hour” to start showering and dressing, then turns up five minutes late and hopes nobody minds. This episode is …
One of the speakers in this episode once lived in a converted chicken coup in the woods in Maryland: twenty feet long, split down the middle with a wall, half studio and half bedroom, with a roof so low that his head would graze it while he worked. In the …
Sandra sums up the whole topic in one sentence: “I have a love-hate relationship with my computer because I can’t do without it, but it doesn’t do what I want it to do.” Ronny puts it more cheerfully — “And I Google the world.” In this episode of Zapp! English …
Katie asks Stuart whether he’s good at maths, and he says he’s “quite proud of my mental arithmetic”. Then comes the story of four girls at a kiosk trying to divide “nine euros twenty five by four”, until “it took the iPhone to…to work it out”. A minute later Katie …
Listen nowZapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation Audio 3.32 – Numbers & Amounts
Katie asks Donnie how he is. “I’m feeling fine at the moment,” he says. “You won’t be by the time we’ve finished,” she replies. That sets the tone for this unit on illness: two unscripted English conversations about colds, coughs, upset stomachs and one broken elbow, followed by drills on …
Listen nowZapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation 2.20 – Illness / Sickness
Halfway through the second conversation, Katie says out loud what a lot of us think when the news turns to the ozone layer: “I can imagine people listening, thinking, Oh dear, oh dear, those two don’t know what they’re talking about.” Hannah’s reply — “Oh that’s terrible!” — and then, …
Listen nowZapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation Audio 3.31 – The Environment
Everyone has a supermarket grievance. In this episode one of the speakers admits to always ending up with the trolley “with the dodgy wheel”, so that pushing it up and down the aisles means “nearly run people over” or knocking things off the shelves. Someone else keeps their receipts so …
Listen nowZapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation MP3 3.30 – Shopping