[8:17] Busy and Warm Mother: A Story of Balancing Family and Work

Just 15 minutes a day, easy listening practice! This book features carefully selected 2-minute short passages with moderate difficulty, suitable for beginners. Through four stages—pre-listening, catching keywords, sentence-by-sentence understanding, and overall retelling—learners gradually comprehend over 90% of the content. Consistent practice brings qualitative improvement and rapid progress in your English listening! Below is a compilation by qicai.com editors of some listening materials starting from the simplest level, suitable for junior and senior high school beginners (beginner level).

My mother does so many things. She has a job at a dress store. She cooks our meals, she cleans the house, she feeds the pets, and she still finds time to spend with us. My mother is always busy, but she says that her favorite time is time that she spends with us. My mother works from Monday to Friday. When she comes home from work, she makes something for supper. We usually do the dishes so that she won't have to do them. After supper, she helps us with our homework, or she sits down to watch television. Some nights she goes shopping, and she takes whoever wants to go with her.

Mothers are a little bit of everything. My mother is like a teacher when she helps us with our homework. She is like a nurse when she looks after us all when we are ill. She is like a cook when she makes meals for us. She says that cleaning the house is her least favorite thing. She says that the house gets dirty again right after you clean it. She gets my father, my brothers, sister, and me to help her with the cleaning. My mother washes all our clothes, and sometimes she irons them if they need it.

My mother says that there are not enough hours in a day. We try to help my mother as much as we can. There is a lot of work involved in keeping a home neat and organized. Most of my friends' mothers work. Mothers are the people who you go to when you need to be comforted. Mothers are the people who can make you feel better. I'm glad that I have the mother that I have. My mother is caring and funny. She is fun to be around.