Zapp! English Listening 3.25: Talking About Memory

Katie asks whether anyone forgets people's birthdays. Stuart answers "Always." Tom adds "Everyone's." Then Katie admits she has "been known, to forget my mum's and my dad's birthdays" and says, with some pride, "Beat that!" That is roughly the level of competence on display for the next sixteen minutes. This is a conversation about bad memories, embarrassing gaps and the increasingly elaborate systems people build to cover for them — from knots in a handkerchief to a phone alarm going off three days later.

What you'll hear in this episode

The unit opens with two short interviews. Tom asks Jameson and Laney the same three questions: have you got a good memory, how do you remember things, and what do you forget? Jameson says he remembers odd details fairly well but "significant events sometimes get a little blurry", and that forgetting names is embarrassing because he meets a lot of people. Laney's answer is shorter — "Not particularly." — and she relies on taking lots and lots of photos so she can look back later.

The rest of the episode is a longer three-way conversation between Katie, Tom and Stuart. They start on birthdays: one of the speakers describes being given a family calendar at Christmas with all the birthdays printed on it, calls it "that's a very subtle hint, but I like it", puts it by the door — and then lets it get buried under other things and forgets the first two birthdays anyway.

From there they move through keys, sunglasses, their own ages and romantic dates. One speaker mentions a mother who leaves the keys in the outside of the door and keeps paying for expensive lock replacements; "it drives me mad," Tom says. Tom's solution to everything is "Google Calendar" — "now I don't need to use my brain anymore. It's fantastic" — while Stuart works week by week on paper and gets told "Get with the times Stu." His reply: "Are we ninety?" There is a lovely stretch near the end where nobody can name a TV programme, an actor or a country, and "Thingamajiggy" has to do all the work.

Quick facts

Episode	Zapp! English Listening 3.25 - Memory
Episode number	3.25
Pack	Listening 3
Level	3
Duration	16 minutes 06 seconds

What you'll learn

The main skill here is following a longer narrative when three people are talking at once, interrupting, finishing each other's sentences and answering questions that were asked two turns earlier. Katie asks about "dates" and Tom answers about calendars — then realises: "I thought you meant romantic dates." Learning to hear that kind of misunderstanding happen, and hear it get repaired, is far more useful than any single word.

The tasks train you to listen for the one true statement among several plausible ones. In Task 2, for example, all three speakers forget birthdays — but the calendar does not actually help. That distinction is buried inside a story, not stated directly, which is exactly how real listening works.

You'll also collect a set of spoken expressions about the mind: things getting blurry, being a bit dizzy, something slipping your mind, an alarm going off, and not being able to put your finger on a word. The vocabulary exercise gives you these in context and asks you to guess the meaning before you check — the same guessing you have to do in a real conversation.

Vocabulary from the workbook

The glossary explains the words most likely to trip you up:

hint (noun) — a little piece of information to help someone get an answer; a clue. Used for the calendar with all the family birthdays printed on it.
buried (past simple) — put under the ground, often for a person when dead. Here it's the calendar, gradually buried by stuff by the front door.
knots (noun) — when a rope or string is tied together.
handkerchief (noun) — a piece of cloth people use to clean their nose. One speaker says his father still ties knots in his — "That's very nineteen forties."
prompt (noun) — a little piece of information to help or remind someone. Tom leaves a glass in the middle of the floor as one.

What's in the workbook

The workbook takes you through five listening tasks, each with its own question and answer key, plus the complete transcript at the back so you can see exactly what was said and why you may have missed it. Task 4 has no right answer — you're asked to think first about your own memory tricks, then listen and compare.

The Extra Materials add nine true/false questions across all five listening sections, and the answers explain the near-misses rather than just marking them wrong: Katie didn't forget her sister's birthday, she forgot her parents'; the calendar wasn't lost, it was covered by other things. Then there's the Vocabulary – Getting the meaning from context exercise on blurry, dizzy, slipped your mind, go off and put your finger on, followed by the glossary.

This workbook is part of the Zapp! English all-in-one pack — every episode, every workbook, for €39.

Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39

Is the audio scripted?

The conversations are unscripted — real speakers, real hesitation, real interruptions. The teaching sections that set up the tasks and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.

Do I need the workbook to use the episode?

No. The English conversations are free to download and you can simply listen. The workbook is what turns listening into practice: tasks, answers, vocabulary and the full transcript.

Is this the right level for me?

This is a Level 3 unit from the Listening 3 pack. It uses longer, faster, overlapping natural speech, so it suits you if you can already follow a straightforward interview and want to cope with three people at once.

What if I can't catch a word?

Use the transcript — but only after a second or third listen. The point of the guessing exercises is that in real conversation you never get a transcript, so you learn to work the meaning out from what surrounds it.

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