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Hello and welcome to the English, we speak where we explain phrases used by fluent English speakers
so that you can use them too. I'm Feifei and I'm here with Neil.
Hi Feifei, how are you?
I'm well, thank you. Now Neil, have you ever experienced the peaks and troughs of life?
Oh, of course, yes. Life is full of peaks and troughs, isn't it? Highs and lows. So peaks and troughs
is the expression we're looking at in this program, but what exactly do we mean by it?
Well, in this expression, peaks refer to the high points in life, moments of success,
happeners or achievement. I suppose that comes from the top of a mountain, which is called a peak.
Well, troughs are the low points, so moments of difficulty or challenges.
Yeah, so we're talking about the ups and downs of life.
That's right. Life is like a roller coaster with its peaks and troughs.
You said you've experienced the peaks and troughs of life. Would you mind sharing?
Oh, yes, okay. So I did a master's degree as an adult when I had a young family that was
really challenging, but I managed to do it. So that felt good. That was a good peak.
A trough, I lived abroad for a long time, and then when I came back home, it was difficult
to adjust. So that was a trough, I'd say. Well, good examples. Thanks for sharing, Neil.
Here are some more examples of people using peaks and troughs.
My boyfriend is self-employed, and he doesn't have any work at the moment, but it's peaks and troughs.
Something will come up soon. I went to a play the other day, and it was all right. I liked some of it.
There were real peaks and troughs. I went to an amazing restaurant in London the other day,
but it was really expensive, and it took me ages to get there, but that's living in London.
It's peaks and troughs. So we have lots of different ways actually to describe the ups and
downs of life. We have ups and downs, highs and lows, eb and flow. That's a good one. It's about
the ocean tides and how they come in and out, but what kind of situations can we use peaks and troughs
in faith? Is it flexible? It is actually, as we've seen in the examples, it can be used to talk
about everyday life, but you can also use it in any situation where there are highs and lows.
So for example, if we worked in a field like economics and we probably will use a graph with a line
going up and down to monitor the financial market, or for example, if you're a doctor, you might
monitor your patient's glucose levels on a graph, seeing it going up and down. Yeah, that's right.
So to recap, we've learnt the phrase peaks and troughs, which we can use when we talk about the
high and the low points in life. We'll be back next week with another useful English phrase.
See you next time. Goodbye.
