Incidents & Accidents: English Vocabulary Level 3.3

A wrist that looked like a humpback bridge. A pair of flip flops on a wet, smooth pavement. Three breakdowns on the same stretch of motorway, on the way to three different gigs. This unit teaches fifteen words for things going wrong, and the answers we recorded are full of the sort of detail people actually give when you ask them about their worst injury — including the frozen peas.

What you'll hear in this episode

Katie asks the questions twice: first on their own, so you can spot the words you already know, then again with the answers, so you hear them used in real speech.

In the first conversation, Stuart talks about falling, breaking bones and cutting himself. He tripped on a raised paving slab and "landed flat on my face", and he describes breaking an arm at eleven "in a freak skateboarding…no not skateboarding, rollerskating accident" — a story he says changed the course of his life. Football gave him "all my sprainages" and a lot of time with "bags of frozen peas on my ankles". Asked what he'd do if he saw someone bleeding badly, he says that if a doctor were already there he'd simply say "Well done doctor, crack on".

In the second conversation, Alec covers collapsing, smashing, losing things, misunderstandings, breakdowns, crashes and skidding. Drumming, he says, means "it means you can legitimately smash things". Flat-hunting in Spanish has produced repeated confusion over bills: you ask Are the bills included?, you hear "bum bum bum bum bum bum bills", and it turns out to be the opposite of what you thought. Two of his three motorway breakdowns were "technical difficulties that were beyond my understanding", mostly "because I don't drive". And skidding didn't stop with bikes — "the school disco is when we used to skid on our knees".

Quick facts

Episode	3.3
Pack	Vocabulary and Pronunciation 3
Level	3
Length	21 minutes 38 seconds
New words	Fifteen
Workbook	Included in the all-in-one pack (€39)

What you'll learn

The teaching sections do two jobs at once: meaning and pronunciation. You finish sentences that stop halfway — "I hit my head when I f…" — so you have to produce the word before you hear it, then repeat after the beep.

Most of the pronunciation work is about linking, which is exactly what makes these phrases hard to hear at speed. In fell over, the l joins the o: /ləʊvə/. In trip up, the /p/ runs into the /ʌ/. In sprain your ankle, your attaches to ankle and becomes /jərænkəl/. And in "I slipped and fell", the past-simple ending is a /t/ that joins the next word: /slIptən/.

Stress gets the same attention. Collapse has a weak first syllable, /kə/ not /kɒ/. Injury is three syllables with the stress at the front. Misunderstanding is five syllables with the stress on the fourth. There's also a long/short vowel contrast to hold on to: bleed has the long /iː/, slip the short /I/.

Then you hear all of it in unscripted answers, complete with hesitation, self-correction and asides — the version of English that a coursebook recording never gives you.

Vocabulary from the workbook

to trip up /trIpʌp/ (phrasal verb) – to go from standing to being on the ground; heard in Katie's question "Did you trip over something or what?"
to sprain your ankle /spreInjəræŋkəl/ (verb phrase) – to hurt / twist your ankle but not break it; used repeatedly in the football answer
to slip /slIp/ (verb) – to fall by sliding; used in the flip flops story, where "my legs shot out from underneath me"
an injury /Indʒəri/ (noun) – damage done to a part of your body
to collapse /kəlæps/ (verb) – to suddenly fall down because you are very ill or unconscious; Katie opens the second conversation with it
a misunderstanding /mIsʌndəstændIŋ/ (noun) – to understand something incorrectly, to confuse something; the flat-hunting story
to break down /breIkdaʊn/ (phrasal verb) – to stop working, especially machinery
to skid /skId/ (verb) – to slide

In the workbook

The workbook for this unit gives you the full glossary with phonemic transcriptions, the complete list of questions from both halves, and the transcripts of both conversations, so you can go back and check anything you missed the first time.

After that there are three practice sections. Practice 1 gives you five situations and asks you to say what happened: "A plate is in pieces on the ground", "I said meet at 6pm, but my boyfriend thought I said 7pm". Some have more than one possible answer. Practice 2 is a gap-fill using words from the unit, including the roof that "totally _" when "it was a miracle nobody was _". Practice 3 is pronunciation: match four words with four others that share the same sound, so break down pairs with sprain on /eI/, and crash with collapse on /æ/. Full answers are included.

The workbook comes with the all-in-one pack, which covers every episode across all levels for €39.

Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39

Questions

Is the audio free?

Yes. Every Zapp! English conversation is free to download. The workbook is the paid part.

Are the conversations scripted?

The conversations are completely unscripted — the answers you hear are people thinking aloud. 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. You should be comfortable following a native speaker at natural speed, with hesitations and self-corrections left in.

Do I need the workbook?

You can listen without it. The workbook is what turns listening into production: the glossary, the transcripts, the gap-fills and the sound-matching exercise.

What will I be able to do afterwards?

Describe accidents and mishaps in clear detail — falls, sprains, breakages, breakdowns, crashes and misunderstandings — and hear the linked forms when someone describes them to you.

Get this episode

To save the audio, right-click the MP3 link and choose Save link as.

Listen on