Welcome to English as a Second Language podcast number 534, Types of Guns and Weapons.
This is English as a Second Language podcast episode 534.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
Our website is eslpod.com.
Go there to download a learning guide for this episode that will help you improve your English faster.
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This episode is called Types of Guns and Weapons, somewhat of an unusual topic for us.
It's going to be a dialogue between Bobby, who is a woman in this dialogue, and Emmanuel.
Let's get started.
I've always pegged you as the nonviolent type.
What's with your fascination with guns and that sort of thing?
I come from a long line of military officers and I grew up with all of it.
Believe it or not, I learned how to fire pistols and rifles before I was ten years old, and by the time I was fourteen I was a pretty good shot.
I hope you fired at targets and not at people.
No, not people.
We did do some hunting when I was young, but I mainly honed my skills with target practice.
I'd like to try target practice with a machine gun or a grenade launcher.
I'm sure I'd at least hit something.
Yeah, right.
What really interests me are the big weapons, like missiles.
You know, like anti-ballistic missiles and torpedoes.
You can have all of the missiles you want.
I'll be hiding in the tank.
Bobby begins by saying to Emmanuel, I've always pegged you as a non-violent type.
To peg someone as something means to believe that that person has certain characteristics or will behave in a certain way.
For example, you might say I've always pegged you as a good swimmer, meaning I've always thought that you were, or believed that you were, a good swimmer.
You could also say I always pegged him as a great decision maker, someone who could make good decisions.
Bobby says that she's always pegged Emanuel as the nonviolent type.
Nonviolent means you don't believe that people should hurt each other.
Usually that means you're not interested in things like guns and weapons.
A weapon is merely anything you use to hurt someone or to protect yourself.
So a knife could be a weapon, for example.
A gun is a weapon.
Bobby then says, what's with your fascination with guns and that sort of thing?
What's with is a construction we use to mean tell me more about or why do you do that?
I don't understand why you are acting this way.
Someone may be feeling sad and they may be crying.
And you may say, what's with the crying?
What's wrong?
There's something of a challenge there too when we use this expression sometimes.
What's with your bad attitude?
It's almost like you're puzzled, you're surprised and perhaps you're a little critical, though not always.
So Bobby says, what's with your fascination, your extreme interest with guns and that sort of thing?
That sort of thing means related things.
Emmanuel says I come from a long line of military officers.
He's trying to explain why he's interested in guns.
He says I come from a long line of.
The expression to come from a long line of something means that you had relatives, your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, your great-great-grandfather or other people who came before you in your family, who were interested in some particular area or who had a certain job.
For example, I come from a long line of plumbers.
My grandfather was a plumber.
My great-grandfather was a plumber.
My great-great-grandfather was a plumber.
My uncles were all plumbers.
My father was the only male in his family that wasn't a plumber.
But I could say I come from a long line of plumbers.
I could say that.
I don't actually say that, especially to my wife, because then she wants me to fix the sink.
Emmanuel however, comes from a long line of military officers, people in the army, the navy soldiers.
An officer is someone who is in charge of soldiers.
So a lieutenant, a sergeant, a captain, a general, these would all be military officers.
Emmanuel says, I grew up with all of it, meaning it was something I saw as a young child.
He says believe it or not, an expression we use when we're about to say something that the person might not believe.
Something surprising.
Believe it or not, he says, I learned how to fire pistols and rifles before I was 10 years old.
To fire a gun means to make the gun shoot, to pull what we call the trigger, moving your finger so that the bullet will leave the gun.
That's to fire a gun.
This particular gun is a pistol.
A pistol is a small gun that you can hold in your hand.
Someone who is robbing a bank, who is trying to steal money from a bank, might have a pistol.
A rifle is a large, long gun, usually used for hunting.
It can also be used in a war, however.
So, Emmanuel learned how to fire, how to use pistols and rifles, even before he was 10 years old.
And by the time I was 14, I was a pretty good shot.
To be a good shot means that you can use a gun or a rifle very well.
You can, for example, hit a bird flying up in the air with just one bullet, one shot.
That would be a good shot.
In the police and in the military forces, they train soldiers to use guns.
If you are very good at what you do.
If you're an excellent what we would call marksman or markswoman, then they would call you a sniper, S-N-I-P-E-R or a sharpshooter.
These are both terms used to describe someone who is an excellent shot, not just a good shot, a very good shot.
Bobby says, When we talk about shooting guns, a target is an object or a thing that you try to hit with the bullet of your gun.
You can go, for example, to special places where they have targets that are small circles.
We would call them concentric circles one circle inside of a larger circle inside of a larger circle, and you try to hit the middle of this circle.
That would be a target.
She is saying here that she hopes that Emmanuel was firing at was shooting at targets and not at people.
Emmanuel says, no, not people.
We did do some hunting when I was young.
Notice here he could have just said we hunted people.
But to express the past tense.
He instead uses.
This is to emphasize, usually in a case where you are making a distinction so that the other person understands that.
Well no, I didn't do this, but I did do this.
Hunting is when you go out and try to kill animals.
Hunting is legal in many states.
It's only legal usually for a certain number of weeks and during a certain time of year.
The fall is a very common time when there is hunting season.
This is especially popular in states such as Minnesota and Wisconsin, where it is legal during certain times of the year to go and hunt deer and hunt certain kinds of birds.
I know people who have done this.
They own guns and they get a license to go and hunt.
You need to get a license.
You need to get permission from the government.
Emmanuel says we did do some hunting when I was young, but I mainly meaning I mostly honed my skills with target practice.
To hone H-O-N-E your skills means to improve your ability to do something, to get better at something.
You might say, I'm going to hone my typing skills.
I'm going to sit at my keyboard and improve my typing.
That would be to hone your skills, to make them better.
Emmanuel says that he honed his skills with the gun.
By doing target practice.
Target practice is shooting at targets.
We talked about before.
There are places where you can go that are called shooting ranges.
And you can go and practice shooting at these targets.
There are clubs gun clubs you can join that have these special buildings, that have target practice shooting ranges.
Bobby says, A machine gun is a large gun that fires many bullets automatically and very quickly.
It's the sort of thing that you would use in a war.
It's not the sort of thing you would normally use, for example, with the police.
Although, if you remember the 1920s and 30s in the United States and ever saw any of the movies about the gangsters people who were professional criminals
Sometimes in the movies you see them with machine guns.
Of course, sometimes you saw them in real life with machine guns.
That is a criminal use of machine guns, but...
The idea here is that Bobby would have to use a machine gun because she says I'm sure I'd at least hit something, meaning she's not a very good shot.
So she would need something like a machine gun in order to hit something, in order to have the bullet go through something.
Emmanuel says, Yeah, right.
What really interests me are the big weapons like missiles, you know, like anti-ballistic missiles and torpedoes.
We've already talked about what weapons are.
Anything you use to hurt someone else or something else.
A missile is a bomb that is sent through the air at a long distance.
Sometimes it is dropped by a plane.
Sometimes it is launched.
It is shot from the ground.
An anti-ballistic missile is a bomb that is made to hit other bombs that are in the air.
So it's sort of a missile to stop another missile.
A torpedo is a missile that is shot by a submarine, a ship that is underneath the water.
Bobby says, you can have all the missiles you want.
I'll be hiding in the tank.
A tank, T-A-N-K, is a very large, heavy vehicle.
It's like a big truck that is used by the Army and it has a large gun on the top of it for fighting.
Tank, like the word fire we used earlier, has a couple of different meanings in English, so take a look at the learning guide for some additional explanations.
Now let's listen to the dialogue again, this time at a normal speed.
I've always pegged you as the non-violent type.
What's with your fascination with guns and that sort of thing?
I come from a long line of military officers and I grew up with all of it.
Believe it or not, I learned how to fire pistols and rifles before I was 10 years old.
And by the time I was 14, I was a pretty good shot.
I hope you fired at targets and not at people.
No, not people.
We did do some hunting when I was young, but I mainly honed my skills with target practice.
I'd like to try target practice.
With a machine gun or a grenade launcher, I'm sure I'd at least hit something.
Yeah, right.
What really interests me are the big weapons, like missiles.
You know, like anti-ballistic missiles and torpedoes.
You can have all of the missiles you want.
I'll be hiding in the tank.
The script for this episode was written by someone who has honed her skills for many years at writing.
Dr Lucy Say.
From Los Angeles, California, I'm Jeff McQuillan.
Thank you for listening.
Come back and listen to us next time, won't you, on ESL Podcast.
English as a Second Language Podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
Copyright 2009 by the Center for Educational Development.
