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Describing Work Situations - Zapp! English Vocabulary for Work 2.2
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).
Katie asks Piotr about his day and gets an honest answer: it was "pretty, pretty rough". Then comes the line that sets up the whole episode — "Another day another dollar, as they say." Katie stops to admire it: "That's a nice expression." From there the two of them work through everything you need when somebody asks what you do — job, profession, career, hours, shifts — and keep drifting back to the one subject nobody wants to discuss.
What you'll hear in this episode
Piotr starts with the plain definition: a job is "what you do for a living", the thing you do nine to five to pay the bills. A profession is different — he calls it "a career in a specific field" and points out that people would not normally walk up to you and ask, "What is your profession?" Katie latches onto the word training: you train for a profession. A career, they agree, is closer to your whole professional life, something you have over a long period.
Then the practical patterns. You work for a company, a university, a corporation, even an individual; you work in education, marketing or medicine. Manual work comes up, and with it a story about being a roofer in minus twenty degrees, described as "a lot of fun". Fixed hours, full-time and part-time, long hours, weekends off, shifts — including the ones "as they call them", graveyard shifts. Piotr asks the obvious question of a self-employed person: "So who is your boss when you're self-employed?" The answer is one word.
The second half is six short accounts from other speakers: care work paid around ten pounds an hour with expenses on top, a student with five lectures a week, part-time support work with flexible hours, an office job with an hour for lunch and evenings before deadlines, self-employed admin and social media done from home, and fourteen years as a probation officer, starting at half seven because the phones are quiet. One speaker trips three times over the long word for paperwork and settles, laughing, for admin staff.
Quick facts
| Episode | 2.2 |
| Pack | Vocabulary for Work |
| Level | 2 |
| Duration | 22 minutes 34 seconds |
What you'll learn
Three ways to ask the same question — What's your job?, What do you do? and What do you do for a living? — and why the third one sounds more natural in conversation than asking about someone's profession. You'll drill the answers too, repeating them after the beep, so the phrases come out as chunks rather than word by word.
The distinctions here are the ones learners usually blur. Work in takes an industry or field; work for takes an employer. Self-employed means you work for yourself; freelance means you sell your services to different companies, and it works as both noun and verb. Unemployed and between jobs describe the same situation with very different attitudes — the second one implies you expect it to change soon.
There's also useful listening practice in how Piotr hedges. He says "so to speak", he checks himself with "Am I correct?", and he softens a complaint into reported speech: "some people complain". Katie does the same thing with tag questions — "you have to train for a profession don't you?" That habit of inviting agreement is everywhere in spoken English, and once you hear it you can start using it.
What's in the workbook
The workbook follows the audio section by section. Vocabulary and Listening 1 gives you the questions to hold in mind before Katie and Piotr start: how many of these work words do you already know, and does Piotr's job sound good or bad to you? The full transcript is there, hesitations included, so you can go back and check any line you lost.
Vocabulary and Pronunciation 1 is the drill — fifteen terms from full-time and part-time through anti-social hours, shifts, manual work and between jobs, each with example sentences to repeat. Vocabulary and Listening 2 sets two comparison questions across the six shorter accounts, with the answers written out afterwards.
The Extra Materials are three exercises with a full answer key: spot the odd one out and explain why (why is freelance different from full-time and part-time?), match sentence halves, and cross out the word that doesn't work in each sentence. Everything in this unit, and every other episode's workbook, comes with the all-in-one pack for €39.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Common questions
Is the conversation scripted?
No. Katie and Piotr are talking unscripted, which is why you get repetitions, false starts and Piotr's "pppff" while he searches for an example. 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 of the Vocabulary for Work pack. If you can follow a conversation about everyday routines, you'll manage this one.
Do I need the workbook to follow the audio?
The audio works on its own. The workbook gives you the transcript, the example sentences and the three graded exercises with answers, which is where the vocabulary actually sticks.
Why do they keep mentioning money?
Because it's unavoidable. Part-time work means you "don't get full-time pay", and freelancing means, as Piotr says, "you really can't count on the money every month". Katie's verdict: "We always come back to money don't we?"
How long is it?
22 minutes 34 seconds, including the drills and the answer sections.
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