Category Archives: Listening

Classroom English is one thing, the way people really speak is quite another. Here’s a selection of real-life talks from native English speakers.

How not to give a presentation

This is from a book called Career Express. A guy presents a laptop in the style of a Shakespearean drama.

Please don’t do that for your exams, or you’ll make me crack up and fall from my chair.

So what’s the problem with this speaker? He’s got the right expression, but he’s absolutely overdoing it. This is especially bad if you speak like Hamlet but make funny mistakes or use inappropriate vocabulary.

To sum up, you should use some expression, but don’t do anything that feels unnatural.

Dialogue practice

One of your exam tasks will be to listen to a dialogue and answer a couple of written questions related to what you hear. Your answers can be very short, we will be asking for hard facts only.

Here are three sample dialogues for you to practice, plus the questions.

A) A trip to New York

B) Buying a car

C) The gas bill

You may use the answer key to verify your solutions.