Daily Dose of English 20
Fans
Daily Dose of English 20
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 fans. Not the people that are enjoyers of something, but fans that push air out into a room and cool you down. That's how you describe a fan. I don't think I've ever described a fan before, but yeah, they're the things that you typically plug into a wall, so they have power, and then they move some blades around with a motor and those blades then push air out into a room or towards something to create a cool breeze and that breeze is usually very needed if you have a fan on. I've been thinking about fans a little bit because it is becoming the hot season here, the summer season, and so I am quite warm often, particularly at night, which is why I actually just bought a new fan because it's getting pretty hot at night and the fan that I have that I bought like a year ago, I don't like. It's kind of a piece of crap, honestly, and I regret buying it because it wasn't super cheap. It wasn't also that expensive, so it's not like I lost a bunch of money, but I got a tower fan, so it's like a big tube and it has fan blades throughout the entire thing, but the problem with that is that I don't need a whole tower fan, so I actually just got another normal fan so it has a base with a long stick coming out of it and then there's a head part that has the blades on it and that you can point more specifically because what I need is a fan that will point at my bed and give me a nice breeze throughout as much of the night as possible. I actually typically, if I can, I put it on a timer because I don't really need it when I'm sound asleep at night, but falling asleep, I like to have a fan on me and so I got a new one because I wanted to be able to direct it directly at my bed so that I don't boil to death. It's not that hot, but it's nice to have and I'm really excited because I've been sort of annoyed at this other fan that I have because it's also really, really loud and it doesn't push air very well and that's the main point of a fan, that it pushes air well and so yeah, it's just a piece of crap. It's also got three levels and the first level is so loud. It's so, so loud. It actually does push air okay, but it's just so loud. I don't know. It just hurts me almost. The second level is also really loud, but the air is pretty good and that's sort of what I want, but I almost always use the lowest level, like sort of level three because it's the most bearable in terms of the noise, but it's not good enough in terms of a fan because so much of the air just goes under my bed essentially. So I got a new one that I'm going to get hopefully in a couple days and it's going to push air directly at me and I'm excited about that. I know lots of parts of the world fans are a lot either more necessary, right? It's not that hot here, maybe 28, 29 degrees and at night it probably gets down to like 24 or something like that, but it does heat up inside pretty well and I prefer a fan because I'm used to sleeping where it's like 17 degrees inside and I quite like that and so I like it to be a little bit crisper and fresher when I sleep, but some parts of the world where it gets to like 35 or 40 degrees, you don't even want a fan. You need an AC, you need an air conditioner, which sort of has a fan built in usually, but it also pulls in really cold air from typically outside, it actually pulls some of the heat or no, how do they work exactly? So there's some that have like a refrigerant and so they take air and they push it through something that's really cold to cool down the air, then it pushes it out, but then there's others that sort of suck coldness out of the outside or I don't remember exactly how they work. Oh no, that's what it is, it's a heat pump, that's what it is, aha, I figured it out. They push heat out by pulling it from inside the room and that's a little bit more efficient, but you have to have a wall that leads outside so that you can pump heat from inside the house to the outside. They also work in reverse though, so you can pump in heat from outside into the inside when it's actually quite cold outside, which is sort of interesting technology, I don't know that much about it, but it's kind of cool, so I'm not going to talk about it anymore because I don't know what I'm talking about. There's also other kinds of fans, right, you can get like a little handheld one or a desk one, I think those are also pretty common in places where people are in like taxis for example a lot of the time and they don't really have good AC and so they just put like a fan on their dashboard. The dashboard in a car is the part that's sort of in front of the steering wheel under the windshield that you can reach out and touch and if you leave something there it's going to get burned in the sun because it's so hot inside cars. But that does remind me of one time many years ago that I was on a road trip with my family. Road trips are pretty common in the US because it's such a big country you can drive for 12 hours and not even have left a single state. But we were on a road trip and we were in an old Volkswagen van that didn't have any AC, didn't have any air conditioning. All it had was one little fan in the front. That was it, that was the entire cooling mechanism of the car plus windows. But we were driving through California in the summer. It's hot in California in the summer and so it was really really hot inside that car. And we were going for like 10 hours. That's a long time to be in a metal box that is being heated by the sun with only a tiny little fan in the front. And so I remember that we survived obviously but barely it felt like we were boiling alive and so I definitely don't like to have to drive in California without AC. Then again I don't think I've done it like in a decade so yeah. But anyways if you're ever going to drive in California in the summer make sure that you have some AC and ways to keep yourself cool. Other kinds of fans that you might often see are the handheld ones. Those are surprisingly effective which is why they're pretty common in parts of the world where it's really hot because you can fan yourself without very much movement on your part. You just sort of just move your wrist a little bit and it creates a lovely cool breeze to cool you off. I remember specifically growing up there was a couple of times we had really really hot summers which is not that common where I'm from in Oregon. The summers are usually 24, 25 degrees, like lovely weather. But every so often we would have a summer that got up to like 29 or 30 degrees and that might not sound like that much to somebody who's from like India or the south of Mexico or anywhere it's really hot. But for a place where it's usually not so hot that can actually be pretty dangerous because people aren't used to it. Same sort of idea if there was snow in somewhere where there's never snow people would freak out. I don't know how to be in snow. It's really really cold. What do I do? Right? And the opposite happens as well. And so I remember that there was during those times not only do people buy a lot more fans and AC and whatever but also like handheld fans become really really common. And so whenever I think of handheld fans I think of times that it's really really hot despite it actually being a pretty normal thing in other parts of the world. I just thought it was sort of an interesting connection that I have to sort of those handheld fans. Plus they look cool right? They're sort of they have that when they close and they open it's very satisfying right sort of a snap and you can and you can I'm moving my hand to show the motion but you obviously can't see that. But when you open the fan sort of in a cool way it kind of looks like you're some sort of magician or whatever. But anyways do I have anything else to say on fans? Oh yeah ceiling fans because those are also really common in the US. I'm not sure if they are in the rest of the world but a lot of houses in the US have ceiling fans which are pretty large fans that go on the ceiling obviously. It's also usually got lights on them right so you have a couple of light bulbs and then the big old fan blades go around the room and when you turn on the fan it has a nice breeze in the entire room. Those I think are probably some of my favorite fans especially for sleeping because you get like a nice even breeze from above. But they're just not that common and they're pretty expensive. And so I haven't really had the luxury of using one in quite some time. I don't think really any of the places that I've lived had fans like that. It's typically in like a hotel or if I'm staying somewhere for a couple nights or whatever it is. But they're usually pretty nice so maybe someday I'll get a nice ceiling fan for myself to keep myself cool in the summer. Anyways that's all that I have to say about fans. Another kind of strange episode but that's what we're here for. I'm going to be talking about totally random stuff in a couple dozen episodes so you just wait all right. Anyways I really appreciate you being here to take the time to listen and I hope that you learned a little something here or there maybe a word or two. If you did let me know down in the comments and what kind of fans you use. But that's everything that I have for today. Thanks for being here. Have a fantastic evening or day or night or whatever it is and I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
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