Our Apartment Building – English Language Bits

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Fill in the missing words in the text. You can type them or copy & paste them. You can check your answers by listening or by clicking Submit at the end.

storage – load – renovation – transportation – basement – inconvenient

Yuliya: So Ralph, how do you like the building you live in?
Ralph: It’s okay, we like it. We’re living in a 9-story apartment building, what we call a mid-rise building. It’s not a high-rise and it’s not a low-rise, we call it a mid-rise building. There’s about, I think, between 50 and 60 different apartments in the building. The location is really good, it’s close to and all the services. It’s close to grocery stores and all the other amenities that you need for your life.

The building itself is a bit old, though, so what that means is, for example, there’s one elevator. So if someone is moving into or out of the building, it can get really busy. If the elevator needs to be serviced, then you’re taking the stairs. So that’s fine for me, but some of the older people in the building find that , for sure.

We have a parking garage in the basement and recently they did a to connect the parking garage to the building. In the past, we had to go outside and down the stairs into the parking garage, but now we could go down to the parking garage in the building, which is nice.

There are storage lockers in the basement as well. When we moved in, the locker was included in the rent, but now you have to pay a rental to have a storage locker, so we benefited a lot there.

There’s no laundry in the unit, so we have to go to the to do our laundry in the laundry room, but it’s well-maintained and there’s no problem there.

You have to use a card, and you up your card and use the value on your card. You tap the machine to start the machine.

These questions can help you practice speaking or writing. You can choose any questions that seem interesting and skip those that don’t seem interesting, or make your own ones.

About the story:

How big is the apartment building where Ralph lives?

What does he like about the building?

What doesn’t he like about it?

What recent renovations were done in the building?

What was included in the rent when Ralph moved into this building?

Where can tenants do their laundry?

How does the laundry room operate?

What about you?

Would you want to move somewhere else if you lived in Ralph’s building?

What about your current housing: what do you like and what do you dislike about it? (location, the building, the view, on-site laundry, and so on)

Is there a washing machine in every apartment?

Do people usually have storage lockers?

Is there a basement in the building?

How is the basement used?

Find the best sentence for each of these words. You can type the words or copy & paste them. Check your answers by clicking Submit at the end.

storage – load – renovation – transportation – maintain – basement – inconvenient

Friday is for me. Could we meet on another day?

I do not want to live here during the . There will be too much noise and dust for a month or two.

Major Canadian cities have good public systems.

I need to my [public transit] card first, it’s not working without money.

I keep my skates and other winter stuff in the locker during the summer.

They are doing a big renovation to add a small apartment in the .