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Hello everyone and welcome back to EnglishPod. My name is Marco

and my name is Catherine and today we have a cold lesson.

That’s right. It’s the winter season and of course it gets cold in a lot of different places around the world and so we’re going to talk about heating.

Okay. It is very important. But before we do get started, we have a very important word to preview in vocabulary preview.

Vocabulary preview

All right. So, we’re going to preview the word freezing.

It is freezing today, by the way. So, this is very appropriate. Freezing means very very very cold.

Okay, it is freezing. Okay, so it’s very cold. It’s freezing today.

It’s so cold in fact, you can’t have water outside because the water will become ice.

It will freeze.

Okay, great word. So, let’s listen to our dialogue for the very first time.

A: It’s freezing in here! Can I turn up the heat?

B: Don’t touch that thermostat! You don’t pay the bills around here!

A: Dad! Are you serious? What’s the point of having central heating if we can’t use it! Look, I can see my breath!

B: Put on a sweater! I’m not gonna let you run up my heating bill just because it’s a bit chilly.

A: Dad! I’m gonna catch a cold!

B: When I was your age, my parents didn’t have central heating like you do! We had a furnace in the center of the living room and that was it. We used it to cook, heat the house and even dry our clothes! We never caught a cold. You should be grateful!

All right, we’re back. And this is actually what a lot of dads are like, I think around the world.

Yeah, my dad definitely like to keep the heat low in our house.

Alright, so we’ll talk about that a little bit later, but let’s take a look at some four words in language take away today.

Language take away

Well, this first word is important for anyone who has a home with heating. It’s called a thermostat.

All right, a thermostat, what is a thermostat?

A thermostat is a dial or like a—

A device

A device on the wall that tells you how hot or how cold the house is. It’s like a thermometer for your house.

Okay. So, you can move the thermostat, the temperature to make the house warmer or colder, right?

Right. So, if it says it’s 20° and I think that’s too cold, I can turn the thermostat up to 23°.

All right. And well, very much related to the thermostat and what this device does, is our next word, central heating.

Right. So, if you have central heating, you have a thermostat. That’s the way to control the heat. And central heating means that you have one heater for the whole house and so the air comes into all the different rooms. So, not many places in China have this, but for example in the United States, in Canada, it is very common.

Okay. So, your house or your apartment building will have central heating and then you can control how cold or warm the house is with thermostat.

Exactly.

Very good. And well, our next word is related to temperature and it’s chilly.

Chilly, okay. So, there’s a big difference between chilly and freezing. Freezing means very very very cold. Chilly means a little cold.

Right. So, it’s a little cold. It’s a bit chilly.

Right. So, it’s a bit chilly today. I’m going to wear a hat. Okay, if it’s freezing, I’m going to wear a hat. A hat and mittens and a scarf and coat and boots.

All right. So, if it’s a bit chilly, it’s not very cold. And well, moving on, the dad mentioned about him having a furnace when he was young.

That’s right. The dad had a furnace in his house and the furnace is as a way to heat your house. It’s like a stove.

So, you just consider it like a big oven, right? Maybe you’ve seen it in the old movies where you have to throw firewood into the furnace to make it heat up the house.

Exactly. And so, this is very common in older homes and not very common in apartments.

Right. And well, that’s all the words we have for language take away today. Why don’t we listen to this chilly dialogue again.

A: It’s freezing in here! Can I turn up the heat?

B: Don’t touch that thermostat! You don’t pay the bills around here!

A: Dad! Are you serious? What’s the point of having central heating if we can’t use it! Look, I can see my breath!

B: Put on a sweater! I’m not gonna let you run up my heating bill just because it’s a bit chilly.

A: Dad! I’m gonna catch a cold!

B: When I was your age, my parents didn’t have central heating like you do! We had a furnace in the center of the living room and that was it. We used it to cook, heat the house and even dry our clothes! We never caught a cold. You should be grateful!

All right, we’re back. So, now we have prepared for you three key phrases on fluency builder.

Fluency builder

Okay. So, this first phrase is related to thermostat, okay? So, thermostat like we said is like a thermometer but we can control the temperature. So, if we want to make the temperature hotter, we turn up the thermostat.

Okay. So, this is a phrasal verb, to turn up, turn up the heat.

You could say this about heat. You could say this about noise. So, can you turn up the radio?

Turn up the volume. So, it’s to increase

to increase, to make bigger or warmer or louder.

All right and if we wanted to decrease the temperature in the thermostat, you would say—

turn down

turn down the heat

Exactly. So, it’s too hot in here. Can you please turn down the heat?

All right, very good. And our next phrase is, well, the dad was talking about the bills and how expensive it is to use the thermostat and he said, I’m not going to let you run up my heating bill.

Okay, so bill is like you know, something that you pay. It’s money. And so in this case, I don’t want you to run up the bill, that means to increase the amount of money I have to spend.

So, maybe if you leave your television on all night, you’re running up your electricity bill.

Exactly. Or if you talk on the phone 10 hours a day, you run up the phone bill. And your mother kills you.

Right. All right and well, the daughter was complaining about her, catching a cold. To catch a cold—

All right, so remember this, a cold is when you have maybe a runny nose and the cough and the sore throat. It usually happens when the weather changes. But we don’t get a cold, you catch a cold.

Okay

And member like in baseball, you throw and catch. It’s something that’s fast.

All right. So, you catch a cold. What about the flu? Do you get the flu or catch the flu?

So, you can’t catch a flu but you can catch a cold. Just remember this phrase, to catch a cold. I caught the cold. To catch a cold door or I caught a cold. It’s almost like if I have it, I could throw it to you Marco. And you catch it.

Right because it’s in the air. The virus is in the air.

Yeah. It passes very quickly right.

All right, very good. So, an interesting dialogue. Let’s listen to it one last time.

A: It’s freezing in here! Can I turn up the heat?

B: Don’t touch that thermostat! You don’t pay the bills around here!

A: Dad! Are you serious? What’s the point of having central heating if we can’t use it! Look, I can see my breath!

B: Put on a sweater! I’m not gonna let you run up my heating bill just because it’s a bit chilly.

A: Dad! I’m gonna catch a cold!

B: When I was your age, my parents didn’t have central heating like you do! We had a furnace in the center of the living room and that was it. We used it to cook, heat the house and even dry our clothes! We never caught a cold. You should be grateful!

All right, we’re back. And well, you mentioned about the thermostat and your dad actually controlling the heating at home. Was it a case like this in this scenario?

It was sometimes, would have to wear more cloths because we didn’t wanna run up the bell. But we had a special situation in my house because I’m from Chicago and it’s very cold in the winters in Chicago but we had a fireplace, okay? So, even if it was very cold, we always had firewood and we could put on the fire in the fireplace to keep warm. So, everyone stay in the living room and read and listen to music and just, you know, relax.

Now, I heard that because, you know when you’re burning wood, it causes some pollution, in some cities it’s banned, right? To actually turn on or well, to have a fireplace.

That’s right.

But in Chicago, you can still do it.

Absolutely. And in most of the States you can. Although a lot of people in new houses, they don’t have real fireplaces. They have electric fireplaces. And so, you can use a light switch to turn on your fire. It’s not a real fire place. It’s just a glow and light.

All right. Well, very good. This is an interesting lesson, especially because the winter season is coming up and well everyone is cold. So, we hope you enjoyed it and if you have any questions, any doubts, you can come to our website EnglishPod.com.

We hope to see you there. Happy studies and stay warm. Bye.