Daily Dose of English 136
Water
Daily Dose of English 136
Intermediate
Hey everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, 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 going to be talking about water. Water, which I'm going to drink a little bit of right now. delicious so water the stuff of life everything alive on earth needs water i think pretty sure um sure there's some like weird organism that doesn't but i think it's all water-based everything life needs water on earth at least And it's also a critical part of our life for that reason. Every human on earth needs water to survive, a good amount of water too. Not only for just survival, we use it, that was not a good sentence. We don't even just use it for survival, but we also use it for, wait, what am I gonna say? Like living, geez, cooking, cleaning, showering, What else? It's used for power generation. There's so many different things that we use water for. However, I made the episode title for this and I'm gonna talk more about drinking water because I think that's a little bit more interesting for me, but maybe we'll get to another topic if we have time. And the reason that I actually think that drinking water is kind of interesting is for a couple of different reasons. One, access. And we can talk a bit about how a lot of places on earth don't have good access to clean water. And so people have to do like more crazier and crazier, more difficult, more difficult things to get access to clean water. Maybe they even drink dirty water. There's lots of reasons why water access is so important, but it's currently not equitable. I think that's a good way to explain it. Not everybody on earth has access to clean water, and a lot of it is at the fault of poor governments, poor decisions, and companies kind of ruining it for everybody. A good example is in parts of, I believe, Mexico, there are companies that essentially rented the entire water supply of a town and then sell it back to them. So they've made a deal with the government to say, basically, this is our water now. And the people don't really have anything they can say about it because they are normal human beings without a ton of control over a huge mega corporation. And then they end up having to buy the water or walk for several hours to get water. That's messed up. That shouldn't happen anywhere in the world. Everybody should have access to clean water. We have more than enough. And it should be like a number one priority, but that's not true. Especially, not especially, but like one place that it's becoming more and more evident is here in Mexico City, where lots of parts of the city are being left without water infrastructure because so much of it is lost just to leakage, right? The system is old and bad and kind of broken. And it's not been fixed. And there's a ton of wasted water. I think something like 40% of all of the water in the city just gets lost. Yeah. But I want to talk a little bit more about maybe the pleasant side, right? If we ignore the problems that are messed up and huge problems, we can talk a little bit about I guess I want to talk more about the flavor of water, rather, because I'm somebody who prefers different kinds of water. Some people can't tell the difference, right? They go, this brand is the same as this brand is the same as this brand. But I definitely can tell the difference and I have my favorites and preferences and waters that I don't like. And I thought of this. episode topic today because I watched a video today as part of my check immersion of a guy reviewing different water brands, which was funny because like water brand, it just sounds goofy, right? But I found a very big difference. I buy water jugs, so these big five gallon jugs every week or so to drink. I use tap water for pretty much everything else but for drinking, it's just better to use company water, what do you call that? You just get the water. It's not very expensive and it ends up being worth it because of the flavor, because it's safer all the time, and that sort of thing. You don't have to worry about contamination, whatever it is. And so I buy a specific brand that tastes, to me, significantly better than the other options. And I've seen other people that do this, right? They have their favorite water brand, not because of price or availability, but because of flavor. And I definitely can tell a difference. But it doesn't have to be the expensive one, right? The purpose of buying water is not necessarily to be fancy or to have water that's gonna change your life. It's to like it more, if that makes sense. I will drink more water if I like it than if it's disgusting and gross. I've been to parts of the US, for example, where the tap water has a lot of metal in it, so like iron flavor. It's not like dangerous, going to kill you, but it's just not very good. It tastes bad. And so I would not drink much water if that was there. I would pretty much buy it all, which means that I drink less water. Um, because I mean, I guess that's what I do here, right? It doesn't take, it tastes not very good here. It's not bad, but yeah, the point is that like buying water for it to be nicer is totally valid. There's also a lot of fancier waters from different sources, and that I care less about. I'm not trying to get water for its properties or the minerals that are in it, even though some people do that, and it can make a difference. If you are low in certain minerals, it can be helpful, but I don't have an issue like that, so I don't really need to think about it. There are some brands of water that I like a lot. So I guess I'll talk about them. Why not? The first one that I want to mention is called Liquid Death, which doesn't sound like a water brand, but it totally is. And I learned about this back in the US. I haven't found it here in Mexico, but I learned about it in the US. And I didn't know it was water. I thought it was like a soda or something. So I just ignored it for a long time because I don't like soda. But then at one point, I was like, I really want some water. And they're like, oh, go grab a liquid death. And I go, that's water? What? And it was. And they have really good water. It's in a can. And it's not too expensive. It was totally affordable where I got it from. And I like their, specifically their sparkling water is really nice. Their sparkling water, their still water is also fine, but I really like the sparkling water that they have. There's also a couple of good brands of sparkling water that I've had from Germany that I like, but I don't drink a ton of sparkling water. I usually like it for like a special occasion or something. I don't think I've had sparkling water for a long time, but there's a couple of good brands. San Pellegrino is fine, it's just expensive. I don't think it's worth the price. Their little lemon sodas, though, are probably the only lemonade soda things that I'll drink. Those are good. But there's also a couple of European brands or whatever. I remember Gerolsteiner is one that my parents like and I like as well. Again, that one's also kind of expensive, but if you buy the whole crate or whatever, it's a lot more reasonable. And then also here in Mexico, my favorite brand is Epura, which is, I just think it tastes good. There's a couple other brands. One of the biggest ones is called Bonafont, which I think tastes bad. I do not like it, but they sponsor like everywhere. And so lots of places have only Bonafont water is the only option. And so I have to like get used to it, but yeah. I also heard, oh, there's a fun video that I watched. know what it's called or how you can find it, but it was about this guy talking about he tried a like a water tasting course. And he starts out the video saying, yeah, I know, I tried a water tasting course because I was curious, like that's a crazy thing to do. But he said that it was an interesting experience because the guy that hosted this course, which kind of sounds like a scam, it's pretty expensive, it's like a weird course, but he said that this guy was so enthusiastic about water that it was fun, like it was interesting to do because you got this neat experience from home like without, I don't know, it sounded cool actually because what happened with this course is they sent you a box of different waters and over the course of a couple, I think, days or weeks, I'm not sure, you try different waters with this essentially water expert who's been just drinking tons of waters and loves different kinds of water, which is a very weird sentence to say. But that sounds cool because there are tons of different types. Do you like water with tons of minerals in them? Like I mentioned about iron, there's other things that can be in it. Do you like seawater? What do you like about water was what the course was about and I found that really interesting. I don't think I'm going to do the course. I don't really have any desire to do that. like thinking about it is cool and I think that more people who have the ability, right, if you are just worried about getting any water, right, worry about that first and I really hope that you resolve your issues because it's fucked up if you can't have nice water. But if you're in the place where you have a lot of choice, see what you like, right, try things out because water can be fun and good and it can in a lot of ways replace maybe if you have bad habits of drinking lots of soda or beer or whatever you drink that you kind of want to drink less of, water might be a great thing to replace that with, especially if you find a water that really resonates with you. but I've gone a little bit over time talking about water, but I really appreciate you being here and taking the time to listen. I hope that you have some water next to you to drink, but if not, go make yourself a glass and I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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