As from today, I'm going to be reading you a book by Robert Louis Stevenson which is a classic Treasure Island.
I remember reading this book when I was a boy and in fact it was written in 1883, so it's rather an old book.
Schoolchildren these days really enjoy this adventure story and i'm going to read it to you today, starting with chapter one.
But what i've done is to rewrite this book completely to a B1 level.
It's a faithful B1 version with the official glossary from Cambridge at B1.
So what I have done is to write the text and highlight the words in bold which are B1 level.
And I will put this audio script on my website so you can actually read it as well and identify those important B1 level words.
Today what I'll do is to read chapter 1 and I'll pick out some words to talk about.
What I'm going to talk about today are the phrasal verbs in Chapter 1.
I'll explain them to you, and then there'll be a short test afterwards.
So this is a B1 recording of the complete book by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Here we go!
Hello and welcome to Practicing English.
My name is Mike Bilbre and these are podcasts for students of English at B1 or B2 levels.
For transcripts, please go to practicingenglish.com.
Would you like to see my books for learning B1 and B2 level English?
Then go to the show notes at your podcast app, and just below today's lesson you'll see a link to Amazon and there you'll be able to read about my new B1 book and my B2 book.
Check it out today.
Before I start, I'm going to tell you briefly about Robert Louis Stevenson, who he was.
Yesterday I started reading The Black Cat, which is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, who was American.
But Robert Louis Stevenson was actually born in Scotland, in Edinburgh, in 1850, and he was very ill as a child, but he had a wonderful imagination.
He refused to enter into his father's engineering profession, and he chose literature instead.
He travelled to improve his breathing problems.
It was then that he met his wife Fanny Osborne in France.
Robert was a well-known Victorian author.
He wrote classics like Treasure Island in 1883 and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886.
Due to poor health, he moved to Samoa, where he was known as Tusitala, the teller of stories.
He died of a brain hemorrhage in 1894.
He was only 44 years old, leaving behind much-loved adventure stories still read today.
So that's just a brief introduction about Robert Louis Stevenson.
I'm going to give you some of the phrasal verbs at B1 level which appear in the story and let's talk about them.
And then there'll be a test on these afterwards.
So the first one is to leave out.
If you leave something out, you omit it.
It's interesting that most phrasal verbs have a Latin-based word equivalent.
So the phrasal verbs are usually the Anglo-Saxon part of English, and there's also a Latin part of English which came from French.
And so we do have a lot of these words which are Latin based, which sound more formal than the Anglo-Saxon or the phrasal verbs.
So to leave out is to omit, which means not to do something.
Okay, so I was making a cake and I left out the sugar, so it didn't taste very sweet.
It means I didn't include the sugar.
I didn't put it in the cake to leave out.
When I came home today, my wife asked me about what I'd done, and so I told her about my day, but I left out the part where I scratched the car because I knew she would be very upset.
So you can leave out part of a story as well.
I left out the part where the car was scratched, because my wife would get very angry and very upset about it.
My next one is to look around.
It's a nice casual sort of phrasal verb, this one.
To look around is to go somewhere and look at the things that you can see on one side and on the other, in front of you and behind.
You can go to a city perhaps, visit a town as a tourist and you can look around.
So in that case, rather than just looking from one side to the other, you are walking around its streets and enjoying the sights of the city.
To look around.
You can look around a shop as well.
You can go in and perhaps you're not interested in buying something.
You just want to look around, to look at what is in the shop.
So this word around is a nice kind of casual, relaxed word.
And the same way you can walk around.
If you're looking around a town which you're visiting, well then you're walking as well.
So you walk around to walk around a town and look at things which you're interested in.
To walk around.
So it doesn't have to be in a circle, because we think of the word round as being a circle.
It could mean and it often does mean just going in different directions backwards and forwards but with no particular direction in mind to walk around.
The next one is not really a phrasal verb.
It's just a verb and a preposition or should I say really an adverb particle to look up.
We use verbs of movement with adverb particles just to give the direction.
And in this case, it's to look up.
So perhaps I'm doing something like reading a book and then somebody approaches and so I look up and say hello.
It means I raise my head to look up.
The next one is to stay away.
To stay away, to stay away from somebody because, well, maybe you don't like somebody or somewhere.
You don't want to go there.
Perhaps you've been to a shop and you didn't really like it very much.
So you stay away from that shop.
You don't go back.
If you work or you're at school, there might be somebody you don't particularly like very much.
And so you stay away from them.
You do not go and say hello.
You turn around and walk away.
To stay away.
The next one is to look out for something.
This really is like to wait for something.
For something that you are expecting to happen.
We often look out for the postman.
We're expecting a letter, an important letter.
And so, every morning, you look out of the window.
Look out of the window which is slightly different meaning, just meaning, look from the inside to the outside, but to look out for meaning, you are waiting for somebody to arrive.
In this case, the postman.
To pull out is the next one.
The phrasal verb to pull out.
So again, really, it's just an adverb particle after a verb.
To pull, okay, is to move something in a particular direction.
Pull the door shut.
If you pull something out, it means that it must be in somewhere.
So perhaps you want to blow your nose.
And so you pull out your handkerchief from your pocket to pull out.
The next one is to give in.
To give in is perhaps when you've been trying something difficult and you can't do it.
And so you say, ah, that's too hard for me.
I'm not going to continue doing this.
Maybe it's a Sudoku or some puzzle that you can't do.
I give in.
It's too difficult for me.
Now to give in also can mean when perhaps you have argued with somebody and you say one thing and the other person says something completely different, the opposite.
You start to argue.
Well, perhaps you don't like arguing, so in the end you give in and you say okay, I don't want to argue anymore, right?
So to give in when something's too difficult to do like a puzzle, and to give in when you are arguing and to say I don't want to argue anymore.
Right.
Well, that's it.
Those are the phrasal verbs.
I would like you to listen for them while I'm reading the story.
So they are to leave out, look around, walk around, look up.
Stay away from, look out for, pull out and give in.
The audio script is available at my website at practicingenglish.com podcast 290.
There is a link from your podcast app there directly to my webpage where you can read it, and you can see these phrasal verbs and other B1 words there as well.
Okay, so listen out for those phrasal verbs.
Here we go with chapter one of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
¶¶
Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey and some other gentlemen asked me to write down the whole story of Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end.
I must leave out only the exact position of the island because there is still treasure there.
So I begin my story in the year 1759 and I go back to the time when my father ran the Admiral Benbow Inn.
That was when the old sailor, with a sword cut on his face, first came to stay with us.
I remember him very clearly.
He came walking slowly to the door of the inn and a man followed him with a huge box on a small cart.
He was tall and strong, with brown skin from the sun.
His dirty blue coat was old, and his hair was tied in a long tail.
His hands were rough, and one cheek had a long white cut.
He looked around the bay while singing quietly to himself.
Then he began to sing an old sea song, which he sang many times later.
Fifteen men on a dead man's chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
His voice was high and shook a little, like a voice broken by many years at sea.
Then he knocked on the door with a stick and asked my father in a rough voice for a glass of rum.
He drank it slowly, enjoying the taste while he looked at the sea and at the sign above the inn.
This is a good bay, he said at last, and a pleasant inn.
Do you get many people here, mate?
My father said no.
There were very few visitors.
Well then, said the sailor, this is the place for me.
Bring my box inside.
I'll stay here for a while.
I'm a simple man.
I want rum, bacon and eggs.
You can call me captain.
Then he threw some gold coins on the floor.
Tell me when their money is used up, he said with an angry look.
Although his clothes were poor and his speech was rough, he did not look like a common sailor.
He looked like a man who was used to giving orders.
The man who brought his box told us that the sailor had arrived the day before and had asked for a quiet inn by the coast.
That was all we ever learned about him.
He seemed to be a quiet man.
During the day he walked about the bay or stood on the cliffs with a telescope.
In the evening he sat by the fire and drank strong rum and water.
When people spoke to him, he usually did not answer.
He only looked up angrily and made a loud noise with his nose.
Soon everyone learned to leave him alone.
Every day he asked if any sailors had passed along the road.
At first we thought he was lonely, but later we understood that he wanted to stay away from them.
If a sailor came to the inn, the captain would watch him carefully before entering the room and would stay very quiet while the sailor was there.
One day he pulled me by the arm to a corner of the room and promised me to give me a coin, a silver coin, every month if I would look out for a sailor with one leg.
I had to tell him at once if I ever saw such a man.
Sometimes he forgot to pay me, but later he always gave me the money and repeated his orders.
The one-legged sailor lived in my dreams.
On stormy nights when the wind shook the house, I saw him in terrible shapes.
Sometimes his leg was cut off at the knee.
Sometimes he had no leg at all.
In my nightmares, he ran after me, and I woke up full of fear.
I paid a high price for that small coin.
Still, I was less afraid of the captain than many other people were.
Sometimes he drank too much rum.
Then he sang loud and mad songs or forced everybody to listen to his stories.
He would not let anyone leave the inn alive.
Until he was sleepy and went to bed.
His stories were the worst part.
They were about cruel punishments, storms and terrible crimes at sea.
My father worried that people would stop coming to the inn.
But in fact, some visitors liked the excitement.
Young men even called the captain a true sea dog and admired him.
However, the captain destroyed our family.
He stayed for weeks and then months without paying.
My father was too afraid to ask for more money.
When he tried, the captain only looked at him angrily.
The fear and worry made my father's health worse, and my father died not long after.
Only once did someone try to stop him.
That was Dr. Livesey.
One evening the doctor was sitting in the inn when the captain began singing again.
The doctor did not like it and spoke calmly to him.
When the captain pulled out a knife and moved towards him, the doctor did not move.
If you do not put that knife away at once, said the doctor, you will be punished by law.
They looked hard at each other, but in the end the captain gave in and sat down.
After that night he was much quieter.
And for many evenings he sat in silence.
Right, so that's the end of chapter one of Treasure Island.
Okay, now to test you on these phrasal verbs.
It's perhaps a little difficult if you're driving along in your car or not reading the text.
So what I'll do, I'm going to read the sentence in the story which contains the phrasal verb.
I will not say it.
Leave it out.
And you say the verb which is missing.
Now, to make this easier, what I'm going to do, I'm going to give you a choice of two phrasal verbs.
You just have to choose the right one.
Number one.
I must only the exact position of the island because there is still treasure there.
Leave out or look around?
Leave out.
I must leave out only the exact position of the island.
Number two.
During the day, he... The bay or stood on the cliffs with a telescope.
Looked up or walked around.
Walked around.
During the day, he walked around the bay or stood on the cliffs with a telescope.
Number three.
At first we thought he was lonely, but later we understood that he wanted to other sailors.
Look out for or stay away from.
Stay away from.
He wanted to stay away from other sailors.
Number five.
When the captain A knife.
And moved towards him.
The doctor did not move.
Gave in or pulled out?
Pulled out.
When the captain pulled out a knife.
Number six.
They looked hard at each other.
But in the end, the captain... And sat down.
Gave in or looked up?
Gave in, but in the end the captain gave in and sat down.
Right, that's the end.
Just six questions for today, okay?
But, as I say, please come to my website, have a look at the audio script and you can see lots of other useful B1 words there as well.
I'll be back next week with chapter two.
Goodbye for now.
