Listening and Reading Practice - British English Podcast

Hello and welcome to the English Like a Native Podcast,

the podcast that's designed for lovers and learners of English.

I'm your host, Anna, and today we are going on an adventure

to the great outdoors.

So today's episode is going to be a little bit different.

I want you to find a quiet place, turn up the volume and come with me as we

experience a different environment.

I open my door and swing my bare legs out of the car.

My feet are greeted by the soft cool ground beneath.

The moss has a slight spring to it, and a few blades of grass

tickle my calves as I emerge.

I had forgotten how it felt to stand in this meadow on a summer's day.

Returning always feels like greeting an old friend.

I stretch my arms above my head, close my eyes, and embrace it.

The sun kisses my face, warming my cheeks just a little before the refreshing

breeze comes in, like a jealous rival, to caress my skin, giving rise to goosebumps.

I pull a light shawl over my shoulders and set off for the middle of the meadow.

The beauty here is striking.

The wide open space, the rolling hills beyond, a continuation of green pastures

lifting up to meet the clear blue sky.

I pause again to take in the view.

The desire to explore is growing inside me, but I am here to wait for my

friend, and so I will continue to wait.

I plonk myself down on a boulder that seems oddly out of place, but I

don't give its origin much thought.

I sit and gaze into the distance breathing in the day, filling

my lungs with fresh air.

I scan the scene, a few shrubs randomly dotted across the field,

wild flowers in full bloom, popping their heads above the long grass

and swaying in tandem in the breeze.

A huge oak tree marks the far corner of the meadow.

A solitary oak laden with young acorns offering respite from the unrelenting sun.

A squirrel quickly darts up the trunk with impressive dexterity,

clutching something in its jaw.

Suddenly something buzzes past my ear, making me jump.

A default reaction, which I always scold myself for.

It's just a bee, a busy little bee bumbling about minding its

own business, as it visits each flower that it comes across.

I could stay here all day, lose myself in this noisy quiet, just breathing, not

thinking, but then the noisy quiet is suddenly shattered by my ringtone rudely

blasting out, desperate for my attention.

And once again, I am back to reality.

"Hello, Anna speaking.

Yes, of course I will be right there."

Okay, let's have a look at some of the vocabulary that I used when describing

my experience within the meadow.

First of all, I said I open the door and I swing out my legs.

Now, often when we are getting out of a vehicle we'd say, I stepped

out or I got out of the car, but here I said, I swung out my legs.

And this is the idea of being...

kind of sitting with your knees pointing in one direction, and then you

swing your body, you turn your body, and at the same time you're moving

your legs into a different place.

So you are swinging them.

You are swinging them to the side.

So it's just a different way of basically saying, I stepped out of the car, but

I swung my bare legs out of the car.

Now I said, bare legs.

Bare here means naked uncovered, which suggests that it's a warm day.

So I swung out my bare legs, my feet greeted by the soft cool ground beneath.

The moss has a slight spring to it.

So moss is like a green...

it's like a plant, isn't it?

A green plant based thing that covers often tree trunks or

stones, boulders, or ground.

And moss can be very soft.

It often grows in places that are a little bit damp, a bit more humid,

so you'll find a lot of moss in places where there's dripping water.

Or in like, you know, the woods, or the forest where it's a little bit

darker, more covered and there's a lot more moisture in the air.

So the moss has a slight spring to it, slightly springy.

Now, I said there are a few blades of grass that tickle my calves.

So a blade of grass is what you use to describe one single piece of grass,

a blade, and I guess it's called a blade of grass because it's very flat

and has sharpish edges, very defined edges like a blade, like a knife.

Although, it would be very hard to cut yourself with a blade of grass.

Anyway, I said a few blades of grass tickle my calves.

Calves is the plural of the muscle that sits on the lower part of your leg.

So the back of your lower leg is your calf, your calf.

So as a single calf, it's C-A-L-F, calf.

But when we're talking about your two legs, your two calves,

then we say C-A-L-V-E-S, calves.

Calves.

So the blades of grass tickle my calves as I emerge.

To emerge is to come out of something to, you know, show yourself to the world.

You know, a chick will emerge from an egg when it's finally

ready to come into the world.

I had forgotten how it felt to stand in this meadow on a summer's day.

Returning always felt like greeting an old friend.

I stretch my arms above my head, close my eyes, and embrace it.

The sun kisses my face, warming my cheeks, just a little, before the refreshing

breeze comes in like a jealous rival.

So to be jealous, to have green eyes, to be jealous is to want

something that somebody else has.

You don't want them to have it.

You want it, you are jealous.

And here we are personifying the breeze and suggesting the

breeze is jealous of the sun.

The sun is kissing my face and the breeze wants to kiss my face.

So he is a jealous rival.

A rival is kind of like an enemy.

If two people are rivals, they don't get on, they're usually

fighting for the same thing.

You'll have rival football teams.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you hate each other, but you

can be rivals in a personal way.

And then I go on to say that the breeze caresses my skin.

So to caress is another way of saying kiss, to caress, or touch, to caress.

Giving rise to, this is a nice phrase, meaning it causes,

causing, giving rise to goosebumps.

So the breeze causes goosebumps.

It gives rise to goosebumps.

Now, goosebumps describes the raised little bumps you get

on your skin when you're cold.

I've heard other people in different countries calling it 'chicken skin'.

When a chicken has been plucked, it has all these little, little

bumps on its skin and that's how you look when you have goosebumps.

So the breeze gives rise to goosebumps.

I pull a light shawl over my shoulders.

Now here I'm talking about the material of the shawl being light, a light shawl.

So it's just a very thin, lightweight shawl.

A shawl is like a piece of material that you hang on your shoulders or on

the upper arms, goes around your back and hangs over your arms or shoulders.

It's like a scarf, but it's not, like a full length, like a scarf is, it doesn't

wrap around your neck several times.

A shawl is just to go over the shoulders or upper arms.

Sometimes shawls are quite large actually, and they can wrap

around your entire upper body.

But in this case it's just a light shawl, just something for the summer.

And I set off for the middle of the meadow.

To set off is a phrasal verb, meaning to go.

Like head off, I go, I set off.

The simple beauty is striking.

Striking is a nice way to describe something that is very

beautiful or very impressive.

It impresses you in a way that really hits you.

To strike is to hit.

So if something is striking, then it stops you.

It makes you take notice of it.

Whoa.

That is amazing.

That is a gorgeous view.

So the scene, the beauty, the simple beauty is striking.

The wide open space.

This is a nice collocation.

We all often talk about a big space, like a field, as being a wide open space, a

wide open space, and the rolling hills.

Here's another collocation.

We talk about the rolling hills.

The rolling hills is where you have hill after hill after hill.

Just like a big ball would be rolling up and down these hills, up and

down, up and down the rolling hills.

A continuation of green pastures lifting up.

So I'm thinking of these green hills all reaching up, trying to touch the sky.

So lifting up to meet the clear blue sky, that's another collocation.

We often talk about the clear blue sky.

I pause again to take in the view.

Now, take in is a great phrasal verb.

It means to have a moment to absorb something.

We often use this phrasal verb for news.

So something is news to you, you might need a moment to take it in, especially

if it's shocking or unexpected news.

If it's very good news or very bad news, you might need a moment to absorb it and

think about how you feel, understand how you feel, and what you think about it.

You need to take it in.

But we also take in the view.

So it's having a moment to absorb the view, look at the

view, think about it, enjoy it.

You take in the view.

The desire to explore is growing inside me, but I'm to wait here for

my friend, but I'm content to wait.

Content is a nice word.

To be content just means to be happy.

I am not upset about this.

I'm just content.

Everything is okay.

I plonk myself down.

It's a bit of a juxtaposition in the type of language I've

been using up to this point.

I plonk myself down.

Plonk yourself down is kind of like a slang phrase, meaning I sit down.

But to plonk yourself down is to sit down a bit haphazardly.

So without much care, you just throw yourself down.

I plonk myself down on a boulder.

That seems oddly, out of place.

So it's weird.

It's oddly.

It's odd.

Oddly out of place.

Out of place is a nice phrase to remember.

If something doesn't seem like it belongs, it is out of place.

I felt out of place.

The boulder seemed oddly out of place.

Very weird for this boulder to be on its own in the middle of a meadow.

Where on earth did it come from?

But I don't give its origin much thought.

Here's another phrase.

To give something much thought.

You usually use this in the negative.

I don't give it much thought.

Just means you've, you didn't think about something very much.

I didn't give it much thought.

"Didn't you question why there was a cat outside your front door?"

"No, I didn't give it much thought."

"Didn't you care that your brother hadn't come home that night?"

"Oh I hadn't given it much thought, really.

He stays out late often.

You don't give something much thought.

I hadn't given it much thought.

I sit and gaze into the distance.

To gaze is to look for a long time I gaze.

We often talk about gazing into someone's eyes if we are enamoured.

"Oh, I'm gazing into your eyes.

I love you."

Breathing in the day, filling my lungs with fresh air.

To fill your lungs is to breathe in deep.

Your lungs, obviously it's an organ in your body.

We have two of them.

We use them to breathe.

If we fill our lungs, then we're taking a deep breath.

We fill our lungs with fresh air.

That's another collocation.

Fresh air.

I might tell you, "Uh, you've been inside all day.

Don't you want to go outside and get some fresh air?"

The funny thing is we use the phrase fresh air even if we are in a city

and perhaps the air isn't so fresh, I say, "Do you want some fresh air?"

Usually it means do you want some air from outside?

Do you want some outdoor air rather than the stale indoor air?

"Should we get some fresh air?"

"Yeah, let's stretch our legs and get some fresh air."

I scan the scene.

To scan something.

Usually when we're talking about scanning something, we're talking

about a machine that scans.

So these days we have scanners in almost every shop because we scan cards.

We scan coupons, barcodes are scanned.

We have a barcode scanner.

At the supermarket, everything is scanned, isn't it?

But to scan just means to kind of do a thorough look across something.

So if I scan the room, it means I look across the whole room, "I've lost my keys.

Where are my keys?

I've scanned the entire house and I can't find them anywhere."

A few shrubs randomly dotted across the field.

Now, a shrub.

What is a shrub?

It's like a tree, but not a tree, and it's not a plant.

A shrub is like a bigger, bushier plant, like a woody plant.

It's smaller than a tree, so it's not a big tall tree.

You couldn't climb a shrub, but it's not like a little plant

that would give you flowers.

It's got woody stalks, like a bush.

That's a shrub.

And I said there were a few shrubs randomly dotted across the field.

If things are dotted across an area, it means there are just a few of them

kind of spaced out across the area.

There's not like a group of shrubs in one area, they're dotted around.

They're very random, all over the place.

Wild flowers in full bloom.

Wild flowers are the kinds of flowers that will just pop up anywhere,

and they're usually very beautiful.

There's been a big push in recent years to kind of encourage the

growth and the seeding of wild flowers because it helps with the

wildlife, particularly with the bees.

Because obviously there's a problem with the decline in bee

population, so wildflowers are, you can find them everywhere now.

These fields are being left to go to seed and for all these wild

flowers to be introduced so that the bees can really enjoy them and

hopefully increase their population.

So the wild flowers in full bloom, they're all out, they're all blooming.

You'll see all the beautiful flowers popping their heads above the long grass.

So we have long grass, which is usually the wild grass that's

been allowed to grow up tall.

And we have short grass, although we don't call short grass

"short grass", it's just grass.

And that's the kind of grass that you would have on a

playing field or in your garden.

If you have an area of grass, that would be a lawn that you would have to mow.

To mow is to cut.

But in a meadow, you'd often have a long grass and that was swaying

in tandem with the wild flowers.

If you do something in tandem, you work together, you do it together.

So the wild grass and the wild flowers were swaying in tandem.

Swaying is moving back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in the breeze.

A huge oak tree marks the far corner of the meadow.

So if it marks the corner, it shows me where the edge of the meadow is,

or the far corner of the meadow.

I know where the far corner of the meadow is because the oak tree is right there.

It marks that point.

A solitary oak.

So this oak is all alone.

Often that is the case, isn't it?

We tend to have these huge oak trees in meadows, and there'll just be one, maybe a

couple, but usually it's just one big one.

They are huge, really, really big trees, and this one is laden with young acorns.

Acorns are the fruit of an oak tree.

If you are laden with something, then you are full of it, you

are weighed down with it almost.

To be laden.

You have lots of things laid on you.

That's the way I think about it.

And this solitary oak is offering respite from the unrelenting sun.

To offer respite.

Respite is like a break or a temporary pause in something that is difficult.

So, if I am suffering with long-term pain, maybe I have problems with

my joints and inflammation, and I'm always in agony, well, medication might

offer me some respite from that pain.

It might give me some short-term relief from that particular troublesome problem.

Some people would find the unrelenting sun too much.

Some people are sun-worshippers and love the sun, but it

can be too much for others.

And so this oak tree is offering shade so that it's a point of

respite for people who don't want to be in the unrelenting sun.

Unrelenting means never ending.

It doesn't stop.

It just keeps going, keeps going.

And obviously we have clear blue skies, which means there's no cloud cover.

There's nothing to stop this sun beating down on you all day long.

And then a squirrel quickly darts up the trunk.

The trunk is the body, the thick part of a tree, the part that goes

from the earth up into the sky.

That's the trunk.

And this squirrel darts up the trunk.

To dart somewhere is to move very quickly.

And squirrels do dart around very fast, so the squirrel darts up

the tree with great dexterity.

To be dexterous means to be strong and good at something physically.

And actually I didn't say great dexterity in the story, I said impressive dexterity.

I'm impressed by how well this squirrel can go from the bottom of the tree to the

top while clutching something in its jaw.

So to clutch something is to hold on something very tightly.

We have a kind of handbag here called a clutch.

A clutch purse or a clutch bag or just a clutch and it's like a

little handbag or a large purse that doesn't have like a strap.

So you don't wear it over your shoulder, you literally just hold onto it.

And because it's got your phone and your money in you do clutch it.

You do hold it tightly and make sure it stays with you at all times 'cause

you don't want to lose those things.

So to clutch.

Then something suddenly buzzes past my ear, making me jump.

Oh!

To jump is to flinch, to physically act very quickly and usually without

thinking, it's like a natural reaction.

If someone sneaks up behind you when you are not expecting and goes, "Boo!"

then you're going to jump.

If you jump in a big way, then you'd say, I jumped out of my skin.

But here I just said, this little buzz by my ear made me jump.

And I do jump actually personally quite a lot, if there's like an unexpected spider.

Ah, I remember once.

Here we go.

Here's my life story.

I remember once lying in bed with my son, so we were sleeping

on a floor bed together.

It's when my son was just about one year old and I remember thinking, 'cause

we're on a floor bed, I thought, "Oh, I bet the spiders at some point do

come and, like, walk across this bed."

And as I thought that, I thought I'll check under my pillow

just to make sure there are no spiders and would you believe it?

Would you, Adam and Eve it?

I lifted up my pillow.

And there was a huge spider, just having a nice time on the sheet under my pillow.

I jumped out of my skin.

It was not pleasant.

And then it didn't make for a good night's sleep because I was, like,

paranoid about spiders forever after that.

Anyway, we no longer use the floor beds.

That's good.

Right.

So coming back to the story, this little buzzing past my

ear, made me jump, a default...

So the default is what you go to, what you keep coming back to, like your

basic setting, a default reaction, which I always scold myself for.

So to scold yourself or to scold someone is to tell them off, to be angry with

them and tell them, that's not right.

Don't do that.

So I tell myself off for having this reaction, this default reaction to bees.

A buzz.

It's just a bee.

It's not gonna hurt you.

It's a busy little bee.

And this is quite a common way to describe a bee, a busy bee

because of the alliteration.

And because bees by nature are very busy, they are busy working,

collecting all the pollen, making honey, looking after the queen.

Bumbling along.

They are called bumblebees and they do bumble along.

We can say that a person bumbles along.

It's where you kind of move around without much direction.

Just like a bee does.

A bee kind of moves around without a definite direction.

It doesn't go directly from one flower to the next.

It kind of hovers up and almost like it's drunk.

It doesn't do it in an efficient way, it just bumbles around.

So it bumbles along minding its own business.

This is a common phrase to mind your own business.

This means to just care about what you are doing, not about

what other people are doing.

So don't worry about anyone else.

Mind your own business.

I might say that to you, "Hey, look!

Stop asking me questions about what I'm doing.

Mind your own business, please."

Look after your own things, your own behaviour, your own projects.

Whatever you are doing, you look after that, you mind your own business.

So this little bee was minding his own business.

As it visited each flower that it came across.

To come across something is to just discover something by accident

as you are travelling along.

I was walking down the high street and I came across a young woman

who looked just like my mother.

We got talking and it turns out that she is my long lost sister.

Okay, moving on.

I could stay here all day, lose myself in this noisy quiet.

Okay. That's a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it?

An oxymoron, where two things don't seem to belong together.

They seem to be the opposite of one another.

A noisy quiet.

It's noisy 'cause you have all that sound of outdoors.

But it's quiet because you don't have any of that industrial

distracting noise of modern living.

So the noisy quiet, just breathing, not thinking, and then the noisy

quiet is shattered, shattered.

Shattered is normally a word that we use to describe the breaking of

glass, but we also use it to talk about the sudden breaking of silence.

The silence was shattered.

Think about how glass breaks, when you break glass, it doesn't just crack.

Usually, it like breaks into a thousand pieces, doesn't it?

It absolutely shatters.

It completely breaks into lots of little pieces.

That's what shattered means.

So this noise shatters the noisy quiet.

And it's my phone rudely, blasting out, blasting out.

It's very loud, it's very rude.

It blasts.

It's desperate for my attention.

Really wants my attention.

And once again, I'm back to reality.

So back to my normal life, boo.

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you found this

particular podcast interesting.

If you did, then please come and let me know.

You can find me on Instagram at British English Pro, and yeah, drop me a

message and tell me what you thought.

Thank you for being here.

Until next time, take care.

And goodbye.