Zapp! English Listening 3.3 - Incidents and Accidents
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).
We sat down in the park with a fairly simple question and got three hospital stories in return. "I’ve got a catalogue of stories about accidents that I could relate," Mark says, before choosing the balcony in Sydney and the broken neck. Katie’s reaction — "So how the hell did you fall off the balcony?" — is probably the most natural thing in the whole recording. What follows is nineteen minutes of interruptions, wincing and unexpectedly warm endings.
What you'll hear in this episode
The conversation opens with Katie: "Hi this is Katie, and I’m sitting in the park." Tom and Mark are with her, and the topic is incidents and accidents.
Mark's story comes first. He was on a balcony with a glass of wine, leant against the side, and the rail came away. He describes trying to grab the tree on the way down, missing the branch, scraping his forearm down the trunk, and landing on concrete. A flatmate downstairs "heard a dull thud apparently"; the friend upstairs had been on a first aid course that same week and knew to immobilise his head. Then came three months in a halo brace, screwed into the skull, in forty degree heat. Tom's verdict: "nothing that a cold beer couldn’t cure."
Tom's story overlaps with it. He was in a hospital bed in Melbourne with a fever, kept in isolation while doctors wondered about SARS, and it turned out to be typhoid. In the same week his younger sister fell into Sydney Harbour after the 2003 Rugby World Cup final and broke three ribs. One mutual friend, Nick, was fielding all three phone calls.
Katie's story is the badminton one: a game in Thailand, a popping noise, a snapped Achilles tendon, an operation and two months on crutches. She couldn't say "I need to go to the toilet" in Thai, so "I had to do lots of miming all the time, which was quite funny." Mark's lesson learned? "Every time I go on a balcony now, I always give a...give the rail a little bit of a shake, to make sure it’s stable."
Quick facts
| Episode | Listening 3.3 – Incidents and Accidents |
| Pack | Zapp! English Listening 3 |
| Level | 3 |
| Duration | 19 minutes 09 seconds |
| Speakers | Katie, Tom and Mark |
| Recorded | In a park |
| Audio | Free to download |
| Workbook | Included in the €39 all-in-one pack |
What you'll learn
This unit trains two things at once: listening for the main idea of a story, and then going back for the detail. Before each conversation the workbook pre-teaches two or three key words and asks you to predict the story from them — immobilise, a screw, a skull for the first one; shuttlecock and Achilles for the last. It's a useful habit: guessing before you listen makes the detail much easier to catch.
The language itself is worth studying because nobody here is being careful. Speakers restart mid-sentence ("give a...give the rail a little bit of a shake"), finish each other's stories, and correct one another: Tom says "At a party," Mark says "Well, it wasn’t a party." You'll hear how English speakers soften a horrible story with understatement — wandering round Sydney in a body brace was "rather inconvenient" — and how Katie pushes back on exactly that word.
There's also plenty of narrative grammar in its natural habitat: past simple and past continuous side by side, past perfect for background ("I’d just arrived in Australia at the time"), and would have for the version of events that didn't happen. Follow-up questions are the other quiet lesson — notice how often Katie asks one to keep a story moving.
Vocabulary from the workbook
The glossary covers the words you need for the injuries and the equipment:
- rail (noun) – a metal or wood bar that stops you going any further or falling. The thing that came away from the balcony.
- branch (noun) – the second biggest parts of a tree. Mark grabbed for one and missed.
- forearm (noun) – the part of your arm between your hand and your elbow.
- dislodge (verb) – make loose, take out of its position. What his legs did to a garden wall.
- contraption (noun) – a strange or complicated piece of machinery. Tom's word for the halo brace.
- reciprocal (adjective) – someone does something for you, so you do something for them in return. Used for the healthcare arrangement that saved Mark a hospital bill.
- snapped (past participle) – broke. Katie's Achilles tendon.
- crutches (noun) – sticks you use to help you walk when you have hurt your legs, they usually go under your arms.
In the workbook
The PDF workbook takes you through the episode step by step. Each of the three conversations has an Essential Vocabulary section first, then a prediction task, then the transcript-backed answers so you can check yourself. After that come extra listening questions on all three stories — why Mark was on the balcony in the first place, why Tom was in Melbourne, how long Katie couldn't walk — with answers at the back.
There's a getting the meaning from context exercise built from real lines in the conversation: a story to end all stories, grab onto, a dodgy area, a chilled evening, a few hundred quid, ended up dead. You match each underlined word to a definition, which is exactly the skill you need when a speaker uses slang you've never met. The full glossary closes the unit, and the complete transcript is there for anything your ear missed.
The workbook for this episode is part of the Zapp! English all-in-one pack, which covers every episode for €39.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Common questions
Is the audio scripted?
The conversations are completely unscripted — three friends talking in a park, talking over each other included. 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 of Zapp! English Listening. The stories are told at natural speed with plenty of hesitation and self-correction.
Is the audio free?
Yes. The English conversations are free to download. The workbook comes with the paid pack.
Do I need the workbook to follow along?
No, but the prediction tasks and vocabulary matching are what turn listening into study, and the transcript is useful for the fast, overlapping parts.
How long is it?
19 minutes and 9 seconds, ending with Mark deciding it's "a good pub story, or a park story."
Get this episode
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