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This is an English lesson designed to help you practice and improve your English listening and pronunciation skills. The listening lesson is a short story about something that happened in my life in Canada. There is also a short pronunciation explanation about a word or sound I used in the story.

Story: The phenomenon of the ‘must-have’ toy at Christmas!
Pronunciation explanation: How to pronounce been – the past participle of the verb be!

If you have trouble with your listening skills, here’s something that may help:
How to practice listening

Listen to the podcast:
*Try to listen at least once without looking at the words!

*music by Incompetech

Download the podcast in .mp3 from Podbean.com or itunes!

Listening Comprehension Questions:

1. What is Christmas supposed to be about?

2. What is a ‘must-have’ toy?

3. What was the ‘must-have’ toy in 1983?

4. What did parents do to get one?

5. Did Santa bring me a Cabbage Patch Kid for Christmas?

Transcript:

(*Click on the links to learn more about the grammar, vocabulary and expressions used in the story!)

Now that all the Thanksgiving leftovers have been eaten and the Halloween costumes have been put away, everyone is getting ready for Christmas! It’s supposed to be a Christian holiday to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, but somehow it’s become a huge commercial holiday and the most important time of year for retailers. For children, this is the most important day of the year. Children wake up on Christmas morning and hurry to the Christmas tree to find their presents from Santa.

Every once in a while, there’s a must-have Christmas toy – a toy that is so in demand that it becomes almost impossible to find in the stores! Parents line up outside toy stores before they open just to make sure they can buy this must-have toy. When the shelves are bare, parents turn to eBay and pay whatever price necessary to get their hands on this toy! One year it was a ‘Tickle-Me-Elmo’ doll. Another year it was Beanie Babies. I know that this phenomenon must sound completely crazy, but people consider it part of the fun of Christmas!

For Christmas in 1983 – when I was a little girl – the must-have toy was a Cabbage Patch Kid. It was a doll that you could adopt. They were sold with unique names on their own birth certificates and adoption papers that you could send in to make the adoption official. There were massive line-ups outside of stores and riots inside the stores when parents realized there were limited dolls available. I’m not kidding: parents were fighting with each other over a doll!

As far as I was concerned, there was no point in having Christmas that year if Santa didn’t bring me a Cabbage Patch Kid! My mom was able to find one that looked just like me … and she didn’t have to fight anyone to get it! It was such an important gift that I still have that Cabbage Patch Kid today! It’s amazing the lengths that parents will go to in order to make their children happy!

News reports from 1983:

Pronunciation:

The present perfect tense combines have or has with the past participle of a verb. The pronunciation of past participles can be challenging for English learners.

The past participle of the verb be can be pronounced two ways. It’s spelled b-e-e-n.

The proper pronunciation is /bi:n/, for example: Have you been to Canada?

When people are speaking quickly, however, it sounds more like ‘bin’: /bIn/, for example: Have you been to Canada?

Listen to some more example sentences:

I’ve never been to Japan!

Have you heard about Jane? She’s been in a car accident.

There’s been a change in plans: we’re meeting at 7 p.m., not 6.

I’ve been thinking about you!
(*Present perfect continuous)

Listen to the story again. Can you hear where been is used in a sentence?

Vocabulary:

Cabbage Patch Kids
= a very popular doll in North America that was first available in 1983 and is still produced today.
Parents often tell their children that babies come from the ‘cabbage patch’ (an area of land where cabbages are grown) when they don’t want to tell them how babies are really made! This is where the idea for ‘Cabbage Patch Kids’ began!

leftovers
Now that all the Thanksgiving leftovers have been eaten…
= food that was not eaten at a previous meal. People celebrate Thanksgiving by having a big family dinner. There is always more food than every eats, and the food that is ‘leftover’ is eaten in the days after Thanksgiving.

commercial (adjective)
…somehow [Christmas] has become a huge commercial holiday…
= used to describe anything related to commerce (buying and selling things); many holidays in North America have turned into ‘commercial holidays,’ where the main way to celebrate the holiday is to buy things. At Christmas, people buy decorations for their home and Christmas trees, cards to send to family and friends, food for parties and Christmas day dinners, and gifts.

retailers
…[Christmas is] the most important time of year for retailers
= a person or business that sells things to the public; stores.

must-have (adjective)
…a must-have Christmas toy…
= something that many people want so much, they believe that they must have it; something that is necessary to have.

bare shelves
When the shelves are bare…
= in a toy store, the toys are usually displayed on shelves (plural form of ‘shelf’), a flat surface attached to a wall or frame on which things are placed. ‘Bare shelves’ means that there is nothing on the shelves – they are empty because all the toys have been bought.

to get your hands on (something)
…[parents] pay whatever price necessary to get their hands on this toy.
= to find, get or obtain something

to adopt
It was a doll that you could adopt.
= when you adopt a child, you become the legal guardians of a child who was born to other parents, and they become a member of your family

a riot
There were massive line-ups outside of stores and riots inside the stores when parents realized there were limited dolls available.
= when a group of people becomes violent and uncontrollable