Listening Level : MID / HIGH – Crazy Stories – The Man in the Bucket Hat

This is a 3 part listening activity with 3 audios and comprehension activities for each one. The accent it British, Kat has lived in the South, Midlands and North of England and has spent the last 15 years living in Barcelona , Spain!

Don´t forget to use the comment section if you have any questions!

Instructions:

1) Complete the pre-listening activities

2) Listen to the audio and answer the questions

3) Listen again and check your answers

4) Check your answers (answers are below transcript)

5) Listen one more time while reading the transcript.

Pre-listening activity:

1)Match the vocabulary to the meanings

2)Check answers ( below transcript)

3)Listen to PART 1 of Kat´s story

4) Listen again while reading the transcript to check what you understood.

VOCABULARY

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello again everybody, this is Kat once again, from APC Languages with a second instalment of Crazy Stories.

Now this story is a little bit of a scary story but it´s a true story so here we go!

When, so, I´m obviously, well, I say obviously, I´m English, I grew up in England and when I went to university I moved to the city of Nottingham, which in the Midlands, in the centre of the country.

I was in my second year, I moved in my second year to a student house. Now this house was a huge, old mansion which in its day would have been the most beautiful, beautiful house but, had been taken over by students. It was 16 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms but I mean it was very very very scruffy and I think actually carpet was actually just old beer. It was that… you couldn’t take your shoes off in the house, your feet would be black in seconds.

But it was really fun living there with 16 people. So, I´d been living there, I don´t know, maybe three or four months and I was working in the evenings. So, I was studying in the day and in the evenings, I was working in a disco, in a nightclub. And I was working in the bar, in the VIP section of this very prestigious nightclub in the city. And so… but in England, back in this time, you know… clubs opened at ten o´clock and closed at two o´clock.

So, I was walking to work on evening, in the dark. I´d say it was maybe a 15 minute walk through the city from my house and I was walking down this dark road and as I was walking along one side of the street, on the other side of the street, I saw this guy in a bucket hat. If you don´t know what a bucket hat is, if you think back to the 90s and the band Oasis, they were famous for wearing this type of hat. And he just stopped and stared at me. I guess at the time I didn´t really take much notice, I just kept going to work.

Well, I went to work, nothing happened the next day, fine. About a week later, I was in the city centre, really far from my house, the other side of the city. And I was coming out of a newsagents, and as I walked out of the newsagents ( it was the middle of the day ) this guy in bucket hat, stopped me and said to me ´I tagged your house, innit!´. Now this is a really, really English expression. First of all, I didn´t understand what he was saying to me. ´I tagged your house´ ´I tagged your house ´ I couldn´t really understand what he was saying to me. So, I just started at him and very awkwardly, walked away. And walked back to my house.

ANSWERS:  1-b, 2-d,  3-e,  4-a,  5-c

Pre-listening activity.

• Read the statements below and try to decide if they are TRUE OR FALSE.
• Listen to the audio and check if you were correct.
• Listen again while reading the transcript to check understanding.

ANSWERS ARE BELOW THE TRANSCRIPT

TRUE OR FALSE?

1. Kat´s 16 housemates were never all together at the same time.
2. Kat spoke to her housemates about the man in the bucket hat.
3. Her housemates didn´t know what a TAG was either
4. The man in the bucket hat didn´t know where Kat lived.
5. Kat´s bedroom was at the back of the house
6. Kat went home to the safety of her parents´ house.

TRANSCRIPT

The next few days I , in all different areas of the city, I kept seeing this guy, in the bucket hat. And I suddenly started feeling really weird about it. So that day I went home to my student house and I was talking to some of my housemates and ….. . We used to get together all the housemates, once a month, you know, a group of us, all 16 of us and just catch up. And it was this day, so I said to them … Guys ..you know.. well , I told them what had happened that the strangest things had been happening to me , I keep seeing this guy I a bucket hat around the city and funnily enough, last week he spoke to me and told me ´I tagged your house, innit!` and I don´t know what it means.

And my housemate said to me  ¨a tag is somebody´s graffiti signature. He is saying that he has graffitied the house¨ and thought, well, that´s impossible. First of all, I´d never seen him near where I lived. But, we all went outside the house and looked at the house and literally, under my window was a graffiti ´STALKER Y2000´so, as you know, this was in the year 2000. Oh, STALKER Y2K that´s what it put.

For those of you who don´t know what a Stalker is, a Stalker is a person who , well, to stalk means to follow a person and so a Stalker is somebody who follows people around. It´s very common with celebrities to have a stalker. Somebody who gets obsessed with them and follows them around everywhere.

So, as you can imagine I was, well, I was in absolute shock, and I was only 19 years old so it was a really scary moment for me. Also my bedroom, I haven´t mentioned, was on the second floor so the only way he could have graffitied or tagged under my window was with a ladder.

AS you can imagine I was petrified, I called my mum from the payphone in the house and she told me to come home on the next train. So I grabbed my things, I went to the train station in the city and I went all the way back to the town where my parents live and spent a few there trying to think what to do.

ASNWERS: a) FALSE   b) TRUE   c) FALSE   d) FALSE  e) FALSE   f) TRUE

Pre-listening activity:

• Read the questions
• Listen to the audio
• Answer the questions
• Listen again and check your answers ( answers are below transcript)
• Listen while you read the transcript

QUESTIONS:

1. How long did Kat stay at her parents´ house?
2. What did Kat know about the stalker?
3. What numbers did the police put on their emergency list?
4. What happened to the guy in the blue hat?

TRANSCRIPT:

After having thought about it with my parents for a few days , we decided that we had to speak to the police. The problem was we didn’t know anything about the guy, except for the only thing I could say that … well, he looked or Indian or Pakistani, I don´t know where her was from but that he wore a bucket hat, a blue bucket hat.

So we went back to Nottingham city and went to the police station and we told the police what had happened and of course they told us… well, they took it very seriously but, you know, they told us that without any kind of identification, a photo or something that there´s very little they could do.

So what they did do was put my mobile phone number, and the house number on the emergency list so that if they ever received a phone call from either my landline or my mobile phone that they would take that very seriously and they would come , they would consider it an emergency.

So, well, that was it, can you believe it? It finished then! I never saw the guy again, nothing every happened, I continued my life as normal and this just became another one of those stories that I have in my repertoire that you ´ll all hear about in the next , in the next few episodes of Crazy Stories. I hope you enjoyed this one!

ANSWERS:

1. A few days
2. Very little ! Only he looked Indian or Pakistani and wore a blue hat
3. Landline and mobile phone
4. He disappeared

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