In this English lesson I wanted to help you
learn the English phrase, "To pass with flying colors."
When you take a test and if you get
almost every single answer right,
if you get almost every single answer correct,
we would say that you were able
to pass the test with flying colors.
So maybe you went to take a driver's test
and you did everything right.
You made all of the correct turns.
You did everything that the tester asked you to do.
We would say that you were able
to pass that test with flying colors.
Maybe you've just taken an English test
and you got almost every answer right,
if not all of them,
we would then say that you were able
to pass with flying colors.
So it simply means to do really, really well on a test.
The second phrase I wanted to teach you today
is the phrase, "When pigs fly."
This is a phrase that we sometimes say in English.
It's a little bit of an older phrase.
I haven't heard it a lot recently,
but I did hear it on the news the other day.
When you say, "When pigs fly,"
you're saying that something will not happen, okay.
If you said to me, "Bob, do you think that someday
you'll jump out of a plane with a parachute?"
I would say, "When pigs fly."
That basically means that that will never happen.
I have no plan to ever jump out of a plane with a parachute.
I'm afraid of heights. It just does not interest me at all.
If you said to me, "Bob, are you gonna go
parachuting tomorrow?"
I would say, "Well, that's not gonna happen tomorrow."
And I would say, "When pigs fly, that's the day
when I'll go parachuting."
So to review, when you pass something with flying colors,
it means you do a really good job on a test,
and you get a really good mark or grade.
And if someone says to you, "When pigs fly,"
they're basically saying that something
is never going to happen.
But hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video.
This comment is from my buddy, Brent
from "American English With This Guy."
"I totally agree about the short days in the winter.
I always dread that time of year.
Why can't summer last forever?"
And my response was this,
"Yeah, it's weird when you're coming home from work
at four o'clock in December and it's already getting dark."
Yeah, I think I forget what it's like
to live in the place I live
in terms of the seasons and the length of the days.
I really enjoy the fact that the days
are super long in the summer.
We can get up early in the morning.
We can enjoy a full day of rest or work
or whatever we're doing, and it doesn't get dark
till nine or 10 at night.
The third week of June, it's still light out
at 10:00 p.m. here,
light enough to be able to be outside and do stuff.
So I think, I just think that's normal.
I forget that many of you live closer to the equator,
and you probably have day lengths
that are very similar all the time.
But for us here, yeah, it's kind of cool.
But as Brent said,
Brent from "American English With This Guy,"
that's his YouTube channel, by the way,
in the winter, in the dead of winter, it's not as enjoyable.
You end up coming home from work at four o'clock or 4:30,
and by the time you get home,
it's already dark out and you can't do anything outside.
So that's the drawback, okay?
The advantage is we have really long days in the summer.
The disadvantage is that we don't have
very long days in the winter.
I wanted to show you, I'm not sure if you can see it,
we are having a very hazy day here in Ontario, Canada.
There are forest fires far to the north.
That's actually that direction, by the way.
There are forest fires, but the smoke from the forest fires
is actually traveling all the way to this area.
And then combined with that,
it's already very, very hot and humid.
So when I look in the distance, it looks very hazy.
If you look over there where you can see the windmills,
it's kind of hard to see them.
They're a little bit faint.
So anyways, air quality is low,
but education quality is high.
Bob, the Canadian here,
I'll see you in a couple days
with another short English lesson.
Bye.