The years had built up around Stewart like the shell of a mollusk. And truth be told, he had drifted into the financial industry largely for this reason: the sedate pace and lulling security of asset management work. It had never seemed terribly risky. Or at least not until the first wave of layoffs earlier in the spring. Until then he had never even considered leaving the bank, let alone making a more aggressive career move and starting afresh in an entirely new profession.

Note: our lesson for today is an Intermediate comprehension test. Get started by listening to our short dialogue and then clicking through to the quiz section and seeing how much you understood. Some of the answers fly by quickly. If you need help though, we've manually annotated the entire dialogue on our regular text page. Consult the transcript after taking the test if you have any difficulty picking up on what is happening.