Listening TEST 2 Part 3

Diana clearly feels that her friend should have honoured the agreement that they made and that her refusal to give Diana the washing machine is not fair to Diana. Her friend has broken the agreement, by which Diana used her name in order to put two entries into the competition (one with her name on it, the other with her friend's name on it) and her friend agreed to give Diana the prize if the entry with her name on it won. Diana feels that this is wrong and unfair to her. She wonders too whether it may be legally wrong and whether consulting a lawyer would result in her getting what she regards as fair treatment.

Kathy says that if she went to a lawyer, she wouldn't have even the faintest chance of forcing her friend to give her the prize and that legally she doesn't have a leg to stand on (she is completely in the wrong, there is nothing at all to support her case). She says that the law would take a very dim view (disapprove very strongly) of her situation because she has tried to evade the rules (break them by doing something that does not conform with the official requirements) of the competition and in doing so she has acted with premeditated fraudulent intent (these are legal terms meaning 'the crime of deliberate, planned in advance intention to cheat for financial or material gain'). In other words, she could get into trouble if she took legal action because she has herself done something illegal.

Ron asks whether people who run competitions keep a blacklist (a list of people not allowed to do something, that is kept by an organization) containing the names of people who often win competitions and who the organization will not allow to win any more competitions. He wonders whether, if they do keep such lists, people like him should use aliases (false names) when entering competitions. Kathy says that it is natural for people who often win competitions but then go through a period of not winning any to get paranoid (wrongly believing that they are being intentionally badly treated) and suspect that such lists exist. However, she says that no reputable (respected, considered honourable) firm would even contemplate (consider) such a measure (action). The only exception to this is competitions run by shops, where there is a faint (very small) risk of the manager of a particular shop deciding to deliberately disregard (intentionally ignore) an entry from someone who he knows often wins competitions. But in mainstream (conventional, available to people in general) competitions, she says such worries (that blacklists are kept) are groundless (without foundation, not based on good reasons), and there is no reason for someone to use false names when entering them. In other words, she is saying that it is rare for the organizers of a competition to have a blacklist and therefore it is rare for the idea of using an alias to be logical.

Stan knows his answer was correct, but the answer sent to him by the organizers when he sent for it (wrote to them and asked for it) was completely different from his and therefore wrong. He has phoned to ask whether he has grounds (good reasons) to make a formal objection (complain formally).

Kathy says that in this competition, the key (most important) word is 'estimate' because people have been asked to give an approximate figure not an accurate one. She says that it is therefore likely that the answer given by the people running the competition is also a guess, not an accurate figure. Their answer is therefore factually incorrect, but it has to be accepted as the right answer because the rules of the competition state that 'the judges' decision is final' (it cannot be disputed). People entering the competition have agree to abide by (accept and obey) the rules and so they have to accept the answer given, even if it is wrong, as it is in this case. Her point therefore is that, although it might seem unfair that a wrong answer has to be accepted as right and therefore a correct answer does not win, this situation is covered by the rules and no rules have been broken.