Daily Dose of English 129
US Geography
Daily Dose of English 129
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short to simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about US geography. I mentioned this a few days ago and I thought it'd be fun to talk about. Or was it yesterday? I don't remember. But geography is like where the stuff in the world is. So we talk about the geographical location or geography in general is like learning about the states and the cities and things like that. Country capitals, countries, that sort of thing. And so I want to talk a little bit about US geography because it's sort of fun and there's some interesting things because the US is really, really big. Um, if you want to get an idea of it, there's a site called I think true size of, and if you search that on, yeah, true size of countries is what it is. True size of countries. Um, you can, Oh wait, no, that's not it. Oh, there's a, I want to know what the site is, but there's one where you can see where you can drag the maps over each other. Oh yeah, I know what it's called, the True Size F. Never mind, that's just what it is. But if I grab the United States and I drag it on the map, it is far bigger than all of Europe. It is huge, like comparatively. The U.S. isn't really that much smaller than Russia, for example. Yes, it is. It's like Russia is way bigger. It's the biggest country on earth. But the U.S. is very, very large. And a lot of people that are not from here don't realize that because when you see on the map, it's like, oh, it's the U.S., right? But it is very, very big. It's a big boy. And something that I've heard a couple times is especially from people who are like planning to travel in the U.S. They're like, oh, I'm going to go to see the U.S. for a few weeks or whatever, even a few days, they might say. And they say, I want to go see New York. I want to see New Orleans, I want to go to Dallas, Texas, and I also want to go to Los Angeles and San Francisco and see all the big cities or whatever. Those cities are really far apart. And that's, I think, the main thing you should know about the US, is that things are very, very spread out and far apart. If you, like I'm from Oregon, which is a state in sort of the upper left corner. If you're looking at a map of the US, which is probably useful for this episode, if you look at a map of the US, Oregon is sort of in the top left. It's not all the way up there, it's under Washington, but it's pretty high up there. If I wanna go from Oregon to Texas, that's far. That's a several hour plane ride. If I wanna go from Oregon to Florida, that's even longer. That takes, what, six hours probably? Getting to New York takes like four and a half, five hours at least, depending on wind and sort of time of year. There's things that affect it. It takes a long time to fly to different parts of the country, let alone drive. I once drove from the far left side of Texas all the way to Oregon. So I went through a little bit of Texas, New Mexico. I think I actually, let's see, how did I, I think I went through Colorado and then Utah, then Idaho, and then I got to Oregon. Yeah, I think that's what I did. So, I went through 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different states and that took me 4 days and I think over 25 hours of driving. Was it 3 days? I don't remember how fast it was. And that was mostly driving. It's not like I was stopping. That was a lot of driving, which is crazy. Nothing's close, really. I think that's one of the big things to realize about the US. If you want to go see several states, you're going to have to fly between them or take months to go through the entire country. If you wanted to see, for example, every country in 50 days, that would be really, really hard because you'd be driving most of the time. And so if you want to see every state somehow, you kind of have to take like half a year to do it, like six months to see all the states if you wanted to do that, which I don't recommend. I don't think it's worth it, but yeah. So getting into a bit more of the actual geography, right, it's kind of this weird, like, shape of almost like a half of a circle, like what's that called, a crescent. And then there's like Florida sticking off the end and then there's also Hawaii and Alaska. And that's another thing I want to mention. Hawaii is very far away. Hawaii is like six hours from California, right? So let's see. Google flights, flights.google.com. Let's see how long it takes to fly from Hawaii. to Los Angeles, which is probably one of the closest major airports in terms of just distance. I don't actually want to go. I just want to see how flight time. Okay, departure, whatever, I'll choose a random day. Sure, done. Let's see how long this flight is. Yeah, five and a half hours is the shortest flight I see here. You can also do longer ones that take a stop, but yeah, a little over five hours to fly from Los Angeles to Hawaii. Hawaii is a state, by the way, like it's a full-on state. If you wanted to go from Hawaii to, let's say Maine, which is the furthest state away basically, which is Maine is all the way on the top right. From Hawaii to Portland, Maine is going to be way longer. Portland, Maine. Portland, Oregon is where I'm from. Portland, Maine is on the way other side of the country. Yeah, Hawaii to Portland, Maine is 12 hours and 26 minutes, so 12 and a half hours basically, because you do have to stop somewhere for a couple hours, so over 10 hours of flying to get from one side of the country to the other. Like, that is very far, basically. Same sort of thing goes with Alaska. There's actually no way to get to Alaska without flying. You can't drive from Canada to Alaska. There aren't roads that really get you to where you want to go. There's You can get kind of close, but I think especially if you want to get to the bigger cities where there's Anchorage or Fairbanks or whatever, you have to drive. I think there's probably a couple places you can drive to, but I honestly don't know. But it's very hard to get to. Most people that go visit Alaska Either well either they fly or they they take a boat like a big cruise ship is pretty common an Alaska cruise to go see parts of Alaska Which sounds really cool because Alaska is supposed to be absolutely insanely beautiful But getting a little bit more into the u.s. Like geographies. I haven't really talked about that that much there are 50 states as you might know plus there are some like territories that aren't really counted in the way that they probably should be. Puerto Rico is sort of part of the US. There's also a couple other islands. But for the most part, we think of the 50 states. Like I've mentioned before, there's the south, which is sort of actually the bottom right side, so the bottom to the southeast. So that includes things like Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Florida, all that sort of section. Then there's the west, which contains sort of all those states on the west from about Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico to the left. That's where I'm from. So I'm from Oregon, which is a state all the way on the ocean, on the water. Then there's New England, which is up in the top right, so those are all of the states that are a little bit older. Those are the original British settlers came from there, called it New England, right? And so that's countries like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, right? There's a reason why these have New in the name is because they just used names from other parts of the, from England when they named things. So New York is, York is a place. Hampshire is a place. So that's all New England. And then there is sort of the Midwest. which actually isn't that far west. Like if you look at the map, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, that's all the Midwest. It's really more like the center, like top part of it. And those are the main, sorry about hitting my microphone. Those are the main different parts of the US. The West, the Midwest, the South, and New England, or the Northeast if you want. That's like the main things, and then you have like, Hawaii and Alaska are sort of off on their own. And when you talk about the US geography, that's really it. Nobody actually knows exactly where all the states are. I mean, yes, most people can... No, not most. Some people can do it. I can name most of the states on a map. Not all of them, most of them. Some of them are harder than others because it's like, which one is Nebraska? Which one's Iowa? I don't know. But yeah, that's really all that you need to know. I think it's pretty simple. We can go over like US culture at some point because there's so many different cultures all over the US that that get really, really specific to each state or even city. So that's kind of interesting. Um, so maybe I'll do that in another episode, but that's all the time that I have for today. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a daily dose of English. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learn something and I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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