Ö1 as the Source of the Listening Texts (Hörtexte)

The EPD listening texts are not studio recordings produced for the exam. They come from the ongoing schedule of Ö1, the news and culture station of the ORF. The exam model says so itself, and that has a practical consequence: the material closest to the exam goes on air every week and is free to listen to.

What the official model says

The official model valid from June 2026 carries the credit "Quelle: Ö1" under all three listening texts. The same credit appears in the answer section under all three transcripts. Hörtext 1 is a report from the programme Digital.Leben, and the transcript names the Ö1 journalist who made it.

Two things follow from that. In the exam you hear broadcast Austrian radio, with everything a radio report brings with it in pace, colouring and offhandedness. And you know what to keep practising on once you run out of tasks here.

What you hear in this trainer

The recordings in the VWUPass listening trainer are ours. We write the scripts ourselves and have them spoken by a speech synthesiser, built to the shape this article describes.

None of it is Ö1 material. No ORF broadcast, no excerpt from one, no licence from the ORF. Real Ö1 you hear only at the ORF itself, through the links further down.

The reason is legal: a commercial provider may neither copy a radio broadcast nor put it into its own player. Linking is allowed. So here you get our own recordings with tasks and answers, and there you get the original to listen to.

How an Ö1 feature is built

A feature is not an interview. Nobody asks a question that somebody then answers. A reporter tells the story, and blocks of real speech are cut into her narration: O-Töne, in which a person named on air speaks in one uninterrupted stretch.

The measurements come from two sources. The three texts of the exam model run 498 to 590 words, their O-Ton blocks are 15 to 223 words long, and the voice changes two to ten times per text. Six current Ö1 reports that we measured on 4 September 2026 run at 122 to 172 words per minute, 144 on average. An exam text therefore lasts 3.5 to 4 minutes, and its sentences have a median length of 12 words.

Five properties separate it from the practice material you know from a language course:

• The O-Töne are unrehearsed. The narration is written and read out, the O-Ton is not. There, sentences break off, start again and carry filler words.
• It sounds Austrian. The people involved are from Austria, and the O-Ton carries regional colouring.
• The facts hang on real names. Companies, associations, authorities, municipalities, research institutes. That is exactly what task 2 asks about.
• Every figure is said exactly once. Nobody announces it, nobody repeats it. Whatever you fail to write down in the moment is gone.
• Questions barely occur. The six measured reports carried zero to three question marks each.

Two programmes that fit the exam

Two Ö1 formats have the cut of the exam texts. Both run in the regular schedule and are also online as podcasts.

• Digital.Leben on ORF Sound
• Nachhaltig leben on ORF Sound

Digital.Leben is built like Hörtext 1: one reporter, two or three named experts, a single topic, plenty of figures. Nachhaltig leben is built like Hörtext 3: one project, one place, a handful of people involved and always a technical quantity.

For task 2 no programme can be recommended. Short answers need eight extractable facts, and by no means every episode is that dense: of the six measured reports one carried a single figure, another fourteen. Roughly every third episode is too thin for this. The teaser text on the programme page tells you in advance. If it names an institution, a place and an order of magnitude, the episode is worth it.

One topic is almost entirely missing from Ö1, and that is sport. In one week of the schedule that we went through, not a single sports report came up. If the exam brings one, practise it here in the trainer.

Work through an episode soon after you find it. Podcast episodes stay available for months, and on 4 September 2026 the Digital.Leben feed reached back to the end of March. A whole broadcast that you instead catch up on in the Radiothek disappears after 30 days.

A drill for any episode

The three-phase method of the exam, that is 90 seconds of reading, listening, 60 seconds of checking, is in Listening Strategies and is unchanged here. With real radio, however, you are missing two things the exam supplies: tasks that tell you what to listen for, and an answer key. This drill builds both itself.

1. One minute beforehand. Read the episode's teaser text on the ORF page. It names the topic and usually the institution involved. Write down three questions the report would have to answer: one about a person, one about a place, one about a quantity. Then close the page.
2. First listening, no pause. Do not stop, do not rewind. Write down only the hard things: names, institutions, places, figures with their unit. One line per entry, no sentences. Stop after 4 minutes, because that is the length of an exam text. The rest of the episode is a bonus.
3. Second listening, on the voices. Make a stroke at every change of voice and write behind it who is speaking and about what. In the end you have the skeleton of the report in front of you: narrator, O-Ton, narrator. That skeleton is exactly what task 3, the note sheet, asks for.
4. Afterwards, without the recording. Build the exam task you never got out of your notes: eight questions with answers of at most 5 words, or a note sheet with eight gaps. Anyone who can set the task has understood the report.

Checking yourself without an answer key

Ö1 publishes no transcripts. We searched the programme pages, the podcast pages and the feeds for them and found none for any broadcast. So there is nothing to look up, and you have to run the check yourself. Three moves are enough for that.

Third listening with your notes open. Go through every entry and mark it: found again, not found again, wrong. Whatever you cannot find on the third pass, you expected rather than heard. Delete those entries instead of defending them.

A figure without a reference does not count. A number on its own is not an answer. An invented example: "12 Kilometer" carries nothing, "12 Kilometer neue Leitung" answers a question. Check every figure you noted for whether its unit and its reference stand next to it.

Write names out. Write out every name you heard in full. If that will not work after the third listening, note the sequence of sounds as you hear it and compare it with the teaser text: institutions and place names are usually spelled out there.