Hi there.
Let's do some advanced vocabulary today.
The sort of vocabulary that's used in a newspaper article.
What do I hear you say?
You've got quite good English listening and speaking skills, but
newspaper and magazine articles are still difficult for you?
Well, I'm not surprised.
These sorts of articles use all kinds of formal vocabulary, formal words that you
don't hear in everyday spoken English conversation very much, and writers are
also trying to entertain their readers.
So they tend to use idioms and words in different, in new and interesting ways.
But that's confusing when English isn't your first language.
So today I'm going to use an article from the Sunday Times.
I'll read it out to you and then I will unpack the vocabulary and
hopefully unblock your understanding.
It will give you opportunity to listen to the passage, the article,
a number of times, so that the new vocabulary sticks in your mind and
you'll be able to understand it.
Let's take this article from the Sunday Times newspaper.
Let's explain the vocabulary.
If you take the average newspaper or magazine article, there
will be quite a lot of words which may be difficult for you.
Newspapers use more formal language and the words are being used in
slightly different ways to keep the English-speaking reader interested.
But this can be difficult if English isn't your first language.
So this article is about the cost of living crisis and the way that
students in the UK who are thinking of going to university in the next
couple of years may start to choose to stay at home, to save money.
I'll read the article, first of all.
See how much meaning you can understand from your first listen - that's important.
You need to grow your tolerance of not understanding.
You need to keep your focus and your concentration, even when you
don't understand certain words, because that's what it will be like
in real-life English conversation.
So it's a good skill to practise.
Then after I've read you the passage, the article, I'll talk through the
more difficult vocabulary and you can listen again, once you've understood.
It's a really good way to learn, this.
OK, here's the passage.
See how you do.
"Parents brace themselves for three more years of cooking, cleaning, and
laundry, as hundreds of thousands of teenagers plan to live at home
during their university education, due to the cost of living crisis.
Claire Marchant, Chief Executive of UCAS, the Universities and College Admission
Service, said parents would have to get used to their children, opting to
stay in the family home rather than the traditional 'rite of passage' of moving
out to live in student accommodation.
UCAS surveyed 18 year olds applying for university this year about the cost
of living and found that one in three said their biggest worry was 'housing'.
One in five said their second biggest worry was 'groceries'.
Students normally want to move away from home to "explore their
independence" Marchant said.
But early indications were that that trend was reversing."
So that's from the Sunday Times, 24th of July, 2022, page nine.
And it's by Sian Griffiths, that piece.
So I'm gonna work through the vocabulary from that passage.
Just the same as I do on our Course One: Activate Your Listening.
If you haven't tried Course One: Activate Your Listening, it is
full of this method for learning.
Available on our website at adeptenglish.com.
'Parents brace themselves for three more years of cooking, cleaning, and
laundry.' So parents, P A R E N T S.
That means your mum and dad, your mother and father.
And 'to brace oneself'?
That's B R A C E.
In its literal sense, it means 'to get ready for impact'.
It's what they say when you're on board, a plane - 'brace, brace!'.
So you put yourself in a particular position because
there's going to be an impact.
And here as though preparing for a 'metaphorical impact', that of
your children staying home rather than leaving at 18, parents are
being told to 'brace themselves'.
Three more years of cooking, cleaning, and laundry?
Hmm.
The implication here is that the 18 to 21 year olds don't do any of
that themselves, if they stay home.
Not in my house.
That's not true!
And the laundry, L A U N D R Y means 'washing the clothes and the bedding'.
So 'hundreds of thousands of teenagers'?
A teenager, T E E N A G E R is someone who is 'in their teens'.
That's an age with 'teen' on the end.
So teenagerhood starts at 13 years old.
And the last year of it is 19 years old.
And 'the -cost of living crisis' - that's a new phrase,
which is summing up how everything is more expensive at the moment.
What it means is the cost of living - it literally costs us a lot just to live.
That's why it's a crisis.
And children 'opting to stay in the family home rather than the traditional
rite of passage of moving out to live in student accommodation'.
Yes.
I think that the UK is perhaps unusual in that it's most people's expectation
that when they go to university, it's an opportunity to go and live
in a different part of the country, importantly, away from mum and dad.
That's why it's called a 'rite of passage', R I T E.
That phrase suggests something, like leaving home here, is a ritual,
which marks a person passing from one phase of their life to another.
That's a 'rite of passage'.
It's rather like a coming-of-age.
And 'student accommodation'.
That just means student housing, often called 'halls of
residence', in UK universities.
Watch that spelling - A C C O M M O D A T I O N.
So two Cs, two Ms in 'accommodation' and in 'accommodate'.
Next sentence, 'UCAS surveyed 18 year olds applying for university this year'.
The word there, 'surveyed', S U R V E Y E D.
That means they asked 18 year olds to fill in a survey, a questionnaire.
They asked them a number of questions, and then they put together the results.
And 'applying' means 'in the process of making an application'
to university this year.
And they obviously asked, 'What is your biggest worry?' 'What is your
second biggest worry?' 'And your third biggest worry?' A worry, W O R R Y is
something that's on your mind, that bothers you, that you're concerned about.
Perhaps it keeps you awake at night.
That is 'a worry', a perceived problem in the future.
So one in three, 33% of those asked, said their biggest worry was for 'housing'.
One in five, so that's 20% said their second biggest worry was 'groceries'.
What are 'groceries'?
Well, that means 'food shopping'.
So a grocery, G R O C E R Y - is an old fashioned term for a shop that sells food.
The 'grocer', G R O C E R is the person who owns such a shop.
And 'groceries', G R O C E R I E S - that refers to food.
It isn't a term that you hear much in everyday conversation.
We probably say 'food shopping'.
But in a more formal context, the word 'groceries' and 'grocer'
and 'grocery' would be used.
I like this bit - 'Students normally want to move away from home "to explore their
independence" - and it's got little quotation marks around it like that.
It's slightly 'tongue-in-cheek'.
It's slightly amusing.
It's been put into quotation marks there because it's a 'euphemism'.
It's a code for something else.
And probably what most people would think when they see those double
quotation marks, "exploring their independence" means having a good
time, getting drunk quite a lot, going to parties, lying in bed in the
morning, perhaps even getting a tattoo!
" Exploring their independence".
And that last sentence, 'But early indications are'...
So 'early indications' is a quick way of saying 'that's the way it looks
at the moment', the way it looks as though things are going to go.
' The trend is reversing'.
So 'trend', T R E N D means 'a tendency, a direction that
something appears to be taking'.
You might have 'trends' in the financial markets.
You might have 'trends' in the weather.
You might have a 'trend' in house prices, or even a 'trend' in fashion.
So when 'a trend reverses', it means it's been growing, it's been going
up and up and up, and then suddenly it goes in the opposite direction.
So the trend in the UK has been for more and more young people to go to university
and to live away from home when they do that, that trend is reversing now.
The line goes down.
So the trend for students to live away from home while at university,
so that they can "explore their independence" is going down because
of the cost of living crisis.
It's just too expensive.
In my experience, it's not so much the parents who don't want their
children to live at home anymore.
It's the children themselves that want to move out.
They don't want to live with their parents anymore.
They don't want to live at home.
Or maybe that's just my children, but uni is something of a rite of passage.
One of my daughters has already left university.
The other one is currently just at the end of her first year and will
be starting second year in September.
And they both have had 'a whale of a time' at university.
They wouldn't have missed it for anything.
I did too.
It was really important to me to leave my hometown and experience
living somewhere else in the UK, when I went to university, when I was 18.
University life does change you and it does grow your independence.
And it does tend to mean that you no longer want to live with your parents.
But it's a shame - fewer people are probably going to have
that experience from now on.
OK.
So I hope that running through the more difficult vocabulary means
you're able to understand that passage better on second listen.
It is exactly the kind of help I give on Course One: Activate Your Listening.
In that course, there are conversations and there are lots of articles and then
separate recordings where I explain the vocabulary like a teacher, like a tutor,
and then you can go back to the original recording and hear it again, but this time
with much more understanding of the words.
This is a really good way to learn.
And that course is on our website at adeptenglish.com.
So don't forget, go back to the beginning and listen to that passage again, now
you've had the vocabulary explanation.
In fact, listen to it a few times and each time you listen, your
understanding will get better.
I hope that helps your English language learning!
Enough for now.
Have a lovely day.
Speak to you again soon.
Goodbye.