Welcome to English as a Second Language podcast number 809, A Weather Forecast.
This is English as a Second Language podcast, episode 809.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful los angeles california, home of hollywood, home of the stars, home of yes, a podcast, of course.
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The learning guides contain a complete transcript of everything we say and by we I mean I say on this episode, as well as lots of other things to help you improve your English.
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This episode is a dialogue between Colleen and Jerry about predicting the weather.
Let's get started.
I want to hear the weather forecast for this week.
What's so important about this week?
Tomorrow this warm front will move out and a cold front will move in, bringing with it windy conditions with a chance of thunderstorms.
Yay!
Yay!
On Tuesday, things will clear up in the morning and we'll have sunny skies.
But it will be chilly in the afternoon and the skies will be overcast.
There'll be a chance of precipitation in the evening with very high levels of humidity.
Yay!
On Friday, the temperature will drop sharply and we'll be lucky if we reach 20 degrees.
Oh, yeah.
What was all that about?
If the weather is nice this weekend, my in-laws plan to drive up to spend a few days at our house.
Oh, I see.
Colleen and Jerry are listening to the radio.
Colleen says to Jerry, Shh.
This is when you want someone to be quiet, of course.
You go, Shh.
I want to hear the weather forecast for this week.
The weather forecast is a prediction about what the weather will be like tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the day after that, the entire week, usually for maybe five to seven days in advance.
Jerry says, what's so important about this week?
But Colleen doesn't answer him.
She just says, shh, telling him to be quiet, to stop talking.
My wife does that to me a lot, too.
Maybe I'm talking too much.
No, no, can't be possible.
The radio announcer says, tomorrow, this warm front will move out and a cold front will move in.
A warm front, F-R-O-N-T, is a large area of warm air that moves toward another area with cold air.
So when we're talking about the weather, a warm front would bring warmer temperatures to where you are living.
A cold front is the opposite.
A cold front is a large amount of cold air that moves into a certain area or place.
The radio announcer says that the cold front is moving in.
In other words, that's what's coming in the future.
The warm front is moving out.
It's going away.
This means the temperatures will be colder.
It also means the Aradia announcer says that there will be windy conditions with a chance of thunderstorms.
Windy, W-I-N-D-Y, is when the air moves very quickly, when the air moves at very high speeds.
Thunderstorms is a weather event where there are lots of dark clouds and rain and lightning, which are flashes of light in the sky and thunder.
Thunder is that low noise that you hear after you see the lightning.
That's a thunderstorm.
Where I grew up in Minnesota, there are lots of thunderstorms in the summertime.
In fact, I was back visiting not too long ago, and there was a thunderstorm the first day I came.
Maybe they were trying to tell me something, like I shouldn't go back to Minnesota to visit.
I don't know.
Colleen, after hearing the radio announcer's forecast, says yay, she's happy, which is kind of strange that you're happy if there's going to be thunderstorms.
The radio announcer continues.
On Tuesday, things will clear up in the morning and we'll have sunny skies.
To clear up. is a two-word phrasal verb that here means for the clouds to go away.
So instead of having clouds in the sky, it becomes sunny.
Normally that would be a good thing.
Sunny is when you have lots of sunshine, when you can see the sun.
But Colleen says, oh, she seems disappointed at this news.
Again, a little strange.
The radio announcer continues.
But it will be chilly in the afternoon and the skies will be overcast.
Chilly, C-H-I-L-L-Y, is an adjective meaning cool or cold, not warm.
It's a little chilly outside.
Usually means it's not cold.
It's not so cold you're going to freeze.
But you might need a jacket or a sweater, something to keep you warm.
Chili, C-H-I-L-E, is, well, it's a country in South America.
And chili, C-H-I-L-I, is a food that you can eat.
You can eat chili chili in Chile.
We used to say stuff like that when we were kids.
Same pronunciation, three different spellings.
Isn't English wonderful?
The radio announcer continues that the skies will be overcast.
Overcast, O-V-E-R-C-A-S-T, means there are lots of clouds in the sky, usually gray clouds.
It's not sunny.
It's not thunderstorms.
It's not raining, usually.
But when we say it's overcast, we mean it's cloudy.
There isn't a lot of sunshine.
The announcer says there'll be a chance of precipitation in the evening with very high levels of humidity.
Precipitation is just another word for liquid coming from the sky, either rain or snow or some sort of liquid that is falling out of the clouds.
That's precipitation.
In the United States, when you are listening to a weather forecast, They may talk about how much precipitation there was, and that will be measured in inches.
So they might say, we had an inch of rain last night.
That means that if you put a little glass outside and you let the water fall in it, there would have been approximately one inch of water that would have fallen.
That's how we measure precipitation in English.
Well, in the United States, we use inches, of course.
The announcer also says there's going to be high levels or a lot of humidity.
Humidity.
H-U-M-I-D-I-T-Y is a way of measuring humidity, the water that's in the air before it comes to the ground.
It's really an expression of what we call water vapor in the air.
If it's very humid out, For example, you're in Florida in the summertime, or in the Caribbean or by the ocean, and it's very hot.
There's often a lot of humidity.
It feels like there's water in the air even when it's not raining.
Colleen is happy with the forecast of precipitation and high humidity.
The radio announcer then continues.
On Friday, the temperature will drop sharply and we'll be lucky if we reach 20 degrees.
The temperature, of course, is a measurement of how hot or cold something is.
In the United States, we use the Fahrenheit scale.
In most other places in the world, the Celsius scale is used.
When we say something will drop, we mean it will decrease.
Sharply means suddenly and dramatically, a long way.
When we say the temperature will drop sharply, we mean maybe 50 degrees this morning and then this afternoon it will be only 30 degrees or 20 degrees.
That would be to drop sharply.
Sharply has a couple of other meanings in English.
Take a look at our learning guide for those.
The announcer says, we'll be lucky if we reach 20 degrees.
To reach means for the temperature to get up to a certain point.
In this case, 20 degrees.
Degrees, of course, is the way that we measure, the unit, that we measure and express temperature, both in Fahrenheit and Celsius.
Colleen, again, is happy.
She says, oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Jerry says, what was all that about?
Why were you getting happy, basically when the weather was going to be bad or the forecast said it was going to be bad?
Colleen says, if the weather is nice this weekend...
My in-laws are either your father-in-law or your mother-in-law, usually both of them.
They're the father and mother of your husband or your wife, the parents of your spouse.
So if you're married, you have in-laws.
You have a father-in-law and a mother-in-law.
I have a father-in-law and a mother-in-law.
My wife has a father-in-law and a mother-in-law.
Those are my parents.
And of course, my in-laws are her parents.
I could make a lot of jokes about in-laws at this point, but I won't.
Now let's listen to the dialogue, this time at a normal speed.
Shh, I want to hear the weather forecast for this week.
What's so important about this week?
Tomorrow this warm front will move out and a cold front will move in, bringing with it windy conditions with a chance of thunderstorms.
Yeah.
On Tuesday, things will clear up in the morning and we'll have sunny skies.
Oh.
But it will be chilly in the afternoon and the skies will be overcast.
There'll be a chance of precipitation in the evening with very high levels of humidity.
Yeah.
On Friday, the temperatures will drop sharply and we'll be lucky if we reach 20 degrees.
Oh, yeah.
What was all that about?
If the weather is nice this weekend, my in-laws plan to drive up to spend a few days at our house.
Oh, I see.
From sunny Southern California...
We have our wonderful script writer to thank for our wonderful scripts.
Thank you, Dr. Lucy Say.
From sunny Los Angeles, California, I'm Jeff McQuillan.
Thank you for listening.
Come back and listen to us again here on ESL Podcast.
English as a Second Language Podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
Copyright 2012 by the Center for Educational Development.
