This is the B1 story I'm going to read to you today and the vocabulary I'll look at:

A helpful ghost (B1)

Detective Sam Green liked to hang around any place where strange things happened. One autumn morning, he arrived in a small town surrounded by a beautiful landscape of snowy mountain peaks. 

The people there seemed friendly, but whenever Sam asked about the old castle on a nearby hill, they were silent. At night, lights could be seen in the windows, yet nobody had lived there for hundreds of years.

Sam had some knowledge of what people were like in this area, and knew the villagers were hiding something. 

‘It’s better to keep this secret,’ one old woman admitted to him. ‘We don’t want the tourists to get frightened and leave. We need them.’

However, Sam kept on thinking about this mystery, watching from a distance and taking notes.

One foggy evening, he saw a soft light in the window. Quietly, he climbed the hill and broke in through the locked door. In an upstairs room, a simple lightbulb was attached to a battery and a clock.

Sam smiled. ‘Well, would you believe it?’ he said. ‘There’s nothing like a ghost to attract the tourists. If you don’t have one, you’ve got to invent one. Mystery solved!’

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My NEW book: "B1 English Vocabulary Builder - 22 Short Stories for Learning the Words and Phrases Students Need to Pass the B1 Exam" is now available! This book gives the learner enough vocabulary to pass any B1 exam (special help for Cambridge exams).
To read more about my book, click here (you can access it from any Amazon platform):
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Learners studying towards B2 level will be interested in my B1 to B2 reader: The Tudor Conspiracy (includes audio version) https://amzn.to/4gPsj0i

For very young learners (from 8-10), I recommend my picture reader book for children learning A1 to A2 English. It comes with a fully dramatised audio version: https://amzn.to/46TCWvv

Oxford Bookworm Graded Readers: Read stories at your level to improve your English. I recommend Oxford Bookworms as the best series of books for learners: https://amzn.to/4r7YVHg

At https://www.practisingenglish.com/ I offer learners of intermediate-level English, free grammar help and exercises and other English learning pages.
https://www.practisingenglish.com/

Be back soon with another podcast!
Mike Bilbrough (Secondary school English teacher and Doctor in English philology)