Age and Life Stages: English Listening Practice (Audio)
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).
In this episode: Eight native speakers answer three questions about age, favourite decades and getting older. Level 3 listening practice, 17 minutes, with workbook tasks and answers.
What you'll hear in this episode
Four pairs of unscripted answers, each set built around the same three questions, so you hear the same ground covered eight different ways.
Tom and Mark go first, and you have to work out what they were asked before we tell you. Then Katie answers alongside Niall, who says he doesn't have a favourite age at all — he has a favourite decade. Stuart picks eighteen to twenty-one, described as "basically, hedonistic three years of my life, where nothing really mattered", with the honest footnote that twenty-one and twenty-two were slightly worse because of work.
Chris talks about career, marriage and getting "on the property market, prop...sorry property ladder" — a real self-correction, left in. Tom agrees that the early thirties are "the right mix of youth and experience", and the two of them compare notes on losing track of their own age: "sometimes I lose a year or I gain a year".
Jon is the one who isn't looking forward to forty, because of the pressure to have achieved certain things by then; he says of age: "It's important to other people", more than to him. Laura ends the unit with the best story in it — a relative approaching ninety-one who has a mobility scooter and takes women out to lunch: "he says he's never been happier". There's also a quick joke. Laura says her best time was around thirty-two or thirty-three, and Tom tells her that her husband chose the same age. He is five years younger than her, Laura laughs, so he was that age when he met her, but she was that age earlier, when she was going to lots of parties. Tom's answer: "we won't tell him that".
Quick facts
| Episode | 3.19 |
| Title | Age and life stages |
| Pack | Listening 3 |
| Level | 3 |
| Duration | 17 minutes 54 seconds |
| Workbook | Included in the €39 all-in-one pack |
What you'll learn
The unit trains three different listening jobs. First, inferring the question from the answer: in Task 1 you hear Tom and Mark reply without hearing what they were asked, which forces you to listen for structure rather than single words. Then listening for gist and comparison — do Katie and Niall have anything in common? — and finally listening for specific detail, such as whether Chris mentions his career, his car or owning a house.
Along the way you'll pick up how English speakers actually describe ages: not just "thirty-eight" but in your twenties, my early thirties, my thirtieth, a favourite decade, hundred plus. You'll also hear how vague and hedged real speech is. Answers open with "Hmm. Difficult question" and "I don't really have a favourite age"; people restart sentences, correct themselves and trail off. That's normal, and learning to follow it is the point.
There's a useful contrast in the opinions too. Almost everyone says age is just a number, but they qualify it differently — physical decline, pressure from other people, protecting children — so you get practice hearing agreement and disagreement that isn't signalled by obvious words like "but I disagree".
Vocabulary from the workbook
The glossary covers words that come up naturally in the conversations:
- conventions (noun) — the way things are usually done. From the point about what you're "led to believe" you should be doing by a certain age.
- conform (verb) — do things in a way people think you should do them. Same answer, immediately after.
- blown up (phrasal verb – participle) — made explode. Used in the argument about being able to enlist at sixteen but not buy beer until eighteen.
- protection (noun) — stop from being damaged, hurt or broken. Laura's reason why age does matter in childhood.
- conversely (adverb) — on the other hand / in the opposite way. Used to introduce the seventeen-year-olds who behaved as though they were middle-aged.
Inside the workbook
The PDF is part of the €39 all-in-one pack and follows the audio step by step. Each of the four listening tasks has its questions set out before you listen and its answers written out afterwards, so you can see not just what was right but why — including the three original questions, revealed after Task 1.
The Extra Materials section adds a second pass over the same audio with harder detail questions: where Mark went first, Fiji or Spain; whether Stuart enjoyed his nineteenth year; who the oldest child in Tom's family is. Answers are at the back, and the full transcript is there so you can check any line you missed.
There's also a getting-the-meaning-from-context exercise, where you match expressions taken straight from the recordings — hedonistic, sorted, settle down, hitting that age, put off, emulate — to their definitions, using the surrounding sentence as your clue. The vocabulary glossary rounds it off.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Is the audio scripted?
The conversations are completely unscripted — hesitations, self-corrections and laughter included. The teaching sections that set up each task and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.
What level is this episode?
Level 3, from the Listening 3 pack. You'll need to be comfortable following fast, overlapping natural speech without every word being clear.
Can I use the audio without the workbook?
Yes. The audio is free and the tasks and answers are spoken aloud. The workbook adds the transcript, the extra questions and the vocabulary exercises.
How long is it?
17 minutes 54 seconds, covering four pairs of speakers.
What if I can't follow one of the speakers?
Read that section in the transcript, then listen again without it. This unit has a good range of speaking speeds, so use the slower answers as a warm-up.
Get this episode
To save the audio, right-click the MP3 link and choose Save link as.
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