Identifying communicative aims

Optional activity

Ask students if they can add one or more words to 

each of the groups. Possible words include 

tennis, 

basketball, football; steel, nylon, stone; dish, plate, chair. 

3 

•   The aim of the activity is for students to contextualise 

a short listening extract by working out what kind of 

passage it is extracted from. 

•  Explain to students that they should listen for the main 

gist of each passage and that it does not matter if they 

do not understand every word.

•  Play the recording. Students match each extract 1–3 

with the summaries A–C.

  Units 5–6

PREVIEW

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UNITS 5–6 PREVIEW

2.15

  Recording

1

Kite surfing started in France in the 1980s and has 

recently become very popular worldwide. You use a small 

surfboard and a large kite on 30-metre lines. The kite pulls 

you through the water and you can steer with the lines. 

You can just speed through the water, or you can do jumps 

as high as a house. ‘I’ve never had so much fun,’ says a 

kite-surfer. ‘It’s much more exciting than water-skiing 

behind a boat.’

2

‘My best friend in the world is still NJ, or Nugent Walker 

Junior. We’ve been friends ever since we met on the first 

day of primary school and I can’t remember ever falling 

out with him. We hit it off straight away and now he’s my 

personal assistant, someone I can turn to at any time of 

day or night, who is always, always there for me.’

3

Californian Krysta Morlan was 16 when she invented a 

special waterbike. She thought of the idea when she was 

doing exercises in the swimming pool. She had spent a lot 

of time in hospital and needed to do exercises to recover 

her strength. ‘I loved cycling, but I hadn’t ridden a bicycle 

for a long time,’ she explained. ‘The idea of the waterbike 

was to have fun and still get the advantage of a workout in 

the pool.’

Answers

1 C  2 A  3 B