Welcome to English as a Second Language podcast number 847, Experiencing a Blackout.
This is English as a Second Language podcast, episode 847.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
We have a website at eslpod.com.
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This episode is a dialogue between George and Inga about what happens when you don't have any electrical power.
Let's get started.
Whoa, what happened?
The lights went out.
Did we blow a fuse, or is this a blackout?
Well, I don't see any lights on in any of the houses down the street.
It's pitch black out there.
So it's another power outage.
Somehow the circuits got overloaded again.
I wonder how long we'll have to do without electricity this time.
I wonder if it's our power grid or if this is a citywide blackout.
All right, we'd better light a few candles.
There's no telling how long this will last.
No, it's not like last summer, when we had rolling blackouts because of the surge in demand due to the heat.
Do you remember how we passed those hours of darkness?
Yes, I do.
What are you suggesting?
I'm just saying that there's no reason to waste a perfectly good blackout.
Our dialogue begins with George saying, whoa, what happened?
Whoa, usually spelled W-H-O-A, is an expression of surprise.
What happened, George asks.
Inga says the lights went out, meaning the electricity has stopped working.
Inga says, Did we blow a fuse or is this a blackout?
To blow B-L-O-W a fuse F-U-S-E means that you are using too much electricity in a certain part of your house.
The fuse is something that protects your house, protects the things in your house if you try to get too much electricity into a certain area.
Most houses nowadays don't have fuses, which are little devices, little things, little objects that you put into your electrical what we call the electrical panel, in the back of your house or wherever it is.
Nowadays, they use things that are called circuit breakers, which are just basically switches.
Fuses are things that you actually have to take out and replace.
In the house I grew up in many years ago, we had fuses.
Now the house I live in now has these new switches called circuit breakers.
Inga is asking if She and George have blown a fuse.
Or if this is a blackout, a blackout B-L-A-C-K-O-U-T one word is when an entire area, sometimes an entire city, loses power, loses electrical power.
There is no electricity available anywhere.
Blackout could also be when you don't remember something after drinking a lot of alcohol.
That's also called a blackout.
But here it means when you don't have electrical power for a large area of a city.
George says, well, I don't see any lights on in any of the houses down the street.
George goes out and looks to see if there is electricity in the other houses, and he doesn't see any.
That means it's probably a blackout.
George says it's pitch black out there.
The expression pitch, P-I-T-C-H, black, means extremely black with no light whatsoever.
Inga says, so it's another power outage.
A power outage, O-U-T-A-G-E, is the same as a blackout.
It's a period of time when there is no electricity available.
Inga says, somehow the circuits got overloaded again.
A circuit, C-I-R-C-U-I-T, is a path that electricity follows between two points.
Inga here is referring probably to the power plants, the place where the electricity is generated that somehow their circuits got overloaded.
To be overloaded means that there is too much demand, in this case for electricity, and the place that is generating the electricity can't produce it fast enough.
And so the circuits overload and nobody gets any power at all.
Inga says, I wonder how long we'll have to do without electricity this time.
To do without means not to have.
Electricity, you probably know, is power, energy that is carried through wires and cables, used to operate almost everything that is in your house.
That's a machine.
Mostly, these are things that run on or are powered by electricity.
Except me, I'm powered by happiness.
I'm powered by your emails, your positive feedback.
That's my power.
George says, I wonder if it's our power grid or if this is a citywide blackout.
A power grid...
GRID is a network of power companies and users of electricity that are connected together.
Power grids usually are very large.
A citywide blackout would be a blackout that only affected one particular city.
Citywide, C-I-T-W-I-D-E, is one word meaning across or covering an entire city.
George says, all right, we'd better light a few candles.
A candle is c-a-n-d-l-e is a small object usually made of wax that has something that you can light so that it burns we call it a wick w-i-c-k it's basically a piece of string that burns in the center of the wax and provides light many restaurants have candles at night It's considered perhaps romantic.
You may have candles in your house.
But George isn't trying to be romantic here.
At least I don't think he is.
He instead wants to get some candles so they have some light.
George says there's no telling how long this will last.
The expression there's no telling is used to mean that it's impossible to know what will happen or when it will happen.
There's no telling how many beautiful women will be waiting for George Clooney or Brad Pitt to get their autographs, their signatures.
There's no telling.
Could be hundreds, could be thousands.
I don't know.
Inga says no, it's not like last summer, when we had rolling blackouts because of the surge in demand due to the heat.
A rolling R-O-L-L-I-N-G blackout is when the power company decides to stop giving power to different areas first one area, then another area, then another area so that they're able to continue generating or producing enough power, at least for everyone for a certain amount of time, but not for everyone for the entire time.
Instead of just one part of the city not having power, they do a rolling blackout where they give one part of the city power for four hours, let's say, and another part of the city power for four hours, and so forth.
A surge, S-U-R-G-E, is a sudden increase in something that usually only lasts for a short time.
Surge has a couple of different meanings in English, however.
Take a look at our learning guide for some additional ones of those.
Inga is saying that last summer there was a surge in demand due to the heat.
In other words, because it was so hot, more people were using their air conditioners to keep themselves cool.
This caused an increase in the demand for electricity.
A surge in the demand and because of that sudden increase, the power company didn't have enough power for all the different parts of the city.
This happens Occasionally.
It happened in California.
I remember, oh, maybe seven, ten years ago, it was happening quite a bit, maybe longer.
It hasn't happened very recently here, but it still does happen in other cities.
Inga says, do you remember how we passed those hours of darkness?
She's asking George if he remembers what they did last summer during the rolling blackouts, when they did not have electricity.
That's what she means by those hours of darkness without light.
George says, yes, I do.
What are you suggesting?
Inga says, I'm just saying that there's no reason to waste a perfectly good blackout.
Perfectly here means completely.
It's a word used for emphasis here.
It's often used before the adjective good.
It's a perfectly good sweater.
It's a perfectly good car.
You're saying that there's nothing wrong with it.
Inga however, is suggesting that she and her husband George can take advantage of this blackout somehow.
Perhaps, of course, in some romantic way.
Now let's listen to the dialogue, this time at a normal speed.
Whoa, what happened?
The lights went out.
Did we blow a fuse or is this a blackout?
Well, I don't see any lights in any of the houses down the street.
It's pitch black out there.
So it's another power outage.
Somehow the circuits got overloaded again.
I wonder how long we'll have to do without electricity this time.
I wonder if it's our power grid or if this is a citywide blackout.
All right, we'd better light a few candles.
There's no telling how long this will last.
No, it's not like last summer, when we had rolling blackouts because of the surge in demand due to the heat.
Do you remember how we passed those hours of darkness?
Yes, I do.
What are you suggesting?
I'm just saying that there's no reason to waste a perfectly good blackout.
There's no telling how many more scripts our scriptwriter will write in the future, but we hope that it will be, in fact, many more.
Thank you, scriptwriter, Dr. Lucy Say.
From Los Angeles, California, I'm Jeff McQuillan.
Thank you for listening.
Come back and listen to us again right 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.
