Zapp! English Listening 3.11 - Discussing life changes
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).
Ask someone what has changed in the last five years and you rarely get a neat answer. We put that question to six people, and one of them boils half a decade down to a dog: “I used to have a very nice, clean house, now I have a very dirty, hairy house.” Others talk about promotions, commuting, weddings, visas and debt. It's the kind of question that makes people think out loud, and that hesitation is exactly what you need to practise on.
What you'll hear in this episode
The episode is built from three listening tasks. In the first, Katie asks Jon and Niall what has changed in their lives in the last five years. Both answers are short, and both come back to work: one speaker has changed jobs several times and earns more, the other has moved up in the company but now spends “an hour there and an hour back every single day” getting to headquarters.
In the second task, Tom and Mark answer the same question. One describes “I’ve been wandering around aimlessly for quite a few years, living in various countries” and a new wish to plan further ahead. The other contrasts life now with “every weekend down the pub watching football, spending lots of money on beers”, and admits to having “finally grown up a bit”.
The third task is one much longer conversation between Eve and Ben, two American college graduates. They cover the jump from structured student life to “a different life”, friends scattering across the US and abroad, weddings that turn into reunions and a “walk down memory lane”, loose-ended degrees, a parents' generation that stayed in one job for thirty years, one-year work contracts and visas, how long it takes “to just fit in” somewhere new, and the economic crisis, because “everybody’s in some sort of debt these days”.
Quick facts
| Episode | 3.11 – Discussing life changes |
| Pack | Listening 3 |
| Level | Level 3 |
| Duration | 16 minutes 45 seconds |
| Workbook | Included in the all-in-one pack (€39) |
What you'll learn
The main skill here is comparing two answers to the same question. After each pair, you're asked to find the one topic both speakers share, which trains you to hold a whole answer in your head instead of chasing individual words. The workbook is honest about why this is hard: after the long conversation it notes that “the topic was the same, but a lot of the details were different”.
You'll also get a lot of practice with the language people use when they aren't sure. Listen for how the second pair of answers is padded with “I think”, “I suppose” and “I guess”, and how the American conversation hedges almost every claim: “I’d like to think I’m more mature”, “It’s less common, to go on that track”, and a description of moving abroad as “a grey area”. Learners often expect opinions in English to be stated flatly. In real speech they arrive wrapped in softeners.
The third task adds a second challenge: back-channelling. Eve and Ben overlap constantly with “Mmm hmm”, finishing each other's sentences and restarting mid-thought. Following two speakers who agree this actively is a genuinely different skill from following a single monologue, and it's the closest thing on the recording to how conversations actually sound outside a classroom.
Vocabulary from the workbook
The glossary picks up words as they occur in the conversations:
- aimlessly (adverb) – do something with no aim or goal, from the answer about years spent moving between countries
- wandering (present participle) – walking around slowly in no particular direction, used figuratively in the same answer
- grown up (adjective) – adult, in the contrast between pub weekends and quiet weekends at home
- fit in (phrasal verb) – to become an accepted part of a group, to not be different to, in the discussion of how long integration really takes
- wisdom (noun) – intelligence that comes from experience, in the exchange about whether either speaker has changed as a person
- assumed (past simple) – thought something was true without checking, in the story about expecting to return to graduate school
In the workbook
The PDF workbook follows the audio task by task. Each of the three listening tasks has a clear instruction, the full transcript of what was said, and an answers section that explains the reasoning rather than just giving a letter.
The Extra Materials add eight comprehension questions with answers: whether the dog or the job change mattered more, how many hours a day the commute takes, whether one speaker used to make plans, whether the other goes to the pub more or less than before, what jobs the two graduates had, and which country one of them lived in for a year.
There's also a vocabulary-from-context exercise: six sentences lifted straight from the conversations, each with three possible meanings for the phrase in bold — “learned to deal with it”, “walk down memory lane”, “people spread out a lot”, “at my core”, “more mature” and “in some sort of debt”. Answers are at the back, and the transcript is there so you can check why you got something wrong. This workbook is part of the Zapp! English all-in-one pack.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Common questions
Is the audio scripted?
The conversations are unscripted — nobody saw the question in advance, which is why you hear so much hesitation. The teaching sections that set up each task and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.
What level is this episode, and how long is it?
It's Level 3, from the Listening 3 pack, and it runs 16 minutes 45 seconds.
Which accents will I hear?
Speakers of different age groups from around the UK, plus two speakers from the US in the long final conversation. The pace and the accents change noticeably between tasks.
Can I use the audio without the workbook?
Yes — the audio is free and the answers are given aloud. The workbook adds the transcript, the extra questions and the vocabulary work.
What if I can't follow the last conversation?
That's expected on a first listen. Play it once for the shared topics only, then read along with the transcript and play it again.
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