Hey everybody, welcome to this first phrasal verb episode.
I hope that you're excited for these new episodes that I'm gonna be recording and hopefully releasing once a week.
So you'll have the normal listening time podcast episodes and you'll also have these phrasal verb episodes.
And if you listened to the last episode, you already know a little bit about what I'm planning to do with these phrasal verb episodes.
But just in case you missed that last episode, let me just give you a brief summary of what this project is about.
In my opinion, the best way to learn phrasal verbs in English is by hearing them and reading them in natural contexts, again and again, and again.
You learn them just like you learn normal vocabulary words.
So my goal with these phrasal verb episodes is to give you that natural exposure to different phrasal verbs so you can learn them naturally and not try to study lists of phrasal verbs and memorize their meanings.
You shouldn't do that, in my opinion.
You should...
Learn them like you learn other vocabulary, which is through repeated exposure, seeing them, hearing them again and again in different contexts.
And these phrasal verb episodes will also be additional listening practice for you, because I'm doing the same thing that I'm doing in my normal episodes.
I'm talking to you slowly and clearly and you have the transcript available.
That's down below in the description.
So this is extra listening practice for you every week.
However, it's more focused on the phrasal verbs that we look at. in each episode.
And in today's episode we're going to look at two phrasal verbs.
The first one is abide by and the second one is account for.
So let's start with abide by.
What does this mean?
When you abide by something, you are accepting and obeying a rule.
You are submitting to a rule.
So let me just give you a couple example sentences.
I could say, if you travel to another country, you need to abide by its laws.
That means that you need to follow and obey those laws.
Or I could say, when you're in my house, you have to abide by my rules.
That means you need to accept and follow my rules.
And so that's one phrasal verb that we're going to look at today.
And the other one, like I mentioned, is account for.
This can have multiple meanings, but the meaning that we're going to focus on today is giving an explanation for something or giving a reason for why something happened.
So, for example, the man couldn't account for his absence the day before.
This means that the man was absent the day before, but he couldn't give the reason why he was absent.
He couldn't explain why.
And someone might ask the question, can you account for the mistake in this report?
This person is asking for an explanation.
Why is there this mistake in the report?
Can you account for this mistake?
So, those are the two phrasal verbs we're going to look at today.
I'm going to talk about another topic now and as I talk about this topic, I'm going to include these two phrasal verbs in different sentences as I talk about this topic.
Okay, so let me talk a little bit about following the rules when you're in school.
I think that this is something we all have experience with, regardless of your experience in whatever school you went to, in whatever country you live in.
We all had to follow certain rules.
I'm sure that in your school, just like in mine, rules were enforced.
This means that there were rules and the teachers and the principal and the staff, they forced us to follow these rules.
Otherwise, there were consequences.
So sometimes students didn't like abiding by these rules.
And there were some rules that I didn't really like, to be honest.
But these rules were essential to follow.
You had to abide by them.
Let me give you some examples.
You weren't allowed to eat in class.
I think that was a rule in most teachers' classrooms.
There might have been a couple really cool teachers that maybe allowed us to eat sometimes, but in general, most teachers did not allow their students to eat in their classrooms.
You had to abide by this rule.
If you got caught eating, you would get in trouble.
Or at the very least, they would tell you to put your food away right now.
So sometimes people would eat, but they would kind of hide it.
They would do it in a way so that the teacher couldn't see them.
And Honestly, I did this from time to time.
So I wasn't a perfect student.
I didn't always abide by the rules.
And something else that was prohibited or forbidden in classrooms was listening to music while you were working, or whatever.
So you weren't allowed to have your headphones in your ears while you were in the classroom.
So that's a rule that students had to abide by.
And then one of the most universal rules.
This is something that I learned in every year of school, every grade.
I was told that we had to raise our hands.
In class, when we wanted to ask a question or when we wanted to say something.
So you weren't allowed to just blurt out.
When you blurt out, this means that you say something suddenly without warning.
So you just suddenly say it.
So you weren't allowed to blurt out.
You had to raise your hand, and then the teacher called on you, and then you could speak.
So when I think back to my time in school and about some of the rules that students didn't abide by sometimes, and when I think of certain examples of this there are a few that really come to mind that I remember really clearly and that a lot of people had trouble with.
One of them was arriving late to class.
So if you didn't show up to class on time and you couldn't account for your tardiness, then that was something bad.
Right, because if you can account for why you're tardy, meaning you're late, then it's possibly okay.
Like, if you were late because your last teacher needed to talk to you and they kept you in their class for longer and that's why you were late to this class, then you probably won't get in trouble, right.
But if you can't account for your tardiness, if you were just late because you were talking to your friends or you were walking slowly or whatever, then that's not acceptable right, you might get in trouble for that.
And another one that I remember really well was when people didn't do their homework.
That's a rule that everyone is supposed to abide by.
You have to do your homework and turn it in on time.
When we say that you turn in your homework, this means that you deliver it to the teacher.
So if you didn't do your homework and you can't account for that you can't account for why you didn't do your homework then you will get a bad grade on that assignment, even if you turn it in late.
And of course if you just never turn it in, then you fail that assignment.
So if there is some really legitimate reason why you didn't do your homework, then of course you can account for that and you can say that there was something like an emergency that happened with your family and that was different.
But if you couldn't account for why you didn't do your homework, then you have no excuse.
You're gonna get a bad grade.
And one other thing that I remember really clearly, because it was a big violation of the rules was when people would cheat on tests.
So this would happen from time to time, where the teacher would call two students to their desk, to the teacher's desk, and ask them to account for the fact that their tests had the exact same answers.
And when that's the case, you know that those two students were probably cheating.
One of those students was looking at the other student's test And the other student might have let the first student look.
So they would both get in trouble.
Neither of those two people were abiding by the rules.
So they're both going to get in trouble.
And you get in a lot of trouble if you get caught cheating on tests.
That's a big offense.
And so lastly, what are some of the punishments that people receive in school when they don't abide by the rules and they do things that they're not supposed to do?
Well, in my school the high school that I went to one of the ways that people got punished was that they had to go to Saturday school.
So there was like an extra day of school that they had to attend and go and sit in some big room for hours.
And that was their punishment and, of course, for more serious offenses, people would get called into the principal's office to talk to the principal or someone like that, and in extreme cases people would sometimes get suspended, for This means that they had to stay home from school for a number of days, and this was a serious offense.
This was something that stayed on your permanent record, like everyone could see that you got suspended, and that's something really bad for a student.
So, in summary, when you're a student in school, you're supposed to abide by the rules, and if you can't account for certain actions or behaviors of yours and you can't give a legitimate reason why you did something or didn't do something else, then you get in trouble.
And there are consequences like Saturday school or getting a bad grade or even getting suspended sometimes, so we should try to abide by the rules, right?
All right, that's it for today.
I hope you enjoyed this format, and i hope that now, after listening to this episode, the phrasal verbs abide by and account for are in your head now and you feel more comfortable with them, And so I hope that you like these episodes, and I'll continue to release one of these episodes every week.
And I'll see if you guys like them.
And if not, then I'll just stop doing them.
And before we end, remember that you can get my advanced podcast episodes if you become a Listening Time family member.
And if you do that, you'll get two new advanced episodes every month.
And so the link to sign up is down below.
And you also have the link down below for my US Conversations podcast.
So if you want to practice listening to two people talking and not just one, then make sure to sign up for that podcast so you can reach the next level in terms of listening comprehension.
The link to that is also down below.
Alright, thank you all for listening to this phrasal verb episode and I'll talk to you in the next one.
