Ben's Language Lab

Daily Dose of English 38

Flowers

Daily Dose of English 38

Intermediate

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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 flowers. And now there's actually a couple of different words that we have in English that have that same pronunciation. There's flowers like that you might find in a meadow. So things like lilies or roses or dandelions, those are all types of flower. But then we also have the word flour that is spelled F-L-O-U-R, which is used for baking, right? It's what you make from wheat and you use it to make cakes and pies and bread, all sorts of different things. But today I'm talking about the first kind. The kind that look nice and smell nice. Because flowers are cool in a lot of ways. Because they are plants that do a lot of different things. They're colorful, they're pretty, they smell nice, and sometimes they can even taste nice or be edible. And I think that we can have an interesting little chat here about flowers. Because flowers have an interesting place not only in our minds as, I guess, humans, as people, because we interact with the world and with nature and with flowers, but also because there's a certain role that they play in culture and in our day-to-day lives, I guess. And so we can first talk a bit about kind of what they are, and then we'll dive into a little bit more about what they mean. Starting from what they are, flowers are part of a plant, right? They're specifically a part that we say it flowers, right, as a verb. this part of the plant flowers and becomes what we think of as a flower. They have different, they have petals, right? Those are each of the different sort of leaves are what a plant has, but a flower has petals. And the petals are often used for various different things. And then inside the petals, there is actually, I'm not even sure what it's called, but that's sort of like, there's like a center. and that typically has some sort of pollen or nectar, which are other different words that you might come across when talking about flowers. Pollen is that stuff that kind of goes out in the air and people have allergic reactions to. It might make you sneeze or something like that. And then nectar is the sweet sort of sticky liquid that flowers create, that bees like, that hummingbirds like, and they use for various purposes, typically for energy and for food and for eating. And so flowers do a lot of things in terms of their biology and how they function as plants because they serve a purpose, not only to look nice, right? That's not the only reason they serve a purpose in terms of like their evolutionary purpose, but they also exist for other reasons that help the plant. One of the big ones is reproduction. If the purpose of an organism is to continue existing, to continue living, it needs to reproduce. And flowers are one of the ways that plants can get their seed out into the world somehow. Like I said, if bees or birds like the flowers, they're going to move those seeds all over the place. Etc. Etc. I think there's also other ways that flowers work, but I don't really know that well I'm not a I'm not a flower biologist or anything like that But that's the general idea of what flowers sort of are technically And you can come across all sorts of different kinds of flowers, all different colors, all parts of the world. There's so, so many different kinds of flowers and they all look quite different, right? You can get flowers that are really long and skinny and tall. You can get ones that are humongous and ones that smell nice, ones that smell terrible, right? There's just a ton of different variety among flowers. But then we also like to use flowers in a lot of different ways. Like I said, they often look nice, and so people very frequently give them as gifts. In the US, there's a couple of different meanings that flowers can have. A common one is roses mean some sort of love, typically a more sexual love. In a lot of ways, rose petals sort of invoke that feeling or they give that feeling of sort of a more romantic connection, romantic love. You may see pictures on romantic books, for example, of people with flowers in their mouth or giving, or with roses in their mouth, rather, giving roses or rose petals being used as a decoration for some kind of romantic encounter, whether that's in a hotel room or in somebody's, their own home, their bedroom, that's what it often gives the feeling of. Flowers are often given as gifts as well as a congratulations is very common. So if somebody has a big show or they get promoted or something happens that's really positive in their life that's good for them that they achieved. then people will often give them flowers, right? They will bring them what we call a bouquet. A bouquet is a group of a bunch of flowers together in one piece, right? One chunk is that bouquet. They typically have some paper on the outside to keep them from being damaged, and people give bouquets. There's also flowers that are used at weddings, especially the bouquet again, that's the generic term. But the bouquet that the bride has, it's sort of a tradition at the end of a wedding for the bride to throw the bouquet out into the crowd, usually over her shoulder, behind her. And whoever catches it, supposedly, is the next who's going to get married. I'm not sure if that's the tradition or the custom all over the world. It might just be a thing in North America. Maybe it's a Christian thing. I'm not super positive. I don't really know where it comes from, but I know that that's what flowers often mean at weddings. There's tons of other meanings of flowers, obviously, but I think we can talk about a bit of something else. I like flowers because they add some color to a place. And that can often be really nice, even if they don't do anything else. Because having color, for example, in your kitchen or your living room, can be a really nice just thing to look at right because you don't always want things to just be gray and black or whatever or silver like if you have a fridge that is silver or white adding a pop of color can be really helpful and especially if you can find somewhere where flowers aren't too expensive it's a really nice way just to add a little bit to your living space without spending too much money. And if you put them in water, they can often live for a while or you can actually grow your own flowers. I don't have any like my own growing flower bushes or anything like that, but that's a fairly common thing for people to do. It's sort of a stereotype, even. It's a thing that people think of often for older ladies who are retired and don't have much to do, or actually older men, too. It's not strictly gendered. But people will think of retired people as having gardens and really caring for their flowers, because sometimes they can be really difficult to grow. And so you have to be really careful with them. You have to take care of them, water them, make sure that there's not any bugs eating them or whatever it is. And so people often will grow flowers because they look nice. And that's usually the biggest reason. I also have some Lego flowers. They're not real flowers. They're made of Lego, which is the simple plastic building toy that has been around for a very long time. And I got those as a gift. And it was a really fun thing to build. And now I keep on a shelf because they never die. But they do have that color, like I mentioned. And so there's a lot of different ways that we use flowers, that we interact with them. And I think an interesting story is of, I think, the Netherlands or the Dutch flower rose crisis or whatever. I don't remember exactly what it was called, but a couple A hundred years ago? God, I don't actually know much about this, I'm now realizing. But at one point, there was a huge bubble in the market Here's some words about finance now, not about flowers, where people were buying tulips. That's what they were, not roses, they were tulips. And people started buying tulips because they were really expensive. And that was really the only reason people were buying more tulips, because they knew that other people were buying tulips because they knew that they were expensive. And so it created a bubble because these tulips actually didn't have any value in them in and of themselves. They weren't really worth anything unless somebody was willing to buy them from you. And so suddenly people just stopped buying flowers because they thought this is too expensive. This doesn't make any sense. I'm not going to buy these flowers. And then suddenly a bunch of people lost the money that they had invested into those flowers. And so don't buy tulips that are too expensive. That's the moral of the story. And I think I've talked enough about flowers at this point, possibly gone on some random, um, asides, but I hope that you enjoyed this episode of a daily dose of English and I'll see you again tomorrow. Same time for the next episode. Have a good one. Bye.


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