داستان کوتاه

Hi this is AJ, welcome to the mini story for this month’s lesson. Now, if you’re new let me tell you how to use the mini story. I’m going to tell you a story, it’s a silly, strange story and I’m going to ask a lot of questions during this story.

All you need to do is answer the questions. Now, you do not need to answer in long sentences. You can give short little answers. It’s fine. When you answer it’s very important that you use your body and your energy and your emotion.

So, for example, if I say there was a boy and then I ask was there a boy, do not do this.

Yes. If you do this, if you have this kind of answer, yes, no, then your energy is going to be very low. You’re not going to learn as quickly. What I want you to do is say yes! No!

Try to really pour a lot of energy and emotion into your answers. Shout your answers if possible. If you’re at home in your own room, lock the door and you can shout the answers.

If you’re on a train or something like that maybe not, but you can inside still kind of yes, no. Use your body a little bit too.

Another great thing to do as you’re listening to these is to actually go out and walk around.

If you’re in a room listening on a computer or a desktop computer or a laptop you can just walk around the room. So you’re up and standing, you’re not just sitting passively. If you sit your energy drops, your concentration drops and you remember less.

Now, the reason I ask all these questions is to get more and more repetition of the most common English grammar that we use when we speak. You’ll also learn a few new vocabulary words, possibly. So let’s get started with our strange story.

We have two characters that we’ll use in a lot of our stories. Character number one is Chim-chim the money and the other one is Heva the dog. Heva is a big dog and Chimchim is a monkey and they’re friends.

Now, our past members know that Chim-chim and Heva started a successful company selling salsa and that they’ve become very rich, but now they have a problem. Chim-chim and Heva are not healthy

We’re going to tell this story as if we’re looking back, as if it’s already happened, so in the past.

Chim-chim and Heva wanted to get healthy.

What did Chim-chim and Heva want?

To get healthy. Chim-chim and Heva wanted to get healthy.

Did Chim-chim and Heva want to get rich?

Well, yes, but they already did. They already got rich in a past story.

So what did they want this time?

To get healthy. Chim-chim and Heva wanted to get healthy.

So this time now, at the time of the story, did they want to get rich or did they want to get healthy?

They wanted to get healthy.

And who wanted to get healthy?

Chim-chim and Heva.

Chim-chim and Heva wanted to get healthy and each of them had their own plan.

Heva first tried to diet. So he tried to stop eating food completely. No food! After one day he got very hungry, after two days he was even hungrier and finally on day three he binged.

So, ‘to binge’, possibly a new word for you, ‘to binge’ means to eat a lot suddenly in a very short time. So it has the idea that you have not been eating much or you’ve not been doing much and then suddenly you eat a lot. We might say to binge on chocolate, for example. So it means maybe you have not been eating chocolate and then suddenly you eat 10 candy bars of chocolate. That’s binging or to binge.

It’s also a noun. We can call that ‘a binge’. Yeah, I had a big binge this weekend. I ate a lot of chocolate. Here we’re using it as a verb, to binge on food. To binge on food means to just suddenly eat a large amount of food in a short time.

So what did Heva do after his diet?

He binged. Heva binged.

Did he eat a lot of food or a little food?

He ate a lot of food. He binged. He binged on a lot of food.

What did he binge on?

We use that word ‘on’. We don’t say to binge ‘with’ or to binge ‘at’. We say to binge on something. That means you eat something, a lot of it.

Heva binged on bacon. Heva loves bacon. So he binged on bacon.

So what did he eat a lot of?

Bacon. Heva ate a lot of bacon.

Did he eat a lot of bacon slowly over time or very quickly in a short time?

Quickly. He ate a lot of bacon quickly.

What did he do?

He binged on bacon.

And who binged on bacon?

Heva. Heva binged on bacon.

What did he binge on?

Bacon. Heva binged on bacon.

Did Chim-chim binge on bacon?

No, Chim-chim hates bacon. Chim-chim did not eat bacon. He did not binge on bacon.

Who binged on bacon?

Heva the dog.

Heva the dog binged on bacon and, of course, he didn’t get healthy. It didn’t help.

He didn’t feel better and he actually gained weight. So, Heva next tried a low-fat, high-carb diet.

That’s our next word ‘carb’. Carb is short for ‘carbohydrate’. If you read about health or diets or food or nutrition you’ll see this word a lot, carbohydrate. Carbohydrate is the scientific word, the full word, but a lot of times we just say carb, c-a-r-b, carb.

A carb is a kind of sugar, really. If you eat like fruit it’s got a simple sugar. That’s a kind of carb, but also things like rice and bread. They’re longer sugars.

We’re not going to talk about the chemistry right now, but it’s basically different kinds of sugars. So the nutritional name of that, the scientific name is carb or carbohydrate. It’s a common word.

You see it a lot now. If you read about diets or health and nutrition you’ll see this word all the time, carbohydrate or carb. When people talk about it in a general way for nutrition or dieting or eating it basically means sugars, fruit, pasta, bread, rice, those kinds of things.

So what kind of diet did Heva try low carb or high carb?

High carb. He tried next a high-carb diet.

So he ate a lot of protein?

No.

What did he eat a lot of?

Carbs.

We can put an ‘s’ on the end. ‘Carbs’ means sugars. He ate a lot of carbs. He ate a high-carb diet.

Who ate a high-carb diet?

Heva did. Heva tried a high-carb diet and low fat, low fat, high carb. So he ate lots and lots and lots of sugar all the time. He ate rice, he ate bread, he ate pasta, constantly and he got fat again, poor Heva.

What about Chim-chim? What did Chim-chim do?

Chim-chim tried something totally different. Chim-chim decided to devour only ice cream and cookies. Chim-chim tried the ice cream and cookie diet and he devoured them every day.

So ‘devour’, what does devour mean ‘to devour’? ‘To devour’, usually the idea is you’re eating something very fast and you’re eating everything. You eat every bite, totally. It has this idea of maybe like a hungry animal. Like a lion will devour a zebra. So it doesn’t just eat it in a very slow polite way. It eats it up and it eats everything. You eat the bones. You eat the eyeballs. You eat everything, all the parts. That’s ‘devour’, ‘to devour’.

So did Chim-chim politely eat ice cream and cookies every day or did he devour them?

Chim-chim devoured ice cream and cookies. He at them very fast and he ate all of it. He even licked the bowl. Chim-chim devoured ice cream and cookies.

How did he eat them? What did he do? He devoured what?

Ice cream and cookies. Chim-chim devoured ice cream and cookies.

He only ate ice cream and cookies. Unfortunately, Chim-chim started to feel sick, so then he tried something else. He read a book called The Metabolic Diet.

‘Metabolic’, this is another scientific word you see a lot when you talk about food, eating and nutrition. You’ll see this word metabolism or metabolic. Metabolic is the adjective, so it describes something. So we might say metabolic system, metabolic diet, metabolic something.

The noun is called ‘metabolism’. This is really the energy system of your body. So your metabolism is your body’s energy system. So this is important, right? If your body uses a lot of energy, it burns a lot of energy then it’s easier to lose weight. If your metabolism, your energy system is slow then that means you’re burning less energy so it’s harder to lose weight. So metabolic just means about the energy system or connected to this system. Hopefully you understand that.

So he tried the metabolic diet. The metabolic diet meant that he constantly drank coffee and caffeine. So coffee makes your metabolism, the energy system in your body get faster, burn more. So Chim-chim started to drink constantly.

He was on what kind of diet?

Metabolic. Metabolic, meaning to speed up the energy system in his body.

Did he want to increase his metabolism or decrease his metabolism?

Chim-chim wanted to increase his metabolism. He wanted to burn more energy.

And who wanted to burn more energy? Who wanted to increase his metabolism?

Chim-chim. Chim-chim wanted to increase his metabolism.

Did Heva try to increase his metabolism?

No, Heva didn’t try to increase his metabolism. Chim-chim tried to increase his metabolism.

Unfortunately, he became very tired after a while. Too much coffee, he could never sleep and he became exhausted, very, very, very tired. Well, finally, Heva and Chim-chim decided a different approach was necessary. They decided to try and old-school approach.

‘Old school’ means traditional. It’s kind of slang for traditional and it’s usually used in a positive way. When we say oh, that’s an old-school method or that’s old school, it’s the idea that it’s old and traditional, but that it’s good. It’s in a good way, in a positive way.

Sometimes we can say something is old and we mean that it’s not effective, it’s not good, but this is kind of usually something you respect. That’s old school, meaning it’s real.

So they try and old-school approach. They only eat real food, healthy food, fruits, vegetables and organic food. That’s it. They try this old-school approach and they become very, very strong and healthy.

So do they try a new method or an old-school method?

They try an old-school method.

And what kind of method do they try? What kind of diet?

They try and old-school diet, a traditional healthy diet, a traditional healthy method.

And who or whom tries an old-school method?

Chim-chim and Heva. Chim-chim and Heva try an old-school way of eating, an old traditional way of eating.

And after trying and old-school way of eating do they become healthy?

Yes, they do. The old-school method works and they become very healthy.

​

And that’s the end of our mini story, very easy and I will see you again next time for the point-of-view story. Bye-bye.