Listening practice
Every lesson gives you the audio, the full script, and questions that mark themselves. Listen twice before you open the script.
Sixteen B2 listening lessons
Each one has the audio, a hide‑and‑show script, and questions that mark themselves. Try the questions before you read the script — you will find out what you actually heard.
Paired with a reading lesson
11 lessonsThese sit underneath their reading article, so you can read first and then listen, or go straight to the audio. Each link takes you to the listening section.
The Hidden Benefits of Small Talk
Why the conversations that feel pointless are doing more work than you think. Listen →Loving Places to Death
What happens to a beautiful place when everybody decides to visit it at once. Listen →Who Is Winning the Screen Time War?
Streaming services, attention, and who is really choosing what you watch. Listen →The Habits That Actually Help
Sorting the health advice that holds up from the advice that just sounds good. Listen →The Comeback: Nature’s Quiet Success Stories
The species that came back from the edge, and what actually made the difference. Listen →The Tech That Will Shape Tomorrow
The developments worth paying attention to, and the ones that are mostly noise. Listen →The Four‑Day Week
The argument for working less, and what the companies that tried it found out. Listen →The World in Numbers
Global problems described in figures, and how to listen to a statistic carefully. Listen →How to Learn Anything
Why rereading fails, and the two study methods the research keeps pointing to. Listen →A New Beginning
Tom turns a worrying health check into a different way of living. Listen →The House My Grandmother Kept
One person describes their own family changing shape across two generations. Listen →Standalone listening lessons
5 lessonsThese are listening lessons in their own right, with no reading article attached. Good for a single focused session.
Balancing Study and Life
Fitting study around everything else, and what people give up to do it. Listen →Managing Stress at Work
Pressure on the job, and the things that genuinely take the edge off it. Listen →Cultural Misunderstandings
Small differences in habit and manner that turn into large confusions. Listen →Staying Safe Online
Practical care with passwords, messages, and what you share about yourself. Listen →Environmental Problems in Our Area
Local environmental trouble, described by the people who live beside it. Listen →Three passes, and the script comes last
Listen straight through
No pausing, no script, no notes. You are only after the general idea: who is speaking, and what they want you to understand.
Listen again, then answer
Now listen for detail and work through the questions. Getting one wrong is useful information — it shows you exactly which part slipped past you.
Open the script last
Read it while the audio plays again. Every gap between what you heard and what was said is a specific thing to work on.
Why B2 listening feels harder than B2 reading
Most learners reach a point where they can read an article comfortably and still lose the thread of a conversation about the same topic. That is normal, and it is not a vocabulary problem. Speech does not wait for you, it runs words together, and it carries meaning in stress and intonation that the page simply does not have. The fix is not more vocabulary. It is more hours of listening, with the script kept shut until you have committed to an answer.
These lessons are built for exactly that. Every one gives you a recording, questions that mark themselves so you get an honest result rather than a comfortable one, and the full script to check yourself against afterward. Nothing needs a login and everything works on a phone, so a spare ten minutes is enough for one pass.
Which one should you start with?
If you have already read the article, take the listening that sits underneath it — the topic and much of the vocabulary will already be familiar, which lets you concentrate on the sound rather than the subject. If you want a single self‑contained session, start with one of the standalone lessons instead.
- New to listening practice at this level: begin with The Hidden Benefits of Small Talk, which is short and conversational.
- Preparing for study or exams: How to Learn Anything doubles as advice you can use.
- Want a story rather than a talk: A New Beginning follows one person over time.
Preparing for a Cambridge exam?
Exam listening is a different task with its own formats and its own scoring, so it lives separately rather than in the grid above. The practice papers cover all four parts for both levels, timed and marked the way the real thing is.