Zapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation 2.7 - In Town

A woman describes something with three colours that stops and starts traffic, and adds that when they're all red at once it takes you "twice as long to get anywhere" on a scooter. That's traffic lights. Then a circular thing that slows cars down, where "there seems to be a bit of a fashion in the UK at the moment to have little ones everywhere". That's a roundabout. This is unit 2.7 of Zapp! English Vocabulary & Pronunciation, and the whole episode works like that: definitions first, word second.

What you'll hear in this episode

Amanda describes fourteen things you find outside in a town or city, and your job is to guess each one before we give the answer. The first set stays on the road: traffic lights, a roundabout, a crossroads, the pavement, a lamppost and a junction. Some of the descriptions are lovely and roundabout in themselves — a junction is remembered through the whole sequence of braking, looking left, looking right, first gear again, and moving out slowly to join the traffic.

The second set moves off the road: a harbour, where boats are "parked...can say that...or moored"; a market stall with spices set out; the underground; a billboard; a stadium (Camp Nou and Maracanã both come up); a pedestrian crossing, where "you look for black and white stripes on the road"; a corner; and a canal, with Amsterdam and Camden as examples.

The corner clue is the one that makes you smile. It's where one street ends and another begins, there are four on a square, "it’s also an important part of football...when...when a player has to take a...one of these", and — helpfully — "it’s ninety degrees, exactly".

Between the two listening sections, our teaching sections ask you questions, give the word, and then leave a beep for you to repeat it in a full example sentence: Turn left at the traffic lights. I'll meet you on the corner.

Quick facts

What you'll learn

Two things run alongside the vocabulary. The first is the British and American split, which is unusually dense in this topic: pavement and sidewalk, crossroads and intersection, roundabout and traffic circle, pedestrian crossing and cross walk, underground and subway. There's a trap in that last pair, and we say it plainly: "in the UK, a subway is just a path that goes under a road". Getting that wrong in London will send you walking.

The second is pronunciation, handled sound by sound and syllable by syllable. Pedestrian is broken into /pə/ /des/ /tri:/ /jən/. Pavement gets "Only two syllables, stress on the first" — useful, because learners often add one. For canal, "The stress is on the second syllable so the first is weak" /kə/, while harbour does the opposite: strong /hɑː/, weak /bə/.

The workbook then turns spelling against you. Nine words, one question: which contain the /ɔː/ sound, as in or? Harbour looks like an obvious yes and isn't — it's /hɑːbə/. Sidewalk has no o at all and is a yes. That gap between how English is written and how it sounds is exactly what makes listening hard, and this is a short, concrete way to work on it.

Vocabulary from the workbook

The glossary gives every word with its phonemic transcription. A few of the entries:

• a junction /dʒʌŋkʃən/ (noun) – a place where one road stops because it comes to another, shaped like a T. Amanda's clue is all about stopping and joining the traffic.
• a roundabout (UK) / traffic circle (US) /raʊndəbaʊt/ (noun) – a circular island at a road junction used instead of a crossroads.
• a stall /stɔːl/ (noun) – a place in a market where people sell things — the spice displays in the second listening.
• a canal /kənæl/ (noun) – a thin man-made river, as in Amsterdam and Camden.
• a harbour (UK) harbor (US) /hɑːbə/ (noun) – a safe place for boats to come in from the sea.
• a billboard /bɪlbɔːd/ (noun) – a very large advertisement on the side of a building.

What's in the workbook

The 2.7 workbook contains the full transcript of both listening sections, so you can read exactly how Amanda circles a word before landing on it, plus the complete glossary with phonemic script and UK/US variants.

Then three practice tasks. Practice 1 gives you a set of directions cut into five lines — police station, crossroads, narrow pavement, traffic lights, football stadium — and you put them back in order. It's a small reading puzzle that doubles as a model for giving directions yourself. Practice 2 is a five-item gap-fill with sentences like He wasn’t watching where he was going so he walked straight into a _ and hit his head! Practice 3 is the /ɔː/ sorting task across nine words. Full answers are in the Extra Materials at the back, so you can mark your own work.

This workbook comes with the Zapp! English all-in-one pack, which covers every episode across the courses for a single price of €39.

Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39

Common questions

Do I need to have done episode 2.6 first?

No. This unit follows on from 2.6 City Life and adds more words for what you see around a town, but each unit stands on its own.

Is the audio scripted?

The descriptions you listen to are unscripted — you can hear the pauses and the self-corrections. The teaching sections that ask the questions and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.

Which accent will I hear the words in?

The target words are modelled in British English, and where American English differs we give that version too, including sidewalk, intersection, cross walk and subway.

Can I use this episode without the workbook?

Yes. The audio is free and complete on its own. The workbook adds the transcript, the glossary with phonemic script, and the three written practice tasks with answers.

How should I use the repeat sections?

Wait for the beep and say the whole example sentence out loud, not just the word. Take the second exit on the roundabout trains the stress pattern in context, which is where you'll actually need it.

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