FCE Matching 1

by Exambot |Published July 31, 2019

You will hear five different young people talking about renting homes.

Choose from the list (A-F) what each speaker says. Use the letters only once.

There is one extra letter which you do not need to use.

A Something dangerous needed to be repaired.

B It was often cold indoors.

C There was a pleasant view from the window.

D The neighbours were very noisy.

E The rent was too high.

F The furniture was good quality.

Speaker 1:

Speaker 2:

Speaker 3:

Speaker 4:

Speaker 5:

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 FCE Matching 1
1. Speaker 1: I quite liked the place when I first moved there in early September. The furniture was
cheap but adequate, and for the rent I was paying, that was fair enough. Everything seemed to be working
until later in the year, when I put the central heating on – and nothing happened. I phoned the landlady
and she said not to worry, that it was always slow like that at first. But even when it did come on it hardly
warmed the place up at all. And then it went off altogether. Again and again, that happened, and I spent
most of the winter evenings there wrapped in blankets. I left as soon as I could afford a better place.

Speaker 2: I’ll always have wonderful memories of that apartment in the countryside, not because it was
particularly comfortable, but on account of what you could see from the living room: green fields running
down to a rushing river, with tall evergreen trees either side of it. I particularly loved that scene in winter,
when there was snow on the ground and the outside temperature was below freezing. It was so quiet, too.
There was an old lady living next door, but I rarely saw or heard her, and there was hardly ever a sound
from the upstairs neighbours, either.

Speaker 3: That first flat I had certainly wasn’t a big place. It had a small living room and bedroom, and
a really tiny kitchen that overlooked the rubbish bins in the yard. And although it’d recently been
decorated and was looking quite nice, the furniture was very ordinary, so I’d say that really I was being
overcharged for what it was. In fact, I don’t think I would’ve stayed there as long as I did if I hadn’t
become so friendly with the next-door neighbours. Which was just as well because, as you know, I like
playing my music pretty loud. And they never once complained!

Speaker 4: I know you can’t ask for luxury if you’re spending so little on rent, but I think it’s reasonable
to expect the owner to do some basic maintenance if he’s taking money off you. In the bathroom, for
instance, the water pipes made a terrible noise every time you turned a tap on, and though I realised it
wasn’t dangerous. that certainly wasn’t the case in the kitchen, where you ran the risk of an electric shock
whenever you switched anything on. There were bare cables there, and even though I kept telling the
landlord, he seemed in no hurry to have anything done about it.

Speaker 5: It was a pity I had to leave that flat because in many ways I liked being there. It was warm,
even during the coldest nights of January, and the owner was fair, charging me a reasonable rent and
immediately getting things fixed whenever anything went wrong. But he couldn’t do anything about the
couple next door, who seemed to spend nearly all their time having arguments. I tried turning up the TV
but I could still hear them, and when I saw the woman in the hall one morning and mentioned it to her,
she got quite angry. So, sadly, I had to pack my bags and find somewhere else.