Zapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation MP3 2.6 - City Life

Somebody has to describe the word district without saying it, and ends up here: "a zone where there is lots of...sex or pornography or prostitution, might be described as the red light..." That is the shape of this episode. Two native speakers talk around sixteen words about city life, and your job is to work out which word each clue points to. The answers come after each clip, so you can guess without fear.

What you'll hear in this episode

The episode is built from two sets of short, unscripted clips. In the first set, Alec describes eight words and phrases without naming them: a traffic jam, polluted, stressful, rush hour, narrow, in a hurry, population and homeless. The clues are personal rather than dictionary-like — one speaker explains that traffic doesn't affect him much because he cycles or walks, and later describes people you'd see "asleep on cardboard" or "asking for money in the metro". There's a nice moment where narrow streets are called "a n...novelty" by someone used to wide streets.

In the second set, Tom describes seven more: multicultural, cosmopolitan, convenient, central, district, outskirts and suburbs. His definitions are looser and more spoken — cosmopolitan becomes "a place that's very vibrant", and outskirts is "often where, the town is, becoming countryside". You can hear him searching for the wording in real time, with the hesitations left in.

Between the two listening sections come the Meaning and Pronunciation parts, where you answer a question, hear the word, and repeat after the beep. These sections also flag the traps: polluted is three syllables with stress on the second, and the first syllable is /pə/, not /pɒ/. Cosmopolitan has five syllables with the stress on /pɒl/. And outskirts almost always arrives as on the outskirts.

Quick facts

What you'll learn

The guessing format trains something that ordinary vocabulary lists can't: understanding a word from context alone. You hear a description full of pauses, restarts and half-finished sentences, and you have to hold the clues together until the meaning lands. That is exactly what happens in real conversation when a speaker forgets a word and talks around it.

On the pronunciation side, the episode works on strong and weak syllables. You'll count syllables in cosmopolitan and place the stress on /pɒl/, hear why the first syllable of polluted is a weak /pə/, and practise the stressed /viː/ in convenient. There's also spelling versus sound: the less in homeless is pronounced /ləs/, the al in central is /əl/, and the ending of population is /ʃən/.

Then there's connected speech. Rush hour is presented as two words that join into one shape — worth slowing down and copying, because it's a phrase learners often say in two separate pieces. And you'll notice small grammatical habits that come with these words: on the outskirts, but in the suburbs; in a hurry, not in hurry.

The words, with their definitions

• a traffic jam /træfɪk dʒæm/ (noun) – a situation where there are so many cars, they cannot move or must move very slowly
• polluted /pəluːtɪd/ (adjective) – dirty and not safe to eat, drink or breathe
• rush hour /rʌʃaʊə/ (noun) – the time when there is the most traffic on the roads, trains, buses etc because people are going to or coming back from work
• stressful /stresfəl/ (adjective) – makes you feel worried and unable to relax
• in a hurry /ɪnəhʌri/ (phrase) – to not have much time
• narrow /nærəʊ/ (adjective) – thin, used for roads, paths, the opposite to wide
• homeless /həʊmləs/ (adjective) – with no place to live
• cosmopolitan /kɒzməpɒlɪtən/ (adjective) – affected by lots of different cultures or countries
• a district /dɪstrɪkt/ (noun) – an area of a city
• suburbs /sʌbɜːrbz/ (noun) – an area of housing away from the centre of a city, where people who work in the city live

What's in the workbook

The workbook for this unit gives you the full transcript of both listening sections, so you can go back and see how each clue was built. After that comes a glossary of all sixteen words with phonetic transcriptions and definitions — the same list the exercises draw on.

There are three practice sections. Practice 1 is a matching task: which noun goes with which adjective, so you find out whether you'd say narrow streets or narrow air. Practice 2 is an eight-line text about living on the outskirts of a city, cut into pieces and shuffled; you put it back in order, which forces you to follow the linking words — which is good because, but at the same time, I'm happy that I don't — rather than just spotting vocabulary. Practice 3 is pronunciation: tick the words that contain a /s/ sound, including some where the spelling misleads you. Full answers are at the back.

The workbook is part of the Zapp! English all-in-one pack — every episode, every level, one download, €39.

Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39

Common questions

Is the audio scripted?

The clips where Alec and Tom describe the words are unscripted — that's why you hear hesitations, restarts and self-corrections. The teaching sections that set up the tasks and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.

Do I need the workbook to follow the episode?

No. The answers are given in the audio after every clip, so the episode works on its own. The workbook is for the written practice and the glossary.

What level is this?

Level 2, from the Vocabulary and Pronunciation 2 pack. If you can follow a slow description of an everyday idea, you're ready.

What's the difference between outskirts and suburbs?

Both are away from the centre. The episode treats suburbs as residential — "where houses are and where people live" — while the outskirts are the outer edge, "often where, the town is, becoming countryside".

Who made the episode?

Katie, Tom and Mark make the Zapp! English recordings and the accompanying eBooks.

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