way2go! 5, Band für Lehrerinnen und Lehrer

79 transcripts Practice Pack (audio) you do or perhaps we don’t really want to spend quite so much money on keeping warm. Practice Pack, Unit 10, exercise 5 ( À 40) Announcer: Listen to three people describing a problem they had with their neighbour. … Good fences make good neighbours. Speaker 1: My husband and I have been living peacefully in our detached house for 20 years. Last year our next- door neighbour Mrs Brady died of old age. We were very sad because she had been such a great neighbour. The house was put up for sale and a few weeks later a young couple moved in. They seemed very nice at first, but after about a week the problems started. The husband was very keen on gardening and he went out and bought 2 big apple trees, which he planted right next to the fence which separates our gardens. The problem was that they blocked the sun from our garden. We asked him politely if he could put them on the other side of his garden and he said ‘no’. So we went to the local council to complain. They sent an official to investigate who told our neighbours that they had no permission to plant the trees. The next day they sent a team and cut the trees down. Our neighbours were furious. The next day when I got up I looked out the bedroom window and saw my neighbour taking the fish from my garden pond. I shouted and ran downstairs. When I got into the garden, he had already jumped back over the fence. I called my husband and when we looked over into their garden guess what we saw? Our neighbours were feeding our goldfish to their cat. Announcer: 24-hour nightclub. Speaker 2: I live in a row of small 3-bedroom terraced houses and you wouldn’t believe the noise that came from our neighbour’s house. It was like living next to a 24-hour nightclub. There was music, shouting, babies crying, dogs barking. It was hell. Me and a couple of other people who live in the road went around there several times to ask them to keep the noise down, but we were just told to go away (but not quite so politely). So eventually we went to the police. I’m not sure exactly what happened but a few weeks later the house was empty. Another neighbour, who saw them moving out, told me there had been ten people and five dogs living in the house and he had seen them carrying out 8 TV sets, 4 electric guitars and 4 amplifiers. Announcer: He drives me crazy. Speaker 3: I live in a semi-detached bungalow and my next-door neighbour is a car fanatic. There are always at least 3 cars on his front garden and drive but they’re never complete. He spends all his free time working on them. I don’t mind this. It’s a bit messy and he makes a bit of noise, but everybody needs a hobby. The problem was when he fitted a new horn into one of his cars. It wasn’t a simple horn, it was one of these horns that plays a really loud tune. In his case the song was “God Save the Queen” – at least he was being patriotic, I suppose. Well this horn was really loud and he played it every time he drove into the road, usually at one o’clock in the morning. One day when he arrived home at about midnight, I went outside to complain. He didn’t take it very well. He reversed his car back on to the road and drove his car straight at me. I jumped out of Practice Pack, Unit 10, exercise 3 ( À 39) Announcer: Listen to an Englishwoman talking about the differences between housing in England and Austria. Woman: I think quite an interesting way of seeing differences in the lifestyles between Austria and England is in looking at the houses. There are very big differences there. For example, in England we, we buy and sell houses almost like cars these days. In Austria, people seem to, to stay in one house for years and years. They have a house built, and they invest all their money and the rest of their lives paying for it. And then they hope that their children will live on in the same house; and I remember meeting a lot of people who were living in the house that their parents or their grandparents had lived in before them. Another difference is that people in England move around quite often from one town to another because of their jobs, which I don’t think happens in Austria. Most people in England live in houses which they own or which they are buying. They don’t have them individually built by an architect; large estates of houses are built, which all look the same. Then you go and buy one, just like you buy a car. So you buy a house that’s finished, you don’t have one built for you. If you wander round any English town and keep your eyes open, you’ll see that there are estate agents’ boards in front of houses in every street. I think where I live, for example, it would be very difficult to find a road or a street where there wasn’t at least one estate agent’s board and usually there are several; everywhere you see: For sale. For sale. I know that Austrians visiting Britain sometimes see this and think that something’s wrong with the houses; it’s not that, it’s simply that, as I say, we, we buy and sell houses like cars. I think the houses in England are much more cheaply built. I don’t think our houses are so solid. And they are not so well insulated, they don’t keep out the cold as efficiently. But then, of course, it is a rather different climate. Because so many people in England own the house they live in, they spend much more time painting and decorating them, doing repairs and so on, so Do-It-Yourself is a big thing in England, also gardening – loads and loads of people love gardening. I think that’s the same thing in Austria, especially in the smaller towns and villages, but far more people, I think, live in flats and don’t have the same feeling towards the place they live in. I think another thing is that houses are much cheaper in England. It’s fairly normal for an average family to be able to buy a house. I got the impression in Austria that it was much more difficult for working-class people to buy a house. It tends to be the professionals, the businessmen, the teachers, and doctors and so on who have enough money to have a house built. I suppose the other major thing is that I find Austrian houses just so much warmer. I mean your winters are much, much colder than ours and yet it always seems warm in the houses, whether you have central-heating or the “Kachelofen” or whatever, whereas in English houses it doesn’t seem to matter what heating system we have, it always seems colder. Whenever you go into an Austrian school in the winter, it’s like being in a greenhouse. I used to find it difficult not to fall asleep ‘cos it was so hot. Perhaps we English don’t feel the cold as much as Nur zu Prüfzweck n – Eigentum des Verlags öbv