Iran protests: BBC News Review

Protests in Iran. Younger generation demand change.

This is News Review from BBC Learning English.

I'm Neil. And I'm Beth.

Make sure you watch to the end to learn vocabulary to talk about the story.

And don't forget to subscribe to this channel, like the video

and try the quiz on our website. Now, the story.

"Neither headscarf, nor humiliation. Freedom and equality."

This is one thing university students

last month when a young woman died after being arrested by the morality police

for not covering her hair.

Many members of the younger generation say they want a different lifestyle

and don't identify with the Iranian regime.

Human rights groups say two hundred people have died in the protests so far.

You've been looking at the headlines,

Beth. What's the vocabulary? We have 'fan flames', 'wave' and 'Gen Z'.

This is News Review from BBC Learning English.

Let's have a look at our first headline.

This one is from The Financial Times.  

And, so, the headline is saying that celebrities inside

and out of Iran are taking part in anti-regime protests, that's protests

against the current political system.

But the expression that we are looking at is 'fan flames'

or, fully, 'fanned the flames of something'.

And we need to break that down, the first part is the word 'fan'.

Now, Beth, we are in a TV studio.

There are lights. They're quite hot.

Yep, you're right.

Sometimes it gets so hot in here that we have to 'fan' ourselves to cool down.

Yeah. OK, so that's the first part, 'fan'.

We need to look at the second part now, 'flames'.

If you light a fire,

let's say a barbecue, and you want to make the flames more intense,

You can 'fan the flames' and they get stronger.

That's the expression 'fan the flames', but we're not talking literally here.

No. So, generally speaking, 'fan the flames' is an expression

used metaphorically, and it usually means 'to make

a tense situation even more tense'. Now, in this headline, celebrities

are encouraging and supporting the protests.

So, that's why we're using it.

They are making the fire bigger or making the protests bigger.

That's right. So, celebrities want to encourage the protesters

to carry on until they achieve what they are trying to get.

They are 'fanning the flames'.

Do we have any other expressions like this?

Yes, we have 'add fuel to the fire'.

Now, if you 'add fuel',

something like wood or coal, to a fire then it gets bigger. Now, again,

this expression is used metaphorically and it means 'to encourage a situation

in which there are strong or high emotions'.

OK, let's take a look at that again.

Let's have our next headline.

This is from France 24.

And so the headline is saying that fame, or being famous, is not a shield

against arrest. A shield is something that protects you.

So, celebrities are also being arrested.

But the word we're interested in is 'wave'.

But we're not talking about water or oceans, are we?

No, but if you think about a 'wave' in the ocean,

it start small and then it gets bigger, before getting smaller again.

So, in this headline 'wave' is used to mean

that a lot of arrests are happening at the moment - 'arrest wave'.

Yeah. So, since the protests began,

there's been a large number of arrests - a 'wave' of arrests.

Yes, so, in the summer this year,

we heard a lot about 'heatwaves'.

That's high temperatures for a specific amount of time.

We also sometimes hear about 'a wave of sickness',

which is lots of people getting sick at the same time.

Yeah. Are there any other words like 'wave' that have this similar meaning?

Yeah. So we can use 'surge'. Again, like a wave, it's connected to water,

but it's used metaphorically to mean 'a large amount of something happening

at one time', like a 'power surge' or a 'crowd surge', for example.

OK, let's look at that one more time.

Our next headline, please.

This is from The Telegraph.

Yes, so, the headline is saying that 'Gen Z' is a 'fearsome

opponent' of the regime. 'Fearsome' means 'frightening' and

'opponent' is someone or a group against another group.

And the headline is saying that this group, 'Gen Z',

are the most frightening opposition group for the government in Iran.

But who or what exactly is 'Gen Z' or 'Gen Z'?

Well, 'Gen Z' is short for 'Generation Z', and it refers to people who were

born in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Now, in Iran and a lot of the protesters are school age

or university age and that is the age group that is known as 'Gen Z'.

But, we have other names for other generations. What are they?

Yeah, so we have 'millennials'. That refers to people born

between the early 1980s and the mid 90s, that's me.

We then have 'Generation X'.

They were born between mid 1960 and the early 1980s.

And that's me. And then there are the 'baby boomers' who were born

after World War Two. Yes, and that my parents' generation.

So, why do we have these expressions? Why do we need them?

Well, classifying groups of people by their age is an easy way to differentiate

between different groups of people, different generations,

  and it can make it easier for the reader

if they immediately know which generation and their, kind of,

supposed characteristics that they're reading about.

Yeah. OK, let's have a look at that again.

We've had 'fan the flames of something', encourage an already tense situation.

'Wave', lots of things are happening at once.

And 'Gen Z', the group of people born between the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

Don't forget, there is a quiz on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.

Thank you for joining us and goodbye. Bye.