Zapp! English Listening 3.23 - Controversial Issues
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 hands Tom and Stuart a list of subjects people can't agree on, and the first one is swearing. Within a minute they've decided it isn't really controversial any more — on a bus in England, Katie reckons, "probably one in four words" is a swear word. Then it gets harder: capital punishment, homosexuality, nudity, sex before marriage. What you get is nineteen minutes of three speakers disagreeing politely, correcting themselves mid-sentence, and laughing at their own hesitation.
What you'll hear in this episode
Swearing comes first, and the tone is set immediately: bad language is expressive, it can "hammer it home", but "if you're a serial offender with swearing" it "means nothing after a while and it sounds uncouth". Katie explains the nine o'clock watershed on British television, and there's a lovely misunderstanding when she says she's been called a "potty mouth" and Stuart hears "party". Nobody will say the word beginning with c — Tom calls it exactly that.
Then Katie moves on to "something a bit more meaty now": capital punishment. Stuart calls it "back to that eye for an eye thing" and says the states where it still happens seem "gung ho for it". Tom pushes back with a hard case — crimes against children — and the others answer with questions rather than positions: who decides, where does mental illness fit, and, as Katie asks, "what defines a child?"
Homosexuality brings the Pope, the debate in the US armed services, and the stoning of young men in Iran for dressing in an Emo, slightly effeminate style. One of the speakers mentions a friend on an oil rig for whom the daily banter is "like a...prison sentence almost".
Nudity is the funniest stretch — a memorably tattooed man in Barcelona, Japanese tourists on a bicycle route — and the most cultural, with stories from Thailand and Ecuador about swimming in jeans and t-shirts. The last section runs from sex before marriage into contraception, immigration and obesity.
Quick facts
| Episode | Zapp! English Listening 3.23 – Controversial Issues |
| Pack | Listening 3 |
| Level | 3 |
| Duration | 19 minutes 28 seconds |
| Speakers | Katie, Tom and Stuart |
| Workbook | Included in the all-in-one pack (€39) |
What you'll learn
This is a unit about understanding opinions, and the difficulty is that almost nobody states one plainly. Positions arrive wrapped in hedges: "I don't think it is very controversial at all anymore", "I find the whole thing, not very humane", "perhaps", "I guess", "or something you know, along those lines". Task 2 asks whether anyone strongly agrees with the death penalty, and to answer it you have to hear disagreement expressed as a series of questions.
You'll also get a lot of practice with euphemism and self-repair. Tom refers to "the one beginning with c, which we're not even going to use", and Stuart catches himself saying homosexual couples walk around the city "freely, gaily, I was going to say". That kind of live correction is everywhere in real speech and almost never in coursebook audio.
Agreement and disagreement markers come up constantly: "No, me neither", "Yeah, but...", "But who decides". So do the interruptions — one speaker finishing another's sentence, or supplying the word they're groping for ("Freely", "Society", "tackle"). Learning to follow that overlap without panicking is the real skill here.
And there's dry British understatement to decode, as when Stuart explains why he avoids the news: "It's not particularly cheery is it?"
Vocabulary from this unit
- uncouth (adjective) – rude, not polite; used about someone who swears constantly
- harrowing (adjective) – emotionally very difficult and upsetting; said of capital punishment "for all concerned"
- gung-ho (adjective) – enthusiastic, not worried about dangers
- oil rig (noun) – the structure in the sea where they look for oil
- effeminate (adjective) – a man who is like a woman in some way
- androgynous (adjective) – neither male nor female
- flesh (noun) – skin and muscles of your body; "you don't show...flesh"
- prohibiting (gerund) – not allowing; used about contraception
- contraception (noun) – the things people use to prevent/stop pregnancy happening
- blame (verb) – to say someone is responsible for something bad
Inside the workbook
The 19-page workbook splits the conversation into five listening tasks, each with questions before you listen and answers straight after, so you can check yourself as you go. Task 1 asks whether British and American people swear a lot; Task 4 asks whether nudity is more or less acceptable in Britain than in Spain, and why. There's an Essential Vocabulary box teaching the two ways to talk about execution — the death penalty and capital punishment — before the section where they discuss it.
The Extra Materials add harder comprehension questions for each of the five parts, including one that asks whether the young men killed in Iran were definitely gay, and a getting-meaning-from-context exercise built on five lines lifted from the recording: "effing and blinding", "out of touch", "tackle out, packet out", "served a ban" and "topless". You match each to a definition, then check the answer key. The full transcript and a ten-word glossary close the unit.
This workbook comes with the complete Zapp! English pack — every episode, every level, one payment of €39.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Common questions
Is the conversation scripted?
No. The discussion between Katie, Tom and Stuart is completely unscripted — that's why they interrupt, hesitate and mishear each other. Only the teaching sections that set up the tasks and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.
Is the content suitable for a classroom?
Use your judgement. The topics are deliberately controversial, and the nudity section is frank and includes strong language and anatomical detail. It's excellent for adult learners and one-to-one lessons.
What level do I need?
This is a Level 3 unit — the pace is fast, the speakers overlap, and opinions are heavily hedged rather than stated directly.
Can I use the audio without buying anything?
Yes. The audio is free to download. The workbook, with its tasks, answers, transcript and glossary, is part of the paid pack.
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