Learn English with an article from The Guardian

Hello, I'm Gill at engVid, and today the lesson is actually a reading of a newspaper article

from a UK newspaper called The Guardian. And the article is, I think, rather interesting.

It's about robots being used to pick fruit. So instead of humans having to pick the fruit,

which is very hard work in the summer, in the hot weather, it's about training robots to pick fruit.

So I hope you find it interesting. And I think reading an article like this, because it's very

well written and uses a very good range of vocabulary, and it's in an interesting style,

I think it's very good to help you improve your English and maybe learn some new words,

new vocabulary and so on. So I hope you enjoy it. So let's have a look. And just to say,

there will be a quiz following this lesson. So do follow it carefully, maybe watch it more than once

and then do the quiz. OK, so I'm now going to share my screen so that we can see the article.

OK. So here we are. This is the article. And as I say, it's from The Guardian newspaper.

So I often read articles from this newspaper as a sort of change or a bit of a contrast from reading

BBC news articles. Sometimes The Guardian covers a different topic that the BBC hasn't covered,

or they have a different view on it, or they find out different information and so on.

So they are regarded as being a little bit more sort of left wing. The BBC is supposed to be

fairly unbiased, not left or right, but The Guardian is more to the left. But even so,

the reporting is very good and you can learn a lot from it. OK. Right. So let's have a look then.

So here we are. The title here, RoboCrop, world's first raspberry picking robot set to work. OK,

so RoboCrop, I think you may be familiar with a film called RoboCop. So this is a little joke.

Journalists love to make little jokes called puns, P-U-N, pun. RoboCrop sounds like RoboCop,

if you know that film. Anyway, here we are, the world's first raspberry picking robot set to work.

OK, and autonomous machine expected to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day,

outpacing human workers. So outpacing, meaning doing more, getting more fruit picked than human

workers can do, because robots, you know, they don't get tired and they're not so worried about

the hot weather and so on. They just carry on working. OK, so here's a picture of a robot

about, well, it looks more like a strawberry to me than a raspberry. But this gives you an idea

of how the robot operates by getting hold of the piece of fruit and pulling it off the stem.

And this looks like a 16 second video. So we'll give you the link to this, this online article,

so that you can hopefully look at it yourself and you can play the short video if you'd like to,

to see what the robot looks like when it's actually picking the fruit. OK, so here we are.

Let's just, I'll read this first paragraph. So, quivering and hesitant like a spoon wielding

toddler, trying to eat soup without spilling it. The world's first raspberry picking robot

is attempting to harvest one of the fruits. OK, so we've got quite a complicated simile here.

The comparison of the robot is like a toddler, meaning a little child, maybe a two-year-old

child. You know how children, they've got a spoon and they're trying to eat their soup.

And they're going like this. Sort of quivering, that's what quivering means,

little movements like this and hesitant, slowly, not sure if they're doing it right.

And spoon wielding means holding a spoon and going like this. So that's what the robot

must look like when it's moving. You'll be able to see if you play the video clip.

So, that's how it appears to this journalist. So, that's rather a complex simile comparing

one thing with something else. So, let's have a look at the second paragraph.

After sizing it up for an age, the robot plucks the fruit with its gripping arm and gingerly

deposits it into a waiting punnet. The whole process takes about a minute for a single berry.

OK, so you might think, oh my goodness, surely humans can pick fruit more quickly than that.

I think the robot is still learning, but then that's what robots have to do. They have to learn

how to do things and get better and better at it. So, that's it. So, to size something up,

this is a phrasal verb, to size up means to look at something and work out what to do about it

or work out how to deal with it. So, the robot is there working out how to pick this piece of fruit

and then it plucks the fruit, it picks the fruit with its gripping arm and gingerly,

gingerly, that's another word for carefully, carefully, because the fruit is quite soft,

so it can't sort of squeeze it too hard. It's got to hold it very carefully,

gingerly and deposits it, puts it into a waiting container. The word punnet is a particular word

that's used for containers that you put fruit into, especially strawberries and raspberries.

So, a waiting container and the whole process takes about a minute for a single berry.

So, you have to be quite patient. Okay, and then, of course, the journalist says that

it seems like heavy going for a robot that cost 700,000 pounds to develop,

but if all goes to plan, this is the future of fruit picking. So, heavy going, that's another

sort of phrase that's used, meaning sort of hard work, heavy going, very slow. And the robot costs

all this money to develop, but if all goes to plan, this is the future of fruit picking.

Okay, so things could speed up gradually. Right, so let's go on. Each robot will be able to pick

more than 25,000 raspberries a day, outpacing human workers who manage about 15,000

in an eight-hour shift, according to Fieldwork Robotics, a spin-out from the University of

Plymouth. Okay, so when they get up to speed, they will be able to pick more than 25,000

raspberries a day, which is a lot more than the 15,000 that humans can do in an eight-hour

shift. A shift is a period of work. If you don't know that word shift, people work an eight-hour

shift, meaning eight hours. They'll have a break, probably a few breaks in that time,

but it's like a full working day of eight hours. And then the Fieldwork Robotics,

I think, is like a company that has developed out of research done at the University of Plymouth,

which is a university in the south of the UK, on the coast, on the south coast.

Okay, so why use robots and not people? Well, here we are, a bit of an explanation.

The robot has gone on trial in the UK as the farming industry battles rising labour costs

and Brexit-related shortages of seasonal workers. Okay, so the farmers are not able to get the

workers that they used to be able to get, and the cost of labour is going up, so they wanted

to find a different way of dealing with it. Battling just means fighting or struggling,

struggling against rising costs and labour shortages because of Brexit, because the UK

has left the European Union. Not so many people from mainland Europe want to come to the UK,

to the UK anymore, to do some summer work. So, then not so many people are coming now to do this

work. Okay, so as we find out in the next paragraph, actually. So, numbers of seasonal

workers from Eastern Europe have diminished, meaning become less, partly due to Brexit fears,

but also because Romania and Poland's surging economies - surging meaning improving,

their economies are getting stronger - have persuaded their own workers to remain in their

home countries. So, people are staying in their own country now because there is more work available

for them. Okay, so I think this paragraph I will skip, so I'm not going to read every single

paragraph, but for the quiz, please go to the article itself and read each paragraph, or read

it via this video so that you've read everything, because there may be questions in the quiz

about paragraphs that I haven't read or explained. Okay. Okay, so I'll read the next paragraph here

then. So, guided by sensors and 3D cameras, its gripper, the robot's gripper, zooms in - that's

zooms in, going closer - on ripe fruit using machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence.

When operating at full tilt, that means at full speed, its developers say the robot's gripper

picks a raspberry in 10 seconds or less and drops it in a tray where the fruit gets sorted by

maturity before being moved into pummets - that's the containers - ready to be transported to

supermarkets. So, the robot gradually learns to recognize the fruit that is ready for picking,

for picking when it's ripe, it's a certain color. Okay, and then next paragraph, the final robot

version expected to go into production next year will have four grippers all picking simultaneously,

so it won't just have one gripper or two, not like two hands, it will have four,

so it will go much more quickly. Okay, and separate field trials in China have shown the

robot can pick tomatoes and it has also been let loose on cauliflower. So, let loose sounds rather

funny because if you let something loose, it's usually something like a wild animal,

a tiger or a lion has been let loose, you know, it's a bit dangerous. So, this is a bit sort of

a jokey really to let loose a robot on tomatoes as if it might do some damage. So, in journalism,

you will often get sort of jokey language like that. Okay, so as robots don't get tired,

they can pick for 20 hours a day, but the biggest challenge has been getting them to adapt

to different light conditions, says Rui Andres, portfolio manager at Frontier IP,

one of the main backers of fieldwork. A backer is a supporter, a company which is supporting,

maybe investing money, I think probably investing money into the company.

Okay, I'll just skip that a little bit.

Okay, and then the robot is the brainchild of Dr. Martin Stolen, a lecturer in robotics at

Plymouth University, who moved from aerospace engineering into robots and took inspiration

from his grandparents' farm in Norway by tackling one of the most difficult soft fruits. First,

tackling means trying, dealing with, experimenting. He hopes to be able to tweak

the technology. That tweak, you may not know that word, it means to adjust, to make it just right

for the particular type of fruit, and adapting to different types of fruit, to tweak. So,

the robot can be used to pick other berries, fruit, and vegetables. Okay.

So, I think we could skip that paragraph.

And that one, let's do this one here. So, Nicholas Marston, chairman of the British

Summer Fruits, BSF, trade body, trade organization, says fruit growers were 15% to 30% short of

seasonal pickers last summer. Meaning, if they were short of, it means they didn't have them,

they needed more. They needed 15% to 30% more people picking the fruit, but they didn't have

them. So, he said, it's a struggle. There were definitely crop losses last year, and the year

before. So, if they don't have enough people to pick the fruit, the fruit will just stay there,

and then it will go too soft, and it will go bad, and then you've lost it. You can't, you can't

transport it to supermarkets, you can't transport it to supermarkets, you can't transport it to

supermarkets, you can't, you can't transport it to supermarkets and sell it once it's gone too far.

So, they may have lost money from that. Okay. So, let's just skip to this paragraph here.

So, UK farms growing apples, berries, and field crops, that's probably vegetables,

need 70,000 seasonal workers a year. The berry industry alone employs 29,000,

but BSF estimates it will need an extra 2,000 pickers by 2020. So, this article was written

a few years ago now, as people eat more berries. The National Farmers Union has recorded more than

6,000 unfilled vacancies on farms so far this year. So, an unfilled vacancy, that's a job vacancy,

you know, an offer of work, 6,000 spaces that people haven't applied for or come to work.

So, they're very short, as they said, as the journalist said, short of people,

they need more people to do the picking. Okay, and other countries as well are having similar problems.

Right, let's just read this paragraph. Robots are also starting to be used for weeding

and planting crops and milking cows as part of the long-term trend of automation in agriculture.

So, weeding is when you get unwanted plants growing, that you pull them out because they're weeds.

Okay, and planting crops, actually planting probably vegetables, putting seeds in the ground,

and milking cows also. The small robot company based near Salisbury, that's in the west of the UK,

southwest, is trialling robots that look like spiders on wheels, called Tom, Dick and Harry.

So, they've given them men's names, Tom, Dick and Harry. Trialling, to trial, is to do a trial,

to experiment, to see how these robots get on, see how effective they can be.

Okay, they seed, feed, weed, and monitor field crops, such as wheat, in a gentler way

than heavy farm machinery, reducing the need for water and pesticides. So, conveniently in English,

all these activities, three different activities in agriculture, seed, meaning planting seeds,

to grow, feed, putting food on the soil, some sort of fertiliser perhaps, or watering,

and weed, pulling out the weeds. So, seed, feed, weed, they just happen to rhyme.

And monitor, which doesn't rhyme, but never mind, you can't have everything. So,

so they, the robots are better, they're more gentle, gentler than heavy farm machinery

that's been used for years. So, it's more effective.

Okay, so we'll just skip that one and go to this paragraph. If the rise of the robots

materialises, it is expected to mainly affect low-skilled jobs. A new cohort, meaning a new group

of highly skilled workers, will be needed to maintain and debug the machines. So, to look after

and even to do with the IT, with the computer coding and so on of the machines, people with

those skills will be needed. But Marston cautions, to caution is to warn, to say, "Ah, but remember,

it will be 10 years before robots will work as effectively as people." So, maybe that 10 years

is now reduced to eight years because this article was written a while ago now. So, but anyway,

I'm sure the robots are quickly learning how to, to do all this amazing farm work.

Okay, so that's the article. So, so do read it all. And before you do the quiz,

I hope you will give the quiz a try. And just to recommend the Guardian online news website,

we'll give you the link. It's, it's a very, very good standard of journalism, very well written.

And at the end of the article, you get extra links, other articles on the same subject,

so more on this story about robots, different articles about robots, going back. So, it's,

it's a good, well-designed website for finding lots of news articles. So, I hope that's been

an interesting article for you and introduced you to some, some new vocabulary and new sort

of phrases and some sort of jokey language, entertaining language. I hope, I hope you've

enjoyed it. Do look out for the other articles that we've done previously, and I'm sure there

will be more to come in the future. So, well, that's all for today then, but do go to the quiz,

and if you haven't already, subscribe to my channel. I hope you will, and come back and

see some more videos. So, that's it for today. Thanks for coming and see you again soon. Okay,

bye for now. Bye.