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Hello and welcome to Real Easy English.
In this podcast we have real conversations in Easy English to help you learn.
I'm Neil.
And I'm Becca.
You can find a video version of this podcast, along with a transcript to help you learn, on our website pbclearningenglishcom.
Hi Becca, how are you?
I'm well, thanks Neil.
How about you?
I'm pretty good.
Today we're talking about phones.
Now, Becca, how much time do you spend on your phone every day?
I don't know the number.
I haven't checked my screen time in a while.
So your screen time is the time in which you spend looking on your phone screen.
I probably would guess that I spend quite a few hours looking at my phone.
How about you?
Yeah, I spend probably a lot of time on my phone every day.
And I'm not really happy about that.
Because I think it's a waste of time.
But I do it like millions of other people.
Yeah, I mean, phones can be very useful.
You can get information very quickly.
Yes, this is true.
They are also really handy, of course, for finding out information quickly.
And you can do loads of things that used to be quite hard to do.
Yeah, one of those things that we can probably do better with phones is to connect with people and to have contact with people.
Do you get lots of notifications from your friends and family on your phone?
Because I don't like spending too much time on my phone, I turned off my notifications.
Now, notifications are the little messages that you get from apps when people or the app wants to tell you something.
OK, so that's a good tip really, if you want to reduce your screen time, is to turn off your notifications.
Yeah.
I also try not to doom scroll.
What's doom scrolling?
That's probably how I spend a lot of time on my phone.
So when you doom scroll you look at negative news stories or things that make you feel maybe a bit upset, a bit sad.
And you just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.
And it really doesn't make you feel good.
And so if you do, like you, Becca, a lot of doom scrolling, that could be a sign of an addiction.
Now, an addiction is something that you can't stop doing.
So, for example, an obvious example is smoking.
People who smoke, they have an addiction.
It's something they have to do.
And we hear a lot about phone addiction.
And it's really hard to stop an addiction, even though I know doom scrolling is very bad for me and it doesn't make me feel good.
I can't stop doing it.
I don't think you're alone, Becca.
But do you think most people look at their phone too much?
I do.
And I think that it doesn't matter how old you are.
I see phone addictions with people my age, people younger and people older.
I think that a lot of people are addicted to their phones.
Yeah.
If you just look around anywhere, most people have their head down at that angle, looking at their phone, missing what's going on in the real world.
OK, let's recap the vocabulary we learn in this episode.
First, screen time.
And that's the time that you spend looking at an electronic screen.
We usually use it to talk about looking at our phones.
We heard doom scrolling.
Doom scrolling is when you look at one story after another, after another, after another, and they're usually bad news stories.
Notifications are the messages that apps will send you to make you check your phone.
If something is an addiction, it means that you can't stop doing it.
That's it for this week's episode of Real Easy English.
You can head to our website for a free worksheet, And we'll be back next week with another conversation in Easy English.
Goodbye for now.
Bye.
