Daily Dose of English 25
Kettles
Daily Dose of English 25
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. Because in this episode, we're going to be talking about kettles. or things to boil water in, which I know as kettles. I think there's a couple of different words in the English speaking world, depending on where you're from or how much you boil water, but I've always known them as kettles, K-E-T-T-L-E. And so a kettle typically is just a chamber to fill with water and then a spout to pour it out. and then you heat it up in some way and that's it. But I wanna talk a little bit more about them and their use and how common they are because I think it's an interesting topic. Because most people in the US don't have an electric kettle. They have a simple stovetop kettle that you use like a flame with a gas or some kind of heating element to directly heat the body of the kettle to boil the water. But it's in like most of Europe, wherever people drink a lot of hot teas and liquids, for example, electric kettles are much more common because they're so convenient, they're so nice. And I've always found it very strange the amount of coffee that Americans drink, and even tea, and the small amount of electric kettles that there are. I think they're becoming more popular nowadays as people realize just how useful they are because you can boil water in a minute, two minutes. It's a lot faster than putting it on a stove and waiting because the kettles will directly heat the water instead of also trying to heat the whole kettle. And that's what makes them faster overall. It's not like they have some sort of magic way to heat the water to be boiling faster, other than the fact that all of the heat goes into the water instead of into the kettle first and then into the water. Because if you think about it, a stovetop kettle, you put it on the stove, and you turn on the gas flame. That flame then has to heat the air around the kettle, which then has to heat the kettle itself, which then has to heat the water on the inside. And that's just a longer process, plus a bunch of the heat comes out along the sides of the kettle, and you lose a lot of that heat, that energy that you're trying to put directly in the water. But with an electric kettle, it essentially plugs directly into the water. And so it's heating the water, which then ends up heating the kettle a little bit, right? Because when you touch it, it's hot. But it's because the water is heating the kettle. And if you put your hands close to the kettle, it doesn't really feel hot. The air isn't really being heated. Sure, if you leave it for long enough and you put your hand above where the steam goes out, that's pretty hot. But that's a different thing. That's the steam, not the air. And so they just generally make better use of that electricity in this case, instead of gas, they make better use of that heat energy to boil the water faster. And so you get faster heating. There's a lot of different kinds of kettles depending on the spout or the neck that you use. And that's where the water actually comes out. You can have like a simple spout that is just an opening and you can just directly pour water. You can have sort of one of the fancy ones, which we often call a gooseneck because it comes out, it goes up, and then it kind of turns back down again and creates like this swoop that looks sort of like a goose or a swan. And so those are called gooseneck kettles in English. And they're some of the most useful for making coffee because you can get a really fine stream of water going exactly where you want it to go. And I think it's just easier to use, in my opinion, because the bigger ones, if you're trying to pour hot water on your coffee, yes, it functions the same. It's not like the water is different, but you're more likely to spill water and get water in places that you don't want it to be. And so the gooseneck kettles are just a quality of life thing. That's a good word, actually. Quality of life, if you've never heard of that before, refers to something that makes something else better, usually a product or something that you use every day in a way that is not strictly needed and not necessary. The product will be functional without that feature, but it's nicer. So in the case of a kettle, something like a A gooseneck spout is a quality of life feature. A nice handle is quality of life. There's lots of little things that can be quality of life. For example, a kettle that can beep when it's ready, when the water's ready, or a kettle that has different temperatures is also quality of life because sure, you could guess yourself and figure it out, but it's a lot nicer for it just to be automatic and easy. The kettle that I have and use every single day all the time is a pretty simple gooseneck kettle like that. And it's got some buttons to choose what temperature it goes to. It's not that fancy. Honestly, it only holds like 500 milliliters of water. maybe a little more, and it just plugs into the wall and that's it. But it's been super handy ever since I bought it. I've been using it every single day, possibly several times a day. And I almost can't imagine living without it because I make coffee every morning and I like to be able to have hot drinks if I want a tea or whatever. It's also just handy if you need hot water quickly. And I don't know, that's just something that's so indispensable is a good word for me. Indispensable is something that you can't go without. It typically refers to something that is technically dispensable, like you can live without it, but you would really prefer not to. Or a person can be indispensable if they're just a really valuable member of a team. They always bring a lot to the table. That's a good metaphor. I know I'm going off on weird tangents in terms of vocabulary, but bringing a lot to the table is almost always for a person who is very valuable to a team because of their skills or abilities or knowledge or whatever. And so we use the metaphor that they bring a lot to the table. in terms of stuff that they just have to offer as a person. And so you want to be an indispensable member of a team who brings a lot to the table. That's a really, that's a good goal, I think, for a lot of people on smaller teams. But anyways, back to kettles. But the most common type of kettle, like I said, is that sort of more boring metal kettle that you fill with water and you put on the stovetop in the U.S. at least, right? That's the more, it's more common there. And a lot of people that is their kettle. They work the same basically, but like I said, they're just a little bit more fiddly and annoying. I know the one that I grew up with, um, was like also hard to open the top. And so we would actually just fill it through the spout. A lot of the times it was just easier that way. But again, that just adds more. a difficulty to using your, your day to day stuff. And I don't like my parents use that for years again, making tea every single morning. I don't really know exactly how they didn't decide to get something a little bit nicer because that thing, although I guess that thing did last for probably a decade, two decades, maybe it's probably still functional because it's just a piece of metal that heats up water. Right. It's not that complicated. Um, but yeah, The other ways to use kettles besides making tea and coffee are doing things like instant noodles, which I talked about in a past episode. You can also, if you need to clean something, it's really nice to have hot water instantly. For example, if you need to clean like a stain off of a sink or a shower or whatever, sometimes hot water can really help with that. Or if you're trying to boil a pot of water, Just putting a whole bunch of boiling water in that water will also help heat up the entire pot of water. And so if you need to boil things faster, then you can. Although boiling water is actually something that I also didn't think about a ton until I moved to a city that is very high up. I live at about 2,500 meters, which is about 7,500 feet, I think, something like that. I don't know the exact numbers. But water boils at a lower temperature here, actually like 90 degrees Celsius or what, 190 Fahrenheit? I actually don't know. I know Celsius, but I don't know. Um, but the water boils at literally cooler temperatures. And so when I put my kettle on to the 200 degrees, it's in Fahrenheit. I said, it's a 200 degree, which is good for coffee. And it boils there. It just boils, boils, boils, which is not the same if you live at sea level. And so it's just a bit of a weird, uh, quirk of living high up. that water boils differently. For that same reason, rice cookers don't work here unless they're vacuum sealed because rice cookers work on the temperature of water to boil. But since they're basic systems, they assume that that temperature is 100 degrees. And so when it's colder than that, it messes things up. But anyways, I think I've rambled enough about random kitchen utensils and objects and things and a little bit about kettles. So I hope that you found this episode useful. You maybe learned a word or two and let me know down in the comments. Do you use a kettle? What kind of kettle is popular in your country? I'd love to hear and I appreciate you being here. Make sure you subscribe for more and I'll see you tomorrow for another episode. Bye-bye.
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