Hey everybody, welcome to this week's phrasal verb episode.
I hope you're doing great and I hope that you feel like you've learned a lot of phrasal verbs already.
I hope that you remember the ones that we already went over and that you feel comfortable using some of them in your own speech now.
And I hope that these episodes have been a good extra dose of English listening for you.
A dose refers to some serving of medicine, right?
I hope that these phrasal verb episodes have also just been an extra listening session for you and that they've helped you practice your listening even more every week.
And, of course, remember that you have the transcript for each of these episodes for free down below in the description.
So in today's phrasal verb episode, we're going to look at two phrasal verbs.
The first one is attend to, and the other one is attest to.
So what does attend to mean?
This means to manage or deal with something or someone.
So we often use this in the context of business and things you need to do related to business work clients, things like this.
For example, I could say, I need to attend to some important business matters.
This means that I need to deal with these matters, these issues.
So that's attend to.
Things like that.
And how about attest to?
This means to affirm that something is true or to bear witness that something is true.
In other words, you are testifying or promising that it is true.
So, for example, I could say, I can attest to his courage.
What I'm saying here is that I am promising in truth that this person has courage.
I am the witness to that.
And so I'm saying that I know this is true.
I can tell you that this is true.
He has courage.
So I can attest to his courage.
So that's a test too.
So now I'm going to talk about a couple different things.
First, let me tell you a story about my friend.
It's not so much a story, but let me talk about this friend and his vacations and how he manages his vacations and his work while he's on vacation.
And this is fiction.
This is not real, but...
This is based on truth in the sense that many people deal with this issue.
So my friend takes a couple vacations every year, but my friend is a very busy, important businessman.
He has a lot of business to attend to every day.
He's someone who is extremely busy, but he likes to take a couple relaxing vacations every year.
So when he goes on vacation, his number one goal is to try not to have to attend to any business while he's on vacation.
So, in other words, he doesn't want to have to look at his phone or open up his laptop and receive calls.
He doesn't want to have to attend to anything business related while he's relaxing vacation, and so this can be tricky for him because, even though he's on vacation, business is still going on back home with the company that he's a part of, so he is still receiving emails throughout the whole time that he's on vacation and And people are asking him questions, and people always bring their problems to him.
And he doesn't want to have to attend to all these problems and issues, but sometimes they're urgent and he's the only one that can solve these problems.
That usually interrupts his period of relaxation and it kind of ruins his vacation because it gets him back in work mode.
When we say that you're in work mode, this just means that You're in this state of mind where you're thinking about work, right?
So all of these things, the emails he gets, the things that he has to attend to while he's on vacation, all these things take him out of relaxation mode and put him right back in work mode.
And That's what he tries to avoid every time.
No one wants to be relaxing on the beach or taking a nap by the pool and being interrupted by an urgent business phone call where there's something that needs to be attended to at that moment.
No one likes that.
So my friend tries to organize everything so that when he goes on vacation there's nothing that he needs to attend to, unless there's some emergency or some really big issue that only he can solve.
But unfortunately, those things happen pretty often in his line of work, in his company.
He attends to everything before going on vacation but, like I said, these business emergencies or urgent issues or problems, they come up quite a bit.
So even if he's done a good job attending to all necessary business matters before going on vacation, it still usually happens that while he's on vacation he has to solve one or two problems.
He has to put out a couple fires, as we might say right.
So that's something that bothers him a lot, but that's something that is hard to avoid.
And this last time that he went on vacation there was a really important piece of business he needed to attend to right in the middle of his beach vacation.
His company had just started working with a new client, and this was a really important client that they were extremely excited to finally work with.
And this client wasn't concerned about whether or not my friend was on vacation or not.
They wanted a lot of things done very quickly.
And my friend had to attend to some of these client-related matters while he was on vacation.
And he had no choice because this was a really important client.
Everyone was happy to be working with them.
And so...
If that client needed things done, right then and there.
Right then and there means at that exact moment.
If they wanted certain things attended to, right then, and there then my friend had to attend to those things.
He had no choice.
And talking about myself now.
This is real.
I sometimes have to attend to work-related matters when I'm on vacation.
And this is something that I try not to do too much, but it's unavoidable sometimes.
So there are some things that just need to be dealt with.
They need to be attended to.
I can't just wait until I come back home the following week.
But usually I'm able to limit this and not need to do too much work. while I'm on vacation.
Sometimes when I travel, I don't view it as a vacation and so I work while I'm traveling.
Like sometimes when I go to Mexico and we go there because, for example, we need to visit my in-laws, I might view that as a more of a vacation for my wife and not for me, and I might still work during that time period.
So sometimes I work while I'm traveling because I don't view it as a vacation for me, for myself.
But if I'm really trying to have a vacation for me, then I try not to constantly attend to business while I'm traveling.
That kind of thing. ruins the fun, right?
So now let me talk about one other thing.
Let me talk about something that actually happened.
This is true, but I'll kind of stretch the truth a little bit.
This means that you take something that is true but you kind of exaggerate or go into details that might not be true.
But this one is based on a true story, and that is when my friend subbed for me in my job as a teacher while I was traveling.
When I say he subbed for me, I'm saying that he was the substitute teacher while I was gone.
So I had a teaching job when I was 19, And I was going to be traveling.
I was going to be in Mexico for five weeks.
And of course, I couldn't just leave my job for five weeks and come back and have my job there waiting for me, right?
So, in order to do this, I had to find someone who could sub for me, who could do my job while I was gone.
And so I asked my friend to do this because he needed money and I needed a sub.
So I talked to my boss about him and I had to really build him up In the eyes of my boss.
In other words, I had to make him seem very good.
So when talking to my boss about him, I attested to my friend's work ethic.
I said that he was a very hard worker.
He was able to accomplish tasks easily given to him.
He wasn't a slacker.
When you slack, this means that you kind of don't do your job and you're lazy in that way.
So he wasn't a slacker.
I attested to his work ethic, that he was a good worker.
I also attested to his honesty.
This is an important trait, an important characteristic that employers look for in employees, of course.
So I attested to his honesty, that he was an honest worker, an honest person, and that There was nothing to worry about in terms of my friend being dishonest or deceptive or things like that.
So I attested to his honesty.
I also attested to his knowledge in general about the different subjects he would be teaching, so english and math, i think reading as well.
This was for an after-school program for kids, so those were the classes that i taught, and so i attested to his knowledge and his expertise in these different areas.
He was someone who was pretty smart in these different areas.
He was going to be able to do the job well.
So I attested to his knowledge.
And I attested to his ability to manage children.
So I worked with children in that job.
And thankfully, that friend of mine, he had a little brother. lived with him.
And so he had a lot of experience babysitting his brother, managing his brother, having to do a lot of things related to that.
So he was a good candidate for this job, because when you teach children, you're not just teaching, you're managing kids that have behavioral issues and things like that.
So I attested to his ability to manage children because of his experience with his little brother.
And I attested to his ability to do this job well.
I really... thought that he would have the ability to do as well as I did, really.
I didn't think there would be any drop off between my performance and his performance.
When I say there wouldn't be any drop off, I'm saying that his performance wouldn't decrease in comparison with my performance.
So I attested to that.
And lastly, I attested to his character in general.
I said that he's a decent guy.
He's not going to do anything bad here.
He's going to try his hardest and work well.
He's going to listen to everyone your instructions and he's gonna do a good job.
So i just attested to his overall character and that they wouldn't need to worry at all and that there wouldn't be any issues with him subbing for me.
So I hope that as I was speaking, you were able to hear these two phrasal verbs repeated a lot and that you are more comfortable with them now.
And maybe you can try to use them in your own speech.
And I strongly encourage you to start using my advanced podcast episodes so you can take your listening to the next level and be able to understand English speakers when they speak fast.
And also, I encourage you to use my US Conversations podcast.
In that podcast, I talk to different native speakers from around the US about different topics.
It's a lot of fun.
You learn a lot about the country. and it's great practice for your listening.
So the links to both of those are down below in the description.
All right, thank you so much for listening to this phrasal verb episode and I'll talk to you in the next one.
