English Listening Practice for Beginners: A Story and Vocabulary in the Garden

Practice listening easily with 15 minutes every day! This book features selected 2-minute short passages of moderate difficulty, suitable for beginners. Through the four stages of “pre-listening — catching keywords — understanding sentence by sentence — overall retelling,” learners can progressively understand over 90% of the content. Persistent practice brings qualitative change from quantitative change, boosting your English listening dramatically! Below is a collection organized by the qicai site editor, starting from the simplest English listening materials, suitable for junior and senior high school students (beginner level).

The garden is very interesting. I sometimes go outside, and I watch all the things that go on in the garden. It smells wonderful in the flower garden. There are red, white, pink, and yellow roses that have a sweet smell. I watch the bees as they take pollen from the roses.

There are tiny bugs that live on the rose bushes. My mother tries to get rid of the little bugs, but it is difficult to get rid of them. She is glad to see the red ladybugs who eat the little bugs. The birds like the sunflowers. They like to eat sunflower seeds. There is a bird bath in the garden. The black birds and swallows go in there to take a drink or have a bath. I sometimes see a robin or a bluejay in there, too.

In the dirt there are little holes where the ants go in and out. The ants are hard workers. I watch them as they work together as a team to bring food to their nests. There are snails in the garden, too. They carry their homes on their backs. They move slowly and leave a silvery trail as they go. They eat the leaves from my mother's plants.

My mother also has vegetables growing in her garden. She grows green peas. We like to pick those and eat the peas raw right out of their pods. She grows lettuce and tomatoes, too. We have so many tomatoes that we always give some to our neighbors. My mother sends us outside to pick lettuce and tomatoes whenever we have a salad.

My favorite vegetables are carrots. Our tops grow above the earth, but the carrots are below the dirt. When you pick them, you have to pull the carrots out from under the soil. Weeds also grow in the garden. After a good rainfall, it seems that the weeds just spring up. I pull the weeds out by their roots so they won't grow back. Weeds choke the good plants so we don't want them in our garden.

Gardening is a good hobby. You get fresh air, sunshine and exercise. You even get beautiful, colorful flowers and nice fresh food.