Listening test: Ideal homes

Listen to Jackie and Steve talk about the best homes they have lived in and choose the option A, B or C which best completes each sentence. 0 is an example.

listen to ‘Ideal homes’ on audioBoom

0 Steve ……………. in many different places around the world.
A. has lived
B. hasn’t lived
C. would like to live

1 Steve’s flat in Cairo
A. had great views.
B. was very big.
C. was very long.

2 On his balcony Steve had
A. a table, two chairs and a bar but no plants.
B. two tables, chairs, a bar and lots of plants.
C. two tables, two chairs, lots of plants and lights.

3 At night Steve
A. played Arabic music and danced with his friends.
B. sat on his balcony with friends.
C. took a boat and cruised up the river.

4 Jackie was surprised by her home in Malawi because
A. it was bigger than expected.
B. it was very basic.
C. it was very small.

5 Jackie
A. lived alone.
B. shared the house with someone else.
C. didn’t like the house she lived in.

6 When talking about the garden Jackie says
A. it made the house special.
B. it was impossible to grow anything there.
C. she looked after it.

7 When Steve lived in Ghana
A. he didn’t do the washing.
B. the wind used to blow away all the washing.
C. there were monkeys in the garden.

8 In Greece Steve
A. decided to buy a traditional house.
B. lived on the islands.
C. stayed for three years.


Hello Steve.
Hello
Now, I know that you have lived in many different places around the world…
Yes, that’s right.
Could you tell me which is the nicest place you have lived in.
That’s very difficult to answer because I’ve been lucky enough to live in several really interesting countries and in really nice houses in those countries. But I think I would have to say my flat in Cairo, in Egypt, was the one that stands out.
Why is that?
Why is that? Because it was right on the river Nile and had an enormous balcony looking right over the river.
How big was the balcony?
Absolutely huge! It was probably about… ooh… I don’t know, maybe… twenty metres long?
Wow!
Wide enough to have two… two sets of… furniture, two tables and chairs around and it had a bar at one end that was built for me and lots of plants, and at night the boats would cruise up and down on the river, playing Arabic music with all the Egyptians on the upper deck dancing and having a really good time and it was really nice just to invite friends around and to sit on the balcony and have a drink and look out at this really nice scene. So that was, that was fun.
That sounds lovely!
Jackie, you’ve lived in lots of places abroad as well, where’s the nicest place you’ve ever lived?
I think the nicest place I’ve lived in was when I was a volunteer in Africa. I lived in Malawi for three years and I was very surprised when they said that I was living in a three bedroomed-bungalow in a very small town. I had expected something quite basic, I suppose, and I got this lovely bungalow which I shared with another volunteer and the nicest thing about the house was the garden. It was a huge garden and although we had a gardener who tried to grow things, it really looked after itself and it was full of wonderful exotic trees like pawpaws and hibiscus and bougainvillea and lots of trees that I didn’t know the names of. And lots of strange animals, including monkeys as well and baboons we had living in the garden so that made the place very special for me. So that was the nicest place I lived in.
That sounds really nice, I’m really envious actually. I stayed in Ghana in West Africa for three months and also had a really beautiful garden but no monkeys. The maid used to do the washing and hang my clothes to dry on the bushes so sometimes I would come home and the whole garden would be covered in shirts and trousers all over all the bushes. That was very nice.
Could you describe what would be your ideal home.
I went to live in Greece for three years and I used to travel to the islands quite a lot, it was very cheap in those days, and I think ever since then I’ve had this sort of dream of having a little white-washed traditional stone house on an island in the Aegean very plain with a terrace outside flooded with sunshine, wooden floors, very little furniture and that’s really it. Just this very nice little house flooded with the light of the Aegean. Maybe one day I will still do something about that, I don’t know.
That sounds lovely, thank you very much Steve.

Key:
1A 2B 3C 4A 5B 6A 7A 8C

Talking point: Repairs and renovations at home

Today's talking point is repairs and renovations at home. Before getting together with the members of your conversation group, go over the questions below, so that ideas flow more easily when you meet up with your friends and you can work out vocabulary problems beforehand?

• Are you good at DIY (do it yourself)? Do you know anyone who is? Do you know anyone who's completely useless?
• Have you ever... assembled flat-pack furniture / painted you house or flat / changed a wheel on a car / fixed something in your home (vg., a leaking tap, a bulb) / set up a home cinema system or your PC?
• Choose one of the odd jobs above and describe how you went about it: When/where did you do it?; why did you do it and not anybody else at home?; did anyone help?; how long did it take?; what problems did you have?; did you do a good job?
• Who do you turn to if some job needs doing at home and nobody in your household knows or wants to do it? Would you be ready to pay a handyman to do it?
• What tools do you have at home to do odd jobs around the house?
• What DIY stores are there in your area? Do you often go there?
• Have you ever been to Ikea? Do you find it easy to navigate around the store? Do you find the strange names given to products (Snille chair) helpful? Do you like the food? If you have ever bought self-assembly (or flat-pack) furniture at Ikea, did you find it easy to put it together?
• Would you be ready to learn how to fix appliances so as not to pay someone else to do so or have to throw them away?

To illustrate the point, listen to the 6 Minute English lesson Restart Party Project, where people learn the forgotten art of fixing objects so as not to  throw them away.

You can also watch this BBC video along the same lines.



You can also watch the video Ingvar Kamprad Success Story about the person who started Ikea.

Extensive listening: I belong to Glasgow (Alex Norton)

I Belong To Glasgow is a BBC series where four famous Glaswegians (Karen Dunbar, Alex Norton, Sanjeev Kohli and Elaine C Smith) talk about their city.

In this episode, Alex Norton "looks for the Glasgow he knew as a child in the 1950s. The tenements and closes he played in have been knocked down but their spirit lives on. Alex drops into the Citizen's Community Theatre, meets the woman who first put him on the stage, travels by tram, wears Lex Mclean's bunnet, wins a shoot out at the Grand Ole Opry and belts out one of the best Glasgow songs ever."

You can read the transcript for the first ten minutes of the documentary here.

Talking point: A special place

My area, my home and my favourite room is the topic of this week's talking point. Before you get together with the members of your conversation group, go over the questions below and think of the answers, so that ideas flow more easily when you meet up with your friends and you can work out vocabulary issues beforehand.

Most of the questions below are taken from the Anecdote section of Inside Out, MacMillan Heinemann.

Where do you live?
What are the pros and cons of the area where you live?
What is there to do in your free time in your neighbourhood?
Describe your flat or house.
What would make your home a better place?
Where would you like to live in the future?

Which is your favourite room?
What do you use it for?
How is it decorated?
What sort of furniture does it contain?
Where do the windows look out on?
What's the best thing about the room?
Is it usually tidy?
Who cleans it?
What would you change about your favourite room to make it a better place?
How much time a day do you spend in it?
How does your favourite room reflect your personality?

To illustrate the topic you can go to the MacMillan site and watch the video A special place, where two girls, Heather and Sue, talk abut their favourite room in their house.

You can watch the video online or download it. You also have the option to download the accompanying worksheet and the teacher's notes with the transcript.

Hong Kong series: My home

Dickie, Kathryn and Kate, teachers at the British Council in Hong Kong, talk about the place they live in. Listen to what they say and note down their answers to the questions below. As usual, you'll get plenty of help with comprehension with the video, as some of their answers are highlighted on the screen.

After you have watched the video three or four times, you can answer the same questions about your home.

Where do you live?
What is it like?
What do you like or dislike about your flat?

Hong Kong series -My home town

Four teachers from The British Council in Hong Kong -Kevin from Southbourne, Maria from Shrewsbury, Nishani from Durban and Tom from Ashwell- tell us about their home town. These are the questions they answer:

Where are you from?
What’s your home town like?
Why did you leave?

A very unusual English home

This is another episode in the Richmond vodcast series for their intermediate textbook The Big Picture. Alex and Tom go on a new mission. They visit a very unusual English home. The place looks more like a museum than a house. They have to decide which four objects in the house are typically English.

The video clip may come in handy to revise the use of modal verbs might / could to express probability.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video clip from the beginning up to 5:40 and make a note of the four objects Alex and Tom select as typically English.

You can check the answers while Tom and Alex get on at it themselves with the owner of the house.



Key:
1 plates 2 pictures 3 figures or figurines 4 chest of drawers

Homelessness

The topic of homelessness is touched on in unit 5 of module 8 in the That's English! programme, so the video on this post fits in perfectly with that unit.

I first saw this Homeless video on Rob Whyte's excellent ESLWriting. As a matter of fact, you can find a listening activity there.

However, I think that the level of difficulty is a bit high for intermediate students to understand it fully, which made me think that I should provide the transcript if I wanted students to make something out of it.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and complete the blanks in the transcript with the missing words.



I served in the (1)...  . I’d been working (2) ... years. Right up to my retirement I hurt my (3) ...  . Yeah, I lost my job and next thing I knew I was in the street, you know? (4) ... .

I’m sorry, man.

Hurts to live in this country, shouldn’t have to live like that.

It could happen to anybody. When you are in a situation like this you don’t think nobody (5) ... . It’s great to have somebody care about you. People that (6) ... me was good enough. They helped me a whole lot.

I was off the street and now I have a nice (7) ... place of my own. There’s a whole lot of people out there need help. A lot of them don’t even  know where to go. I am a lucky one. I am lucky.

Key:
1 military 2 thirty-five 3 leg 4 Homeless 5 care 6 helped 7 clean

Home (song)

What is home for you?
What city, town or village would you call home?
Why is it special?
What are your feelings about the place whenever you are away for a long time?

Listen to this song about Singapore, but it could be about anywhere.

Find more videos like this on EFL CLASSROOM 2.0