Hello, and welcome to Study English, IELTS Preparation. I'm Margot Politis.
A useful skill in all aspects of English is knowing how new words are formed with prefixes
and suffixes, and how adding those prefixes and suffixes changes the meanings of words.
First, let's watch this story about recycling wooden barrels - or kegs - for storing wine.
Listen carefully for words that have a prefix, or a suffix - or both:
Wine involves a great deal of recycling. Not recycling the wine itself, but the barrels
and the kegs that wine is stored in. The barrel's very important. The wood it's made from imparts
flavour and texture and character to the wine. But after a while the wood loses those qualities
and the barrel has to be taken apart, the wood refurbished, the barrel put back together.
From vineyards around Australia, tired old barrels arrive to be renewed. Glenn is a cooper,
practising an ancient craft with its own language.
Well, when they come in, we just start taking the ends out of the barrels, loosening the
hoops on one end, take the head out, retighten it, turn the barrel over and do the same thing
so that we've opened both ends of the barrel. And we use a grinder with a rotary planer
head on it to shave, say, four or five mill out of the inside of that barrel so that we
expose all the fresh oak flavours. The barrel is dismantled. You get different-width staves.
You get wider ones, you get narrower ones. But you might say, "Why don't they make a
square barrel?" Well, they have, and it didn't work. So coopering lives on.
A word that cannot be broken down into parts is called the root, or base word. A prefix
may be added to the beginning of a word, changing the meaning. And a suffix may be added to
the end of a word. Let's look at one example.
From vineyards around Australia, tired old barrels arrive to be renewed.
Let's look at the word 'renewed'. The base, or root word is 'new', the opposite of old.
It's an adjective. A prefix 're' can be added before the word. The word is now 'renew'.
Adding this prefix not only changes the meaning, it changes the function of the word. 'Renew'
is a verb. The prefix 're' means 'again'. So the new word is a verb that means 'to make
new again'.
The suffix 'ed' has a grammatical function you probably know - it changes the tense of
the verb to simple past tense. So the meaning of 'renewed' is 'made new again'.
Tired old barrels arrive to be made new again.
There are some other examples of the prefix 're' in that story. Listen:
Wine involves a great deal of recycling. Not recycling the wine itself, but the barrels
and the kegs that wine is stored in. But after a while the wood loses those qualities and
the barrel has to be taken apart, the wood refurbished, the barrel put back together.
Well, when they come in, we just start taking the ends out of the barrels, loosening the
hoops on one end, take the head out, retighten it, turn the barrel over and do the same thing
so that we've opened both ends of the barrel.
The three words were: recycled, refurbished and retighten.
Recycled means to treat something so that it can be used again. Refurbished means restored
- made better, and to retighten, is simply to tighten again. There is another suffix
that can be added to 'refurbish' - 'ment'. This suffix carries the meaning of 'an action,
process or result of', so refurbishment is the process of refurbishing something.
There are many words in English that use this suffix: development; government; employment;
entertainment; to name just a few.
Now, we've heard a bit about the process of refurbishing and recycling wine barrels - but
who does this work? What is that person called?
From vineyards around Australia, tired old barrels arrive to be renewed. Glenn is a cooper,
practising an ancient craft with its own language.
That person is called a 'cooper'. A cooper is someone who makes barrels. The 'er' suffix
- carries the meaning 'the person who does that thing' - for example:
A teacher teaches. A driver drives.
A footballer plays football.
And the 'er' suffix isn't only used for people - it can be used for things. Listen:
Well, when they come in, we just start taking the ends out of the barrels, loosening the
hoops on one end, take the head out, retighten it, turn the barrel over and do the same thing
so that we've opened both ends of the barrel. And we use a grinder with a rotary planer
head on it to shave, say, four or five mill out of the inside of that barrel so that we
expose all the fresh oak flavours.
A grinder is a machine that grinds. A planer is a machine, or blade that planes - or makes
wood smooth. The 'er' suffix has another function too. Listen:
The barrel is dismantled. You get different-width staves. You get wider ones, you get narrower
ones.
You get wider ones. The 'er' suffix here is added to an adjective to make a comparative
adjective.
We looked before at the word 'retighten', which means 'to tighten again'. Let's look
at the word 'tighten'. The root word is tight - an adjective. When we add the 'en' suffix,
it becomes a verb - to make tight. What is the opposite?
Well, when they come in, we just start taking the ends out of the barrels, loosening the
hoops on one end, take the head out, retighten it, turn the barrel over and do the same thing
so that we've opened both ends of the barrel. The opposite of 'tighten' is 'loosen'. Again,
the 'en' suffix is used to make the verb - 'loosen' and 'loosening'.
Here's another example of an 'ing' suffix:
The barrel is dismantled. You get different-width staves. You get wider ones, you get narrower
ones. But you might say, "Why don't they make a square barrel?" Well, they have, and it
didn't work. So coopering lives on.
Coopering lives on. We've already seen that a cooper is someone who makes barrels. So
coopering is the work of making barrels. Notice here that the word 'coopering' in the sentence:
'Coopering lives on' is the subject of the verb 'lives'. This is an example of a gerund
- where a verb is acting as a noun in a sentence.
Finally, notice that when describing a process we often use passive voice verbs to describe
the actions in the process. Listen for the verbs:
The barrel's very important. The wood it's made from imparts flavour and texture and
character to the wine. But after a while the wood loses those qualities and the barrel
has to be taken apart, the wood refurbished, the barrel put back together.
The barrel has to be taken apart. Notice that in a passive construction the agent, or person
who does the action, the taking apart, is not mentioned - so the object - the barrel
is acted on by the verb.
There are two other examples in this description: the wood refurbished, the barrel put back
together. Because this is a list of actions in a description of the process, the speaker
leaves out 'has to be', which applies to all of the steps.
The barrel's very important. The wood it's made from imparts flavour and texture and
character to the wine. But after a while the wood loses those qualities and the barrel
has to be taken apart, the wood refurbished, the barrel put back together.
That's all for now.
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I'll see you next time.