Listen to a 5-minute podcast from Daily Tech Headlines, review the vocabulary, answer the questions, and have a discussion. This podcast is awesome for anyone looking to improve their tech-related English.

This lesson is best for advanced learners. The PDF is at the bottom of the page for teachers who want to use this in class or as homework.

Vocabulary you can preview

Listen to the podcast from Daily Tech Headlines: Cloudflare Launched A Tool To Keep Bots From Scraping Data To Train AI

Here’s a link to the transcript if you need to follow along.

Answers to the comprehension questions are below.

Comprehension questions

1. What does Cloudflare’s new tool stop?
2. What does scraping websites to train AI mean?
3. Why are Apple and Epic Games in a feud?
4. What does YouTube’s updated eraser tool do?
5. What is driving the rising profit in Samsung Electronics’s semiconductor sales?
6. What changes do European Union regulators want to see with X?
7. “Server issues” on Amazon Kindle created an outage. How did that affect e-readers? 
8. What is WhatsApp’s new feature?
9. How does the removal of the Nike Adapt App affect self-lacing sneaker owners?

Discussion Questions

1. Do you have a website? If yes, what is your website’s content? And do you use CloudFlare? Why or why not? (If you don’t have a website, would you like to start one? Why or why not?)
2. What’s your opinion about AI bots scraping websites for information? Why?
3. Do you think it’s a good idea to use a tool like Cloudflare to stop bots and crawlers from scraping websites? Why or why not?
4. Epic Games claims that Apple is “arbitrarily” stopping their games from being available on Apple products in Europe. Do you think Apple is being arbitrary? Or do you think Apple has a reason for hindering Epic Games? Why?
5. YouTube content creators often complain about music copyright claims on their videos. What’s your opinion on copyrighted music on YouTube videos? Should YouTube creators be allowed to use copyrighted music? Why or why not?
6. If you had the chance to work for a semiconductor company, would you? Why or why not?
7. Do you read e-books? Why or why not?
8. If you read e-books, where do you get your books? Why?
9. Have you used WhatsApps new AI image function? If yes, what did you think? If not, have you ever used AI generated images on another app or website? Why and what did you think?
10. Have you heard of self-lacing sneakers before? What’s your opinion on self-lacing sneakers?

Answers to the comprehension questions

1. It stops bots and crawlers from scraping websites for content to train AI models. 
2. It means AI models use content from websites to “learn” and create new material, so a website using Cloudflare’s new tool will not appear in any AI-generated content.
3. They are in a feud because Epic Games (Fortnite maker) wants to put their game stores on Apple products in Europe, but Apple is stopping them.
4. It erases copyrighted music from a YouTube video without affecting the other audio around it.
5. The rising profit is due to the artificial intelligence boom.
6. They want X to do more to combat dangerous content on the platform.
7. Amazon Kindle users were unable to download e-books.
8. WhatsApp users can create AI images on the app.
9. Nike self-lacing sneakers can no longer be operated through the remote control app, although the manual buttons still work. Also, the lights on the shoes are no longer controllable.

If you want to listen to more technology related podcasts like this one, check out more from Daily Tech Headlines here.

And if you want more advanced listening practice, try Podcast Questions – How to Brew Amazing Coffee with Science.