Let's Learn English! Topic: Natural Places 🏜️🏝️🗾 (Lesson Only)

Well, hello and welcome to this

English lesson about natural places.

It's summer here in Canada, so it is enjoyable to

go to see some of the natural places around me.

It's fun to be outdoors.

So today I'll teach you about, I think,

just over 30 words, no phrases today.

All vocabulary words, English vocabulary words about

different natural places that you can visit.

A few of these, I think, are only in North America.

Some of these are only in other parts of the world.

But most of them are common English words that you need

to know if you want to talk about natural places.

And you might be wondering, what's a natural place?

Well, heads up some of the simpler ones.

A beach is a natural place, a marsh is a

natural place, and a geyser is a natural place.

And I'll talk about those three and more

in this English lesson about natural places.

Oasis.

So an oasis, first of all, it's

a fun word to say, oasis. Oasis.

It's also a band, I think,

but they might spell it differently.

An oasis is a place, usually in

the desert, where there is some water.

So if you were walking through the desert and you

saw trees up ahead, you think to yourself, there must

be water there, it must be an oasis.

So if you ever find yourself walking through the desert

and you see trees ahead, it will probably be an

oasis, a place where you can find some water.

Hopefully it's not a mirage.

A mirage is like when you think you see

something, and then it's actually your imagination or the

wind and the sand playing tricks on you.

But an oasis is a beautiful place in the desert,

usually, where you can get a drink of water.

If the water is safe to drink, you can

go and get some at an oasis geyser.

So a geyser is an interesting phenomenon.

It's when water in the ground, it heats up

and then it shoots out of the ground.

Water and steam shoot out of the ground because deep

in the earth's crust, there is a, some sort of

hot rock or lava, something that's heating up water and

making it shoot up out of the ground.

As was mentioned, there was recently a geyser

that I guess exploded almost, uh, in yellowstone.

I think it was Yellowstone, uh, where there was

so much force from the water and steam that

it actually, um, was a, it kind of shot

up a little more vigorously than normal.

I don't think anyone was hurt.

But anyways, a geyser, hot steam and water that

shoots out of the ground, and a hot spring.

As with a geyser, sometimes water is heated up

in the earth and comes to the surface.

A hot spring is a naturally occurring pool

of water that is very, very hot.

Sometimes it's just the right temperature, and you

can go swimming in a hot spring.

But sometimes a hot spring is too

hot to touch or to go in.

But, uh, sometimes there are areas where

you can go to hot springs because

they might have healing, uh, qualities.

The hot spring might be said

to make your body feel better.

I know when I'm really sore from working on the

farm, I wish there was a hot spring near us

that I could go sit in to soothe my body.

A marsh.

So the difference between a marsh and a swamp, that a

marsh usually doesn't have trees, but has lots of water.

And it's usually really shallow water.

Like if you have really long boots on, like

hip waders that go up to here, do you

know they make boots that go up to here?

You could probably walk through a marsh.

A swamp, on the other hand, is a place with

lots of shallow water, but it usually has trees.

We have marshes near us, we have some swamps,

but not as many as you would have like

in Florida or another place like that.

But again, a marsh, a place with very shallow water.

We sometimes say low lying water with no

trees, but lots of grass, and the types

of things that grow in shallow water.

And a swamp then would have some low

lying water, but also trees growing in it.

Kind of a fun word to say, marsh and swamp.

A bog.

So this is a little hard to explain.

A bog is like a marsh, but it also has peat.

It has a certain kind of moss that you can find.

So a bog is, it's not so much

like a marsh, has lots of water.

A bog has lots of really wet earth with some water.

And then you can usually find different kinds

of moss, peat moss in particular in CaNada.

In some parts of OntArio, we have bogs that are filled with

peat moss, and we dig it up and we sell it.

It makes really good potting soil.

Let's talk a little bit about the

difference between a plain and a prairie.

A plain is a very flat piece of earth, okay?

So if you have mountains, sometimes the mountains end and

you have a large plain where the graph, it's just

flat and you can see for miles and miles.

By the way, even though I use kilometers,

I still say miles and miles when talking

about being able to see really far.

In western Canada and in the western US,

we have what are called the prairies.

So a prairie is simply a plain.

It's the same thing.

It's just a different word.

And it's a word we use in North America.

So if you go to the province

of Saskatchewan, you will see the prairies.

We actually call Manitoba, Saskatchewan and part of

AlbERtA the prairie provinces because there's lots of

very, very flat plains, which we call prairie.

A dune.

A dune is a very, very large pile

of sand or a hill made of sand.

We have lakes in Ontario.

I live close to the Great Lakes and there are a

lot of dunes around the great lakes, around some of them.

So as you walk to the beach, you

walk through the sand dunes to get there.

It's very fun.

You take your shoes off, you take your socks

off, you walk barefoot through the dunes and the

sand feels really nice on your feet.

So a dune is a very large hill made

of sand instead of other types of dirt, like

instead of clay or any kind of other dirt.

It is a big hill of sand.

And there was recently a movie dune and dune two, which

take place on a planet that is mostly sand, 99% sand.

And so there are lots of dunes on that planet.

It's science fiction, though.

It's not real.

A cave.

A cave is a natural, um, basically large hole in

a rock, one that you can walk into sometimes.

So as you look at rock, you

sometimes see holes in the rock.

And if you can go in, we call this a cave.

This may have been someone's

house hundreds of years ago.

Someone might have lived in a cave.

A cave, if it's big enough, would

be a natural place to live.

If it was five, 6700 years ago or a

thousand years ago, maybe you lived in a cave.

But, uh, yes, we do not have

a lot of caves around here.

If I go to the north, there is what's

called an escarpment and there are some caves there.

I'll explain what an escarpment is in a bit.

But yes, a cave is basically probably water over time,

removed the rock, or perhaps the rock moved in such

a way over time to create, uh, what we would

call a void in the rock, an area in the

rock that you could go into if you wanted to.

A bay.

So a bay is a large protected area of water

connected to a lake or ocean or the sea.

So you can see here there's usually one entrance to

a bay, but it's kind of, kind of sheltered.

Like if you have a big lake, there might be a bay

at the bottom of the lake where it has kind of an

entrance to the lake, but the bay itself is kind of separate.

It's kind, it's usually a curve.

A bay usually has a curve to it.

You can see this one is shaped like the letter c.

But a bay would be a really cool, sheltered area

close to right on the edge or the shore of

a lake, or on the coast of the ocean.

An archipelago.

Now, I used to pronounce this wrong.

Even English speakers sometimes say words wrong.

But it's archipelago.

This is a series of islands, usually in a row.

There are many of these in the world.

Like, I'm pretty sure Hawaii is an archipelago.

I think Japan is an archipelago.

I think anytime you have a series of

islands, this is the term you would use.

I guess it's probably an underwater mountain range, and

you can just see the tops of the mountains.

Does that make sense?

That's what most islands are.

The top of an undersea mountain, I think.

But an archipelago, a series of islands

that kind of form a chain.

Sometimes we use that term as well,

a chain of islands, a lagoon.

So a lagoon is a mostly enclosed area of water,

salt water, which means it's part of the ocean, where

there might be one little area to enter.

So different than a bay.

This lagoon, as you can see, is

mostly enclosed, mostly surrounded by land.

So a lagoon is a big area on

an island or on the coast of an.

By an ocean, where you have, um.

It is a body of water that is connected

to the ocean by a certain section, but it

is just kind of enclosed on almost every side.

This one looks beautiful, by the way.

The beautiful blue color of that lagoon.

Very, very neat.

Very, very cool.

A cliff.

So a simpler one.

A cliff is simply sheer drop where the

land ends and goes almost straight down.

We call this a cliff.

You might walk to the edge of a

cliff and look down and see water.

You might walk to the edge of a

cliff and look down and simply see land.

A cliff can happen along the coast.

A cliff can happen just anywhere.

It can happen in a mountain range.

Some people like to climb cliffs.

I don't like to climb.

I'm afraid of heights.

And some people like to go,

uh, cliff jumping into water.

I don't like doing that either.

But a cliff is a very sharp drop off of,

uh, usually a mountain or other rocky area, a delta.

So a delta is an area where a

large river flows into a lake or ocean.

So you can see here, as a river gets close to

a larger body of water, it will start to split.

And we call this split.

This whole area is called a delta.

If you follow the Mississippi river in the United

States, you get to the Mississippi delta, where the

Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

So a delta is the area where a

river flows into a larger body of water,

and it usually breaks into different little.

I don't know what you would call those.

Rivulets, maybe, but it breaks into smaller

little tributaries and flows into a larger

body of water, a canyon.

So a canyon is a large area, usually with

a river or stream in the bottom, where I

think the river has eroded the rock over time.

And so you have this higher area,

and then you have the canyon.

So if you go to the Grand Canyon, you'll

just see lots of higher areas like this plateau,

and you'll see a lot of lower areas.

This lower area is called the canyon.

So you have a canyon right here.

And again, the Grand Canyon would be a

place where I would love to visit.

I would love to go and see

the Grand Canyon someday with Jen.

I should take her on a trip.

So there's something called a plateau.

I described that far, high area as a plateau.

This is a plateau.

So it's when you have a lower area of land, and then

when it goes up, the top part is called a plateau.

We also have what's called a butte.

This is very north american, very, very

much the United States would have these.

A butte is a smaller, raised area like that.

And then we have a mesa, which

is kind of in the middle.

So let me go back.

These are mostly from the United States.

Midwest Plateau is a little more universal, but

a plateau is a large, flat area.

I actually kind of live on a plateau.

When you go to the Great Lakes, there's an escarpment, and

then I'm kind of on this raised area in the middle.

A butte is, of course, a smaller one. Butte.

And then a mesa would be

somewhere in the middle, size wise.

So you have three different raised areas.

If you watch any american westerns, like cowboy movies,

you will most likely see images like this.

You'll see plateaus and buttes and mesas,

and you'll hear those words used.

A waterfall.

I live close to Niagara Falls.

That made me thirsty when I said waterfall.

I live close to Niagara Falls.

It is a large waterfall.

A waterfall is where a river or a stream

flows over a cliff, basically, and you get what

looks like this, a really nice waterfall.

Waterfalls can be very loud.

There can be lots of spray

that comes up off a waterfall.

If you go to Niagara Falls, there's an area where there's

just mist all the time because water vapor or water is

spraying up a little bit, and it's just in the air,

which makes it really cool in the winter.

By the way, because everything around

that area freezes really, really nicely.

But a waterfall is an area where water, where a river

or creek or stream flows over a cliff and goes down

to whatever is below a hill and a valley.

So a hill is, of course, a very tall area.

It's not a mountain.

In my mind, the difference between a hill and a

mountain is size, but also what it is made of.

You can see this hill is covered in grass.

Hill can be covered in grass.

It can be covered in trees.

It basically is made from dirt.

There might be a few rocks here and there, but

in my mind, when I think about a hill, a

hill is something that's covered in grass and trees.

And you can climb the hill.

If you're someone who likes winter,

you might ski down a hill.

You can go tobogganing down a

hill as well in the winter.

But a hill would be made dirt, a raised area formed

from dirt with lots of grass and maybe trees on it.

A valley, sorry.

As opposed to a mountain, which is mostly

rocks, rocks with some trees that get smaller

and smaller as you go up.

Eventually there's no trees, and at the

very top there might even be snow.

So a hill made of dirt, a mountain made of rock.

That would be the simple definition.

And then a valley would be the area between

two mountains or between two really large hills.

So you can see here down in the valley, the

part at the very bottom, you can see the mountains

come together and you have the valley there.

So I would call that a mountain

because you can see the rocks.

The mountain is very rocky.

It does have some grass and trees, but

it looks a lot different than a hill.

But yes, the area at the bottom,

I would call a valley a channel.

Now, this is where even I got a little confused.

My understanding is that a channel is water that

connects two larger bodies of water between two land

masses, and that a straight is water that connects

two larger bodies of water between two landmasses.

It got really confusing, because even when I was

reading the definition, the difference between a channel and

a strait, it literally said a channel is a

piece of water between two landmasses that connects two

larger bodies of water, as opposed to a straight,

which is a piece of water that connects two

larger bodies of water between two landmasses.

So they're not the same thing.

But I don't know the difference and I

don't know if it matters for this lesson.

So this is a channel you might

be familiar with the English Channel, which

separates England from mainland Europe.

So it's a section of the ocean, which

we call a channel, and then a straight.

There are lots of straits in the world

as well, just a smaller bit of water

that connects two larger bits of water.

So again, there is a difference.

I don't know what it is, but

hopefully, hopefully you will remember it. A gulf.

So someone asked if a gulf and a bay are the same.

In my mind, a gulf is usually gigantic.

So we have the Gulf of Mexico.

It's a huge area surrounded by a lot of land

where you can still get out to the ocean.

So I think when you look at a map

of the world, you will see gulfs, and they

are usually quite a bit bigger than a bay.

So the Gulf of Mexico is the most familiar to me.

Many people in Canada will travel to Florida or

Mississippi or alabama in order to, um, go on

a vacation, because, um, the Gulf of Mexico is

a great place to go in the winter.

It's nice and warm and beautiful.

A glacier. Um.

So am I saying that right, do you think?

Let me check my pronunciation of a glacier because you.

Can you hear how I'm saying it? Um. Let me see here.

Let me get my little earbud out.

Yeah, let's check the British.

Ah, I see.

So it's because I'm using

the north american pronunciation.

So, glacier, basically a large river, but

it's not water, it's ice and snow.

It obviously moves a lot more slowly.

But this is a glacier.

I think if you're in Britain, you would say glaciere.

I probably say both, but glacier

just rolled off my tongue.

I think that's the pronunciation

I am most familiar with.

So you obviously need to go really

far north or maybe really far south.

But if you see something like this, you're probably

in Norway or Greenland or Iceland, and you will.

Or northern Canada, and you will see a

glacier, a slow moving river of ice and

snow, and then, of course, a beach.

I think we're all familiar with what a beach is.

If you go to the ocean or if you go

to a lake, and if it has a sandy shore

like this, we call this area a beach.

We actually have rocky beaches in Canada

as well, where there's small rocks.

But traditionally, when people think of a beach,

they think of a place like this.

A place where there is sand, where there is

sun, where you can play volleyball on the beach,

you can play frisbee, you can lay on the

beach, if you like, basking in the sun.

There's a phrase from last week, but a

beach is a very nice place to go.

And then canal.

So this is an interesting one, because

this is a lesson about natural places.

And I realized as I was doing

the lesson that this is not natural.

A canal is not natural.

A canal is what we would say is man made.

So a canal is a deep, a deeper area of water

where boats can go that usually connects one place to another.

In Canada, there is a canal that

connects Lake Ontario to Lake Erie.

It's called the Welland Canal.

So this slide doesn't belong in this lesson.

A canal is not manmade or is not natural.

A canal is man made.

So, oops, a small mistake.

A little bonus slide for you.

A canal, an area that connects two

bodies of water that's made by people.

Um, now it is some place to visit.

It's fun to go to the Welland canal

and watch the really large boats go through.

I do enjoy that.

So a canal, a volcano.

A volcano is something that is either

dormant, which means nothing's happening, or it

might erupt, which means lava.

Molten rock, just comes out of the top.

Recently, there was a volcano that erupted in Iceland.

Wasn't it?

Two years ago or a year ago? Very cool.

I would love, from a safe distance, to

watch a volcano erupt at night like this.

Looks like it's a. At night.

It would be very, very cool, but it is very dangerous.

Not something that I should do anytime soon,

but I would love to see that.

It would be fun to see a volcano erupt.

An island is, of course, a piece of land

in the middle of a body of water.

And it can be any size.

Like we would say, japan is an island nation, okay?

Because their country is surrounded

by water on every side.

When you go out in a lake, there can

be an island in the middle of a lake.

There can be an island in the middle of a river.

In fact, the river I live on, if you go down a

few kilometers, there is an island in the middle of the river.

But an island, an area of land in

a body of water that is surrounded by

water on all sides, and then a peninsula.

Kind of hard to explain, but you see this little

piece of land here that juts out into the water.

That's a good verb. Juts.

So a peninsula is an area of land that's surrounded

on three sides or almost totally surrounded by water, but

still there is a little piece connecting it to land.

The funny thing is, I actually

live in the Niagara peninsula.

We have a lake to the north, a lake

to the south, and a river to the east.

So there is actually water on three sides

of the piece of where I live in

Canada, so we call it the Niagara peninsula.

I don't know if it's 100% a peninsula, but

that is what we call it, the Niagara peninsula.

A very cool place to live.

And I live pretty much in the middle of it.

And then there's what's called an escarpment.

An escarpment is a.

It's basically a cliff or a steep slope.

And it.

And it goes for quite a while,

like when you go north of here.

Eventually there's an escarpment that

goes down to the lake.

The lake is about 2.

Escarpment is 2 km from the lake.

And then there's just this steep.

It might be almost a 50 meters drop. And it's.

In some places it's a cliff, in other places it's

a steep slope and we call it an escarpment.

Kind of hard to say.

But the Niagara escarpment is a very cool area to go.

When we go hiking, it's often on the escarpment.

We go to the escarpment to go hiking

because there are a lot of hiking trails

and you can't really live on the escarpment.

So it's this natural wild area where

you can go and do some hiking.

You can even do some camping there if you wanted to.