Listening Exercises - Advanced Level

A nurse practitioner describes eleven years of working in remote fly-in communities in northern Canada, from improvised medicine to the cost of isolation.

Healthcare in remote settings; discussing systemic issues with sensitivity

An economist and a climate scientist debate whether Canada's fossil fuel industry remains essential or whether the case for continued investment is weakening.

Formal debate language; presenting and rebutting arguments

A privacy researcher explains how personal data is collected, modelled, and exploited, and why current regulations are failing to keep up.

Technology and privacy vocabulary; explaining complex systems

A journalist visits a small Ohio town seventeen years after its factory closed, talking to residents about what survival looks like when the economy doesn't come back.

Documentary register; economic decline and community resilience

Two debaters argue over whether the British monarchy should be replaced by an elected head of state.

Formal debate and persuasion; constitutional and political vocabulary

A retiring professor tells the stories of three immigrant families whose experiences over forty years reveal what integration actually looks like from the inside.

Academic narrative; immigration and identity vocabulary

A defence attorney describes the moral weight of winning an acquittal for a client he believed was guilty.

Legal vocabulary; ethical reasoning and moral argument

A retired diplomat recalls a fourteen-month trade negotiation in Southeast Asia that taught her everything she knew about patience was wrong.

Diplomatic and cross-cultural vocabulary; narrative reflection

A gallery curator makes the case for a minor Dutch landscape painting and asks what decides whether a work of art survives or disappears.

Art criticism vocabulary; discussing value and obscurity

A retired BBC producer reflects on fifteen years making the Shipping Forecast and why millions of people listen to weather they will never need.

Broadcasting vocabulary; describing ritual and routine

A retired harbourmaster discovers that his forty-one years of ship logs include vessels that officially never existed, some of which match ships that sank decades earlier.

Nautical vocabulary; unreliable narration and ambiguity

A used bookshop owner in Ontario finds handwritten notes in the margins of old books that describe events in her life before they happen.

Literary and bookshop vocabulary; describing unexplained events

An antique map dealer in Vermont discovers a detailed 1893 survey of a town that has no trace in any historical record, until strangers begin contacting him to say they grew up there.

Cartography and historical vocabulary; building an unsolved mystery

An overnight radio engineer discovers a voice hidden in the dead air between programmes, reading news stories that haven't happened yet.

Technical broadcasting vocabulary; describing anomalous events

A retired mail carrier begins receiving letters postmarked from dates that haven't arrived, written in handwriting she recognises as her dead husband's.

Postal and domestic vocabulary; grief and the uncanny