Zapp! English Listening 3.17 - Chance & probability
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 arrived with a list of statistics she'd found online, and a simple game: guess the odds. What are the chances of being attacked by a shark? Of having twins? Of being struck by lightning? Tom and Mark guess, argue, do rough mental arithmetic, and by the end Katie is openly sceptical about her own research — "Well now I’m doubting my information", she admits, before asking listeners to check it for her. It's an unusually honest 21 minutes of natural English.
What you'll hear in this episode
We recorded this one in the park on a lovely day, with Katie running the quiz and Tom and Mark supplying the guesses. The sharks come first, and the responses are very different: one host talks about surfing in Sydney and being called out of the sea for a shark alert, while Mark takes the pragmatic route — "I’m not going to get bitten by a shark if I don’t go in the sea. So I didn’t go in the sea."
Then twins. Tom offers one in a thousand, Mark pushes to one in five thousand, and Katie keeps telling them they have more chance, not less. The real figure surprises both of them. Mark summarises the genetics as "So twins beget twins", which earns him Tom's flat reply: "I don’t even know what that word means Mark."
The lightning section drifts into a shared memory of a man who has been struck ten times and, according to Tom, "He’s kept all his hats" — the ones with burn holes in them. Tom assumed a strike would "incinerated you on the spot"; the statistic says otherwise.
The conversation closes on flying, which Katie admits worries her, and on how quickly a single news story can change someone's attitude to planes. Mark's last word is reassuring: "And now we’ve got the stats to prove it. It’s incredibly rare."
Quick facts
| Episode | Listening 3.17 – Chance & probability |
| Pack | Zapp! English Listening 3 |
| Level | 3 |
| Duration | 21 minutes 15 seconds |
| Speakers | Katie, Tom and Mark |
| Recorded | In the park, on a lovely day |
| Audio | Free download |
| Workbook | Included in the €39 all-in-one pack |
What you'll learn
This episode is a workout in listening to numbers — and not tidy, dictated numbers, but numbers thrown around in conversation and immediately corrected. "One in sixty-five million", "three in a hundred", "one in twenty-nine point four million": you'll hear how English speakers actually say large statistics out loud, including how they read decimals as "point four".
You'll also pick up the language of likelihood and hedging. Notice how often the speakers avoid committing: "Apparently", "according to the internet, so I don’t know how reliable", "I would have thought", "very slim I would imagine", "I don’t think I believe that one". This is how educated native speakers signal doubt without saying "I'm not sure", and it's a pattern learners rarely meet in coursebooks.
The comparative structures come thick and fast too — more likely, less likely, higher chance, lower chance — and Katie's repeated "You’ve got more chance" gives you the same phrase in several contexts.
The five listening tasks train two different skills in turn: catching the gist of an opinion (does Mark like the sea, and why not?) and extracting one precise detail from a stretch of overlapping speech (the exact odds, the exact percentage). The extra questions push further, asking which countries and cities are mentioned and whether Katie is actually certain about her lightning statistic.
Vocabulary from the workbook
The glossary covers the trickier items, several of them very informal:
- bugger you up (slang, very informal) – damage, destroy, make bad. Mark's description of what lives in Australian waters.
- went out of the window – disappeared, went away. Used about his enthusiasm for swimming.
- doubting – not believing, being unsure. Katie, losing faith in her own research.
- incinerated – burnt completely. Tom's assumption about lightning strikes.
- restrictive – with lots of rules and limits. Describing China's policy on children.
- demographic – information about populations and groups of people.
- ignored – to not listen to, or give attention to. The pilot and the warning signal.
- plummeted – fell very fast.
A separate matching exercise asks you to work out meanings from context, including it's always in the back of your mind, to run in families, bloke and telly.
What's in the workbook
The PDF workbook for this unit is part of the Zapp! English all-in-one pack. It opens with three essential words you need before you listen — statistics, twins and struck by lightning — then splits the conversation into five listening tasks, each with focus questions and answers on the following page. Task 1 covers the sharks, Task 2 twins and multiple births, Task 3 lightning, Task 4 living to a hundred, and Task 5 the odds of a fatal flight.
After the summary there are extra listening questions for a second pass — the countries and cities mentioned, the chances of triplets, where Tom had a terrible flight — plus the vocabulary matching exercise and the glossary. Every task has an answer key, and the full transcript is included so you can check exactly which words you missed.
The pack contains the workbook for this episode and every other one, at €39 in total.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Is the audio free?
Yes. The English conversations are free to download. The workbook that goes with this unit comes with the €39 all-in-one pack.
Is the conversation scripted?
The conversation isn't. Katie, Tom and Mark are genuinely guessing, and they interrupt and contradict each other accordingly. 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 3. If you can follow three people talking at natural speed, with overlapping speech and unfinished sentences, you're in the right place.
Do I need to be good with numbers?
No, but you'll get better at hearing them. Large fractions and percentages spoken quickly are one of the hardest things to catch in real English, and this episode is full of them.
Are the statistics accurate?
Katie herself doubts one of them on air and asks listeners to "do the research for us". Treat the figures as listening practice rather than fact-checking material.
Get this episode
To save the audio, right-click the MP3 link and choose Save link as.
Listen on
