Exploring Canadian Cities

Exploring Canadian Cities

Listening comprehension is a key skill in learning English, and practicing it with engaging content makes the process enjoyable and effective. Here is a free listening comprehension activity based on a conversation about vacationing in Canada. This activity includes multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-gaps, drag-the-word, and true/false exercises to help you understand and retain the information from the transcript.


Instructions:

  1. Play the audio clip for the students.
  2. Have students listen carefully to the clip.
  3. After listening, provide the students with the transcripts

Listen to the MP3 audio file and complete the following exercises

Check your answers with the transcript provided

Interviewer: Okay, Mike, you are from Canada.

Mike: That’s right.

Interviewer: So, I actually want to go to Canada for vacation. I’ve never been. What would you recommend for a Canadian vacation?

Mike: Well, it really just depends on the kind of holiday that you want to have. If you want to have a relaxing, outdoors, kind of a back-to-nature kind of holiday, I’d recommend Vancouver. If you wanted to do a holiday that’s maybe a little more culturally oriented, if you want to experience a different type of culture, Montreal would be a city that I’d recommend. And if you wanted to go to a big multicultural city with a lot of nightlife and things to do with respect to entertainment or sports, then I’d recommend Toronto.

Interviewer: Have you been to all three cities?

Mike: Yes. Actually, I’ve lived most of my life in Toronto and in Montreal, but I have spent some time in Vancouver as well. So, all three are very different in attitude and lifestyle and in the way people live.

Interviewer: How so? How is somebody from Toronto different than somebody from Vancouver?

Mike: Well, somebody from Toronto, I think, is a little bit more high-paced. Maybe you could almost say they’re a little bit more stressed out. Just because the pace of life in Toronto is a little bit faster, it’s kind of the big economic center of Canada. So, it tends to have a lot more of a business culture to it, whereas Vancouver is much more like many west coast cities in the United States as well. It’s a lot more relaxed, a lot more easygoing. So, the difference in culture there. And Montreal has a strong French-Canadian influence. In fact, it’s mostly French-Canadian. So, that just changes the dynamic of the city.

Interviewer: Okay. So, if you were to live in any city, which one would you choose?

Mike: Of those three?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Mike: Personally, I would think I would go for Montreal, just because I like the dynamic. The one bad point about Montreal is the weather.

Interviewer: It’s very cold?

Mike: Yes. It gets very, very cold, and it has a very long winter. In fact, the joke is that in Montreal, the seasons are nine months of winter and three months of bad skating.

Interviewer: Okay. Well, thanks, Mike.

Mike: Sure.


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