Listen to an interview with Alex, an Austrian professional living and working in the UK, and complete the sentences 1-7 with the best option a, b or c. 0 is an example.
0 Solicitors are lawyers who
a) treat with the client directly.
b) always go to court.
c) are still training.
1 Before Alex went to Oxford
a) he was living in Vienna with his parents.
b) he was studying English in London.
c) his parents had taken him to live in Australia.
2 Alex decided on his course of study because
a) he wanted to study at the best university in England.
b) he hoped it would help him in his future career.
c) he wanted to become a scientist.
3 Lawyers in England
a) can qualify after taking a conversion course.
b) don’t need to study as long as lawyers in Austria.
c) only have to study for two years.
4 Alex
a) has no timetable in his law firm.
b) is expected to work at weekends.
c) just works with international clients.
5 Sometimes Alex works on
a) environmental matters.
b) matters affecting young people.
c) matters that are shown in the news.
6 After his six-month experience in Hong-Kong, Alex
a) is uncertain about his career.
b) may leave the international organization.
c) will not stay in Hong-Kong.
7 Alex
a) doesn’t perceive fairness in his workplace.
b) finds London a difficult city to socialise in.
c) thinks the UK is an expensive country.
My name is Alex. I’m 30 years old. I’m originally from Vienna in Austria and I now live in London where I train to be a solicitor, which is a type of lawyer. There are two different kinds of lawyer in England; barristers and solicitors. Barristers are the lawyers that always go to court, whereas solicitors are the lawyers that deal with clients immediately.
Um, the reason that I am in the UK is a little bit complicated because my parents are diplomats and when I was 16 we moved to Australia and that was where I learned to speak English. And after that I didn’t really want to go back to Vienna immediately and instead I decided I was going to study in England and so I applied to do philosophy at the University of Oxford, which was meant to have one of the best philosophy departments in England, and I was accepted and that’s how I ended up there.
The thing that first attracted me to philosophy was that I thought that philosophy was the kind of thing that would help you learn how to think and that it is something that underlies all the other sciences and all the other fields of human thought. But I was also always interested in other more practical things, especially in politics and international relations and I thought that having done philosophy, doing law and practising as a lawyer for a while would eventually allow me to go and work for an international organisation such as the European Union or the UN and that’s what I would like to do eventually and that’s why I am now in London qualifying as a lawyer.
The legal system in England is different from the legal system in a lot of other countries because it takes much less time to qualify as a lawyer. What you can do, in fact, is a law conversion course, which takes only two years and then you work in a law firm for another two years until you are a qualified lawyer and in this period you are known as a trainee solicitor. In most other countries it takes much longer to be a lawyer. In Austria for example, where I’m from, it can take up to ten years before you’re a qualified lawyer.
The law firm I work for is an international firm which means that most of our clients are spread out all over the world and that in turn means that, although officially I work from 9.30 to 6pm, inofficially I can be called upon to work at any time on any day of the week for, at times, very long periods of time. So normally I come into work at between 9 and 9.30 and I leave, if there’s nothing on, at 6pm or if there is something on I can leave at 7, 8, 9, 10pm or a few times even at 4 or 5 in the morning although that’s admittedly rather rare.
The work can be very interesting and that depends on who you work for and what is happening at the time. And the thing is that you sometimes work on matters that are in the newspapers, in the press, so it can be quite fascinating to be in the middle of this kind of highly pressured environment. But of course it’s the kind of thing that a lot of people only do for a few years when you’re still young and you don’t really have anything better to do with your life and I don’t think I’ll be doing it for the rest of my life.
In February I’m actually going to be sent to Hong Kong for six months to work there because my firm has an office there. After that, I’m not entirely sure, it depends on whether or not my firm will want to keep me on and if they do the likeliest outcome is that I’ll be working in London, or that I will stay in Hong Kong for a little while but alternatively it’s also possible that I will try to find a work, find work with a different firm if there’s a particular area of law I want to work in that I cannot do at my current firm or that I will try and make a move, make a switch to an international organisation which is something I kind of want to do eventually anyway but maybe not straight away.
I’m not sure if I want to come back to London or not. London is a very interesting city but it also has some disadvantages. It’s very expensive and I find it’s sometimes quite difficult to meet your friends there because it’s so big it can take a very long time to get from one part of London to another. As far as working in the UK is concerned, I think, well, what I like is that in England there seems to be a certain perception of fairness and the need to be fair in the workplace which is something you don’t get in all countries and it’s something very nice.
Key:
1c 2b 3b 4b 5c 6a 7b
