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Zapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation 2.16 - Food (& Ingredients)
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).
Ask an English speaker whether they eat raw food and you get a surprisingly detailed answer. In this episode one speaker lists sushi, raw beef and carrots with dips, then admits he'd never touch raw fish himself. Another has never heard that lettuce makes you sleepy, and points out that "lettuce is basically just water" anyway. Around those answers we work through the food words themselves — pork, lamb, aubergine, courgette, shellfish — and the sounds inside them that the spelling hides.
What you'll hear in this episode
Katie asks the questions and two speakers answer them in full, unscripted. First come the meat and taste words. Katie asks "Do you eat a lot of meat? What's your favourite? Pork, beef, lamb?" and Alec explains that lamb is his least favourite, chicken his usual choice, and that he "really love pork, and beef, as well". On spicy food he is unambiguous: "the hotter and the spicier...the better", and then, in case you missed it, "the more spice, the better for me". Asked whether he could ever be vegetarian, one of the speakers says it wouldn't be a problem, since his diet is already almost there.
The second half moves to vegetables and eating habits. Kami calls them eggplants and zucchini rather than aubergines and courgettes, and describes eggplants fried in flour and olive oil with a shrug — "I don't even know how to make them, but they're delicious". Red peppers are the favourite, eaten raw and dipped in hummus, and chilli peppers get an honourable mention. There's a good moment on junk food, where the answer turns out to be anything made by Reese's, for the combination of peanut butter and chocolate.
Between the conversations, our teaching sections drill each word: repeat after the beep, sound by sound, with example sentences like "Yak! This chicken's still raw in the middle."
Quick facts
| Episode | 2.16 |
| Pack | Vocabulary and Pronunciation 2 |
| Level | 2 |
| Duration | 19 minutes 49 seconds |
| Topic | Food and ingredients |
| Workbook | Included in the €39 all-in-one pack |
What you'll learn
The pronunciation work here is unusually satisfying, because English food words are full of traps. The b in lamb is silent — as the audio puts it, "There's a b in the spelling but not in the pronunciation." Aubergine and courgette both take the soft /Ʒ/ in the middle, but vegetarian takes /ʤ/, which is the kind of detail that makes a fluent-sounding sentence fall apart if you get it wrong. Aubergine starts with /əʊ/, while raw and pork share /ɔ:/. And lettuce ends in /Is/, not the long sound the spelling suggests.
You'll also hear connected speech in a very common phrase: on a diet runs together as /ɒnə/, drilled deliberately so you can both catch it and produce it.
On the listening side, you get two very different speaking styles answering the same questions. One answer is full of pauses and self-correction as the speaker thinks aloud; the other is faster and more confident. Both are the real thing, hesitations included, which is exactly the sort of English you have to follow in a conversation about dinner. You'll also pick up the UK/US vocabulary split — aubergine/eggplant, courgette/zucchini — and hear a speaker choose between them naturally.
Vocabulary from the workbook
- pork /pɔːk/ (noun) – meat from a pig
- beef /biːf/ (noun) – meat from a cow
- lamb /læm/ (noun) – meat of a young sheep
- bacon /beɪkən/ (noun) – salted or smoked meat from a pig, cooked and eaten in slices
- vegetarian /vedʒəteəriən/ (adjective / noun) – a person who doesn't eat meat or fish. Food without meat or fish
- raw /rɔː/ (adjective) – uncooked
- spicy /spaɪsi/ (adjective) – hot and with a strong taste
- tasty /teɪsti/ (adjective) – with good taste and flavour
- an aubergine (UK) / eggplant (US) /əʊbəʒiːn/ /eɡplɑːnt/ (noun) – a (usually) purple vegetable
- a courgette (UK) / zucchini (US) /kɔːʒet/ /zʊkiːni/ (noun) – a green vegetable shaped like a large sausage
- a pepper /pepə/ (noun) – a vegetable often used in salads and can be red, green or yellow
- lettuce /letɪs/ (noun) – green leaves that go in salad
- junk food /dʒʌŋ(k) fuːd/ (noun) – food that isn't good for you and has a lot of salt, sugar and fat
- a herb /hɜːb/ (noun) – parts of plants (usually leaves) that are added to food for taste
- shellfish /ʃelfɪʃ/ (noun) – sea creatures with a hard shell
- diet /daɪət/ (noun) – what someone eats, often only a certain amount of food if the person is trying to be healthy or lose weight
In the workbook
The workbook for this unit gives you the full text of both English conversations, so you can go back and read the answers you couldn't quite catch — useful with the pauses and restarts in the first interview. It also contains the questions Katie asks, written out, so you can answer them yourself before you hear anyone else's version.
The Extra Materials at the back have the glossary above with phonemics and definitions, plus three practice tasks. In Practice 1 the underlined words are in the wrong sentences and you swap them back, so bacon meat becomes raw meat and the curry stops being junk food and becomes spicy. Practice 2 is sentence matching: I was confused when he said courgette, joins up with but then I realised he meant zucchini. Practice 3 is pure pronunciation — in each group of three words, one underlined sound is different, and you decide which. Full answers are supplied, including the explanations (vegetarian is /ʤ/, the others are /Ʒ/).
The workbook comes with the complete Zapp! English pack.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Common questions
Is the audio scripted?
The conversations are unscripted — Katie asks the questions and the speakers answer however they like. 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 audio works on its own, including the repeat-after-the-beep drills. The workbook adds the transcript, the glossary and the three practice exercises with answers.
Should I learn the British or the American words?
Both are worth recognising. The episode gives you aubergine/eggplant and courgette/zucchini side by side, and you'll hear a speaker use the American forms naturally.
What level is this episode?
It's from Vocabulary and Pronunciation 2, at Level 2, and runs 19 minutes 49 seconds.
How do I say lamb and lettuce correctly?
The b in lamb is silent, and lettuce ends in /Is/. Both are drilled in the audio and tested again in Practice 3.
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