Zapp! English Listening 3.32 - Numbers & amounts
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 gives Tom a number — seventy-five — and he works through birthdays, a grandparent's age, pairs of shoes and even ice creams before the penny drops. When it does, we get one of our more honest moments on tape: "I can't believe I'm admitting on...on a recording device that I weigh seventy-five kilograms." Tom's reply: "Nor can I." From there the numbers only get bigger — percentages, military budgets, terminal velocity and a bird that dives faster than a race car.
What you'll hear in this episode
The episode opens with a guessing game. Katie names a number and Tom has to work out why it matters to her: an amount, a size, a position — it could be anything. Then they swap. Tom's number is sixty-four, which Katie immediately answers by singing "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four?" — "Yes...no it's not The Beatles." The real answer is lengths of a swimming pool, which adds up to one mile, and earns him a "You clever clogs!"
The second half is an earlier conversation we recorded: a general knowledge quiz built entirely out of figures. What percentage of people actually stick to their New Year's resolutions? (Twelve per cent in 2007, and the most commonly kept one was "to try and be happier".) By how much did TV ownership in American homes rise between 1947 and 1952? Tom guesses eighty-seven per cent, then five hundred — Katie's answer is "Ten thousand percent!" and his verdict is "That's insane".
Then the military spending round, where Katie upgrades her sourcing from "according to some information that I found on the internet" to "this time, I did actually get my facts from a reputable source on the internet" — the CIA World Fact Book. Oman tops the list; the USA sits twenty-third. Tom's theory about why the figures stop at 2005: "It's probably top secret".
Quick facts
| Episode | 3.32 |
| Title | Numbers & amounts |
| Pack | Listening 3 |
| Level | 3 |
| Duration | 19 minutes 13 seconds |
| Speakers heard | Katie and Tom |
| Focus | Listening for specific information: facts and figures |
| Workbook | Included in the €39 all-in-one pack |
What you'll learn
The skill here is picking one piece of information out of fast speech — and numbers are unusually slippery, because they arrive in so many shapes. In under twenty minutes you'll hear percentages ("twelve percent", "three point four percent"), decimals read out digit by digit ("eleven point four zero percent"), ordinals used for rankings (twenty-third, thirty-third, fifty-third, a hundred and sixteenth), and one genuinely long figure spoken in full: "one million, nine hundred and sixty-four thousand, three hundred and seventy-five square kilometres".
You'll also pick up the hedging language that surrounds numbers when people aren't sure. Tom rarely commits: "probably", "something like", "I would say", "maybe at one or two". Katie grades his guesses instead of just marking them wrong — "You're not far off actually, you're quite close" — and admits at one point "I can't read my own writing now". That's what real quizzing sounds like.
There's a useful clarification running through the whole quiz, too: Tom keeps asking whether Katie means a percentage or a total, and by the end that distinction changes the answer completely. Following that kind of correction while the conversation moves on is exactly the listening skill Level 3 is testing.
Vocabulary from the workbook
- spree (noun) — a short and intense time doing something you like, especially shopping. Tom explains the television figures with "a giant buying spree".
- birds of prey (noun) — birds that hunt, kill and eat small birds and animals.
- dive (verb) — to go quickly and head-first through the air; the peregrine falcon does it at up to 173 miles an hour.
- friction (noun) — the energy that makes it difficult for something to move through air, which comes up in Tom's explanation of terminal velocity.
- propel (verb) — make something move forward.
- GDP – Gross Domestic Product (noun) — the value of things that a country produces in one year.
- reputable (adjective) — well known as being good quality / honest.
- weapons (noun) — guns, tanks, bombs, sticks — things you use to fight. Tom on the UK's falling percentage: "So the money's going on the people instead of weapons."
What's in the workbook
The workbook takes the episode in four listening tasks, each with its answers, so you can check whether you beat Tom to the number and how many quiz questions he actually got right (he was close on all of them, but only one was exactly right). Task 4 gives you two questions to think about before you listen — which country spends the greatest percentage of its money on the military, and whether Spain or the UK spends more.
After that there are Extra Materials: further listening questions with answers ("How many guesses does Tom make about the television question?", "Which animals are mentioned in the conversation?"), a meaning-from-context exercise on expressions such as I'll give you a clue, clever clogs, stick to them, giving up and up to date, and the glossary above. There's also a full transcript, so if you get something wrong you can go back and see exactly why.
The workbook for this episode is part of the Zapp! English all-in-one pack — every episode, every workbook, €39, one payment.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Common questions
Is the audio scripted?
The conversations are unscripted — the guessing game and the quiz happen as they happen. 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 this episode?
No. The English conversations are free to download and work on their own. The workbook adds the tasks, answers, extra questions and transcript.
Is Level 3 right for me?
This is a Level 3 unit and it moves quickly, with figures, decimals and rankings arriving in the middle of jokes. If you can follow the general thread of a chat between two native speakers, you'll manage.
What if I can't catch the numbers?
Replay the answer sections and read along with the transcript. Numbers are worth drilling separately from the rest of your listening.
How long is it?
19 minutes 13 seconds, split into four tasks you can do one at a time.
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