Zapp! English Listening 3.22 - News
Taught by Tom Wilkinson — Cambridge CELTA
Recorded and taught by a team of British and North American English teachers, based in Oxford (UK) and Barcelona (Spain).
Katie asks Tom to explain what a reader will find on Page Three of a particular English newspaper. His answer: "a fantastic pair of breasts." She calls it strange; he calls it "an institution". From there the conversation moves through phone hacking at the News of the World, the Daily Sport's story about "my grandmother gave birth to a three eyed alien", and one of British journalism's most famous headlines, "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster". Before that, four speakers describe how much attention they really pay to the news.
What you'll hear in this episode
The episode opens with Donnie and Cathy on their news habits. Donnie checks the BBC to keep up with home, reads a Spanish and Catalan paper partly for the vocabulary, and mentions receiving cuttings from family — "that can be quite a nostalgic experience". Cathy grew up surrounded by newspapers and now skims several online: "really it's mostly just the headlines to tell the truth".
Then Laney and Amanda answer harder questions. Tom asks Laney whether objective news exists, and she works through it out loud: anyone recounting a story is "filtering what happened", so "no I don't think that there's really such a thing as objective news". On censorship she lands on a neat contradiction — there shouldn't be any, but there always will be. Amanda is disarmingly honest with Katie: her exposure to news comes "through the internet when pages pop up when I'm trying to go to Hotmail". She still thinks print will survive, because "there's a lot of… appeal for vintage things".
The last two sections are Katie and Tom on the British press: the tabloid trio, the two divisions of newspapers in the UK, and a comparison with papers read abroad — Australian-centric front pages, graphic accident photographs in Thailand, five pages of murder victims in a Guatemalan daily. Katie sums up the difference in six words: "no car crashes...plenty of boobs".
Quick facts
| Episode | Zapp! English Listening 3.22 – News |
| Pack | Listening 3 |
| Level | 3 |
| Duration | 17 minutes 58 seconds |
| Audio | Free to download |
| Workbook | Included in the all-in-one pack (€39) |
What you'll learn
This is unscripted speech under pressure, and that's the point. Laney and Amanda are both asked abstract questions they haven't prepared for, and you can hear them thinking: false starts, repeated words, self-corrections. Amanda's "I...I...I guess it's not...I would say it's not possible" is exactly what real English sounds like when someone is building an opinion mid-sentence. Learn to follow the idea rather than the individual words and this stops being frightening.
You'll also practise listening for agreement across two speakers. The first task asks what reason Donnie and Cathy share for following the news, and the answer is never stated as such — you have to notice that both are keeping up with a home country from a distance. The second task asks you to choose between three summaries, which trains you to reject options that are almost right.
The Katie and Tom sections give you register. They shift between the informal ("boobs", "just for a laugh") and the precise vocabulary of media criticism ("the tabloid press", "broadsheets", "relegated", "objective"). Hearing both in one conversation shows you how educated British speakers move up and down the scale in a single breath.
Vocabulary from the workbook
The glossary covers twenty words taken straight from the conversations, including:
- intrigued (adjective) – very interested in; Laney glances at a headline and becomes intrigued
- filtering (present participle) – letting some things go through and stopping others; her argument against objective news
- bias (noun) – favour for one side, not being equal and fair
- peter out (verb) – slowly become less; Amanda on the future of print
- revived (past participle) – brought back to life
- tabloid (noun) – a small, lower quality, less detailed newspaper
- broadsheets (noun) – larger better quality newspapers
- dubious (adjective) – possibly bad, we can't be sure it's safe or good
- relegated (past participle) – put lower in position
- gory (adjective) – with a lot of blood
What's in the workbook
The workbook is a step-by-step companion to the audio. It opens with two essential words you need before you listen — objective and censorship — then sets four listening tasks, each with its own questions and a separate answer page: Donnie and Cathy's shared reason for following the news, a multiple-choice summary of Laney and Amanda, what is unusual about The Sun, and what appears in newspapers abroad that British papers won't print.
The Extra Materials section goes further. There are seven additional comprehension questions (why Donnie stopped buying El Público, which broadsheets Tom names) with answers at the back. Then a matching exercise on six spoken expressions lifted from the recording — keep up with, depressing, boobs, hand on heart, reputation and glancing — where you work the meaning out from context rather than from a dictionary. The full transcript of every conversation is included, so anything you missed you can go back and read. The glossary of twenty words closes the unit.
The workbook for this episode comes with the all-in-one pack, which covers every episode across all our courses for €39.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
What actually is Page Three?
It's a feature in The Sun, and Tom describes it as an institution that has been running for years — possibly since the seventies or eighties. Katie admits she has never seen anything like it in another country's newspaper.
Is the audio scripted?
The conversations are unscripted — Donnie, Cathy, Laney and Amanda are answering questions in real time, hesitations included. The teaching sections that set up each task and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.
Is this episode difficult?
It's Level 3, and it runs just under eighteen minutes. Laney's answer on objectivity is the hardest stretch, because the idea is abstract and she builds it as she speaks.
Do I need the workbook to use the audio?
No. The audio is free and the tasks and answers are read aloud. The workbook adds the transcript, the extra questions and the vocabulary exercises.
Which British newspapers are mentioned?
The Sun, the News of the World, The Sport and the Daily Sport on one side; The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Independent on the other.
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