Survival.
Adapting.
Hey everyone and a warm welcome back to the Easy English Podcast.
If you don't know what those words are, don't worry because we are going to learn today.
My name's Oliver and I'm your host of the Easy English Podcast, the best place to practice your English listening skills while learning new words and phrases.
Today we're going to talk about a powerful and important idea and it's called adaptation.
Adaptation.
Adaptation.
I'm going to explain it in just one second, but generally this word describes the process of changing to fit new situations or environments.
Simply put, when we change for different things.
It's something that we all do, and it's also a vital skill for us in our daily lives communities, studies and work.
We are going to explore what it means to adapt, and we will look at examples from both nature but also human experience.
I think it's a very interesting topic today, so I hope you will enjoy it as much as I have in preparing it.
As always, we are going to look at our key vocabulary for the episode.
I will teach you five words that I want you to listen out for in the episode.
This helps you to practice your active listening.
Don't worry if you know some of them or if you know none of them.
By the end of the episode, I am sure you will have heard or learnt a new word.
Before we start the vocabulary, just a reminder.
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I teach you 50 of what I think are some of the most useful phrasal verbs in English.
Each phrasal verb has a short story to help you remember and understand the verb from context.
Phrasal verbs are one of the most difficult parts of the English language to memorize, to remember, purely because there are so many of them.
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Let's look at our key vocabulary.
So the first word is, of course, adapt, adapt.
And that is the verb form of adaptation that we talked about.
And to adapt means to change your behavior or ideas to suit new conditions or situations.
For example, you must adapt quickly when you move to another country.
The second word is environment environment, and that is a noun, and environment means the natural world or the conditions in which a person, animal or plant lives.
For example, polar bears live in a cold environment.
They maybe live in the Arctic.
It's very cold.
The third word today is survive.
Survive.
And this is a verb.
It means to continue living or existing.
So to continue to live or exist. especially in spite of some kind of danger or difficulty.
For example, animals have to survive harsh winters.
Our next word is flexible, flexible.
And this is a great adjective.
And it means to be able to change easily and adjust to new situations or demands.
For example, a flexible schedule helps me to manage my time.
I keep my days flexible so that I can do things when I need to.
And the final word, which is a great word, and I think not a lot of you will know this word.
It is resilience, resilience, and it is a noun.
It means the ability to recover quickly from difficult or challenging situations.
So to come back from, to recover from difficult or challenging situations.
So keep these words in mind and listen out for them as we learn about the power of adaptation, the ability to adapt.
So don't worry if you still don't understand what adaptation is.
I've prepared a short section to explain what adaptation is.
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Okay, so what exactly is adaptation?
At its core, so the real definition in simple version, adaptation is a process of change.
It is change.
Adaptation is about adjusting yourself or something else to fit new circumstances, new things that have changed.
The main goal of adaptation is usually to survive or to succeed better in a new environment.
Think of it like this.
If you go from a warm country to, let's say, let's say, a warm country like Brazil, to a cold country like Northern Ireland, where I live in the UK, You adapt by wearing warmer clothes.
So you have had a process of adaptation, because you have had to change your clothes and start wearing warmer clothing for the colder climate.
If your job changes, for example, you have to adapt by learning new skills and learning about how this new company or place that you work, how it works, what is their culture, what is their process.
You adapt.
So that is what adaptation is, and we can see adaptation in nature and animals as well.
Adaptation is fundamental to life in the natural world.
Animals and plants are constantly adapting to their environment to survive.
And here I've made a note of a few examples One is called camouflage.
And this word is usually with the military.
So a lot of armies or militaries, they wear camouflage to hide.
But many animals adapt by changing their appearance. to blend in with their environment, to hide.
This is called camouflage.
For example, a chameleon, so an animal, a lizard called a chameleon, it can change its skin color.
This is camouflage.
It has adapted to do this.
Some animals have also adapted to different climates, to cold winters, for example.
And to do this, animals hibernate in cold winters.
Not all animals, of course, but some have adapted this way.
And what that means is they go to sleep in the winter.
Bears, for example, eat a lot of food in the autumn and then they go to sleep for months, and it helps them to get through the winter and survive.
Their bodies have adapted this way.
And these are just a few examples of how living things adapt to ensure their survival in different environments.
But in my opinion and the opinion of many scientists, humans are the masters of adaptation.
We can adapt both physically and, even more importantly, mentally and socially.
And we all do this as individuals.
When we move to a new country, for example, many of you have maybe done this.
I've done it myself.
And when you move to another country, this is a big example of human adaptation.
You have to adapt to a new language, new culture and customs, different food and maybe even a different climate as well.
You learn new ways of doing things and your way of thinking can become more flexible.
When you start a new job, I'm sure we've all done this at some point.
You need to adapt to new tasks, to a new company and different ways of doing things as well.
You also have to adapt to new people, new colleagues and people that you are dealing with every day.
We also have to adapt when we deal with a big change or crisis, a difficult situation in our life.
Life often brings us unexpected challenges like COVID, like a global pandemic, financial difficulty, even death or horrible things that could happen to us.
Our ability to show resilience and adapt to these new things is so important for us as humans and individuals.
It's a very important trait, a very important feature that we have.
And I think it's quite beautiful in a way, the way that we can come back from these situations and rebuild our lives to adapt to the new circumstances.
It's amazing when you think about it.
And we also adapt as a society.
Think about all of the change in technology, how our jobs have adapted and changed, how we travel has changed, how our countries have changed.
We change as a group as well.
And, to be honest, humans' ability to adapt is a really key reason for our success as a species, for our success in general, because we are so adaptable, we can almost adapt to anything.
And adapting is so important in today's world because today's world is so fast and changing.
Technology is developing, AI, artificial intelligence, And we have a climate that is changing.
The world around us seems so fast, almost faster than ever before.
So being able to adapt is a great skill that you can develop even further.
And it's great for growth and learning.
When you adapt, you are learning new things and you're developing new skills.
It makes you a more capable person.
It helps with problem solving as well.
So you're finding new solutions to these new problems when we adapt as well.
And you become more resilient over time.
You build your resilience, which means that you are learning to overcome challenges and difficulties, to come back from them, to improve again, to get back to a good state.
People who are good at adapting often experience less stress as well, because they're confident.
They know that when change happens, they will be able to survive.
They will be okay.
And that's a very, very powerful thing to have, a powerful way to be.
So how can we practice adaptation?
How can we practice adapting, right?
We can do it by being open to change, to trying new things instead of just saying no all the time.
That can be new food, new activities, traveling to a new place.
This is a great way to adapt and to change your behavior.
We can also observe and learn from others or other situations as well.
When you face a new environment or a situation, watch how others handle it and you can learn from their experience, which can help you to adapt as well.
And one key point with adapting is focusing on solutions.
When we have problems, often we focus too much on the problem itself rather than the solution.
I'm quite guilty of this as well.
I can think and think, and think about the problem that I have, but it's better to focus on how to solve that problem.
It's a slight change in your mentality, but it makes a huge difference.
And the best way is to learn new skills, to push yourself with your new skills and with developing in different ways.
Learning English is a great way to do this.
Practicing language skills as well can make your brain more flexible.
Adapting to new sentence structures, new words, vocabulary.
I think it's very healthy for your brain, for your mind and for your ability to adapt within languages as well.
So try some of these tips.
Embrace the ability to adapt because it's so important and it's often a very overlooked skill.
So I want you to answer in the comments below.
If you're on YouTube or Instagram Instagram you can write to me from any of the ways that you contact, whether it's Spotify comments as well.
I want you to answer a time, tell me a time when you had to adapt to a new environment or situation.
So tell me about a time where you had to adapt and I look forward to reading them.
It's a very interesting question, so I hope that I will get a lot of interesting responses.
So in one of the last episodes, I asked you to describe someone a family member, a pet, a friend And I have two answers that I want to read out today.
So I asked to describe someone a person and the descriptions that I got not just a person, you can describe anything.
The descriptions that I got were amazing.
Really, really good work.
But I've chosen two of them, two which I thought were brilliant.
And the first one was from Rodrigo.
And he said, good evening teacher.
I describe my dog Pingo.
He is a small pug.
And he is 13 years old.
He doesn't bark.
He only coughs because he is an old dog.
But Pingo is a happy dog and we love him.
I thought that was an excellent comment.
And I loved your use of vocabulary with words such as cough as well.
It's like this coughing is...
Excellent, excellent comment and really really good job for taking the time and putting your English out there.
It was a great comment, Rodrigo, and I'm very happy to have read it out.
The next comment we had is from Gananga.
I hope I said your name correctly.
You can tell me in the comments if I'm pronouncing it incorrectly.
So great comment again. and I will read it to you.
Hello teacher, I'm new here and look forward to improve my English as a French native speaker.
So about this podcast, I'm going to describe my son.
He is three, but he looks like five because he is tall.
He has a beautiful curly hair and I love it.
He is very active and always needs to do something.
My son is also kind and a bit talkative.
Thanks, that is an amazing comment, gananga.
I would say it is one of the best comments i've had in a while.
A great description and wonderful use of descriptions of adjectives and really just a lovely comment.
Your son sounds like a lovely little boy.
Well, a very tall little boy.
And thank you so much for leaving that comment.
So remember, comment and answer for next week about a time when you had to adapt.
And I will pick two or maybe three of your answers of my favourite and read them out on the next episode.
Well, not the next episode, but one of the episodes next week.
So today we have explored the concept of adaptation.
How all living things, including us humans, adapt.
I hope it was a little bit different and quite an interesting episode, with perhaps a new concept in English for you, a new word or set of vocabulary that can help you to bring your English to a more advanced upper intermediate level.
So I hope you learned at least one new word today.
Thank you so much for joining me.
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So I hope to see you there, or I'll see you in the next episode of the podcast.
Have a wonderful rest of your day.
Goodbye.
