Daily Dose of English 44
Layers
Daily Dose of English 44
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 layers. layers because this is a word that kind of just came into my head and it has a lot of different uses and common meanings that I thought were pretty interesting since they're all pretty obvious why they're called layers but they're totally different in how we actually use them. So first the definition of a layer is something that covers something else, usually in a thin, it's like a thin layer. That's not necessarily always true, but that's the connotation, that's the general meaning that you understand when you hear the word layer. And typically, there's many layers that are included when you talk about layers. However, that's not necessarily true. And so layers can be kind of lots of different things. It's a pretty generic term, but I often think of covering something with a couple of different layers of something to protect it in some way. And so the first use of the word layers is that I think of specifically is when you dress warmly and you have a lot of clothes on to keep yourself warm. And we call that like putting on layers. And so for example, if you're going to go somewhere where it's really cold, you are going to have a lot of layers on, right? You might have your sort of regular underwear. Then you might also have long underwear. So that's, um, sort of really long pants that are really sort of close to your body and they're made of a really warm material. Um, and then maybe have something like that on your top as well. And then you have maybe your normal clothes, right? Actual pants or something like that, a normal shirt. And then potentially, depending on how cold it is, more, right? A jacket or snow pants or something that goes over all of those clothes. And that's why they're called layers, because you put on lots of different layers to keep yourself warm. More layers means that there's more insulation power to keeping yourself warm. It's better often to have layers than just one thicker piece of material because layers are lighter, they're a little more breathable and movable, and that sort of air gap between them is a useful thing for insulation. And so when you go skiing or to go to a cold environment, it's important to wear layers. They're also helpful because you can take off one layer at a time. If you're going skiing, for example, and you get really warm because you've been, well, skiing, you can take off your top layer and still have clothes on, right? If you had just one really warm, thick jacket, you would either have everything on or nothing. And so layers are really nice for that. And so I remember my dad loves cold winter sports, so like skiing, sledding, that sort of thing. And so I did that fairly often growing up. And so I remember layers being a really common thing. Also, just the winter where I'm from is not super cold, but it does get a little cold, right? It gets down to five or six degrees. And so it's nice to have layers on because it's cold. Um, and it's not, it was not that uncommon for things to get down to zero Celsius. I'm talking about Fahrenheit. That would be like 35 to 40 ish somewhere in there. Um, I have a weird. System in my own brain where I use Celsius now more often, even though I often think in Fahrenheit, like some things are in Fahrenheit, but some things are in Celsius. It's a weird point to be in. Honestly, I don't really understand why I think like that, but I do. Another common use of the word layers is for food. And the kinds of layers that come to, like when I think of the word layer on food, I think of a layer cake. And so that's when there's a cake with various levels or layers to add frosting in between the cake part and the other cake part and pot potentially more cake parts. And so those are called layer cakes. And they're typically better than normal cakes that are not normal cakes, the cakes that don't have layers rather, because when you have just a really thick cake without much in between, it can get dry and it's not as delicious in a lot, I guess. And so having that layer with actual frosting in between is a really nice way to break up the texture of a cake and improve its overall cake-ness, I guess. But the other really common use of the word layer is in seven layer dip or in layer dip rather. So first dip is what we call a sort of food that you eat with a chip or some other thing that you dip into the dip. It's like a sauce or a salsa. So they're very common when you go to a sports game or a party at a friend's house or something like that, because it's really easy to make a whole lot of dip and then just put out some chips that you eat the dip with. You dip the chip into the dip and you eat the chip with the dip. I hope that was not confusing. But dip is a pretty common food. And seven-layer dip is a bit of a way to go above and beyond with that. You can have other numbers of layers, but seven-layer dip is the one that everybody hears about when talking typically about sports games, when somebody's gonna host a party to watch a sports game. It's typically American football in the US. However, you can host a sports game for whatever sport. And seven-layer dip is when you have a dip which actually has different layers in it. And so you can have a layer of a normal salsa. You can have a layer of beans, a layer of sour cream, a layer of guacamole, a layer of whatever. I'm sure there's other common ones that I'm forgetting. But it creates this really cool textural difference in the dip. Because as you take the chip and you go down through the dip, you hit different layers of delicious food, deliciousness. And so you get this really mixed flavor of all of these delicious things together, and it looks really impressive as well. Because you can see, typically, it's made in a container that has see-through sides or glass sides, and so you can see inside that there are these various layers of dip. And so it looks just, it's a visually impressive thing to eat, I guess. Which maybe isn't the most important thing for a food, but you know, why not have your food look nice? And the last I think common use of the word layer that people that will come to people's minds is the layers of the earth, which is something that you learn in school. I honestly don't remember that well, what the layers of the earth are. But I know there's like the crust, the inner mantle, I believe is a term, the outer mantle, the core. But there's a lot of layers to the earth. And that's, oh, actually, I thought of another use of the word layer, which actually there's a good quote from Shrek, if you've seen that movie, great movie. But Shrek says that ogres are like onions. They have layers. Because onions are a plant that have layers naturally built into them. But then ogres, he's referring to here, have layers, saying that there is more to an ogre than the outer shell, the outer part. And that's true about people as well. You see somebody and you maybe get an initial impression, a first impression of who they are, what they're like, something like that. But then under that layer of how they look, how they talk, how they act, right, you find other layers of their personality, their interests, their hobbies, their fears. There's a lot of different layers to people and apparently to ogres. And so actually I think that is a another common use of the word layer that I want to end this with because it's important to remember that there are layers to everybody and everything. Just because somebody seems maybe a certain way, maybe they seem a little bit mean or a little bit unhappy or whatever you might associate with somebody in a negative way, there's probably something below that, right? They're probably not just a bad person. There's probably a little more below them. Of course, there could be some people that are just bad people, but I think that's less common than we might assume on first glance. And so if you find something that you maybe don't love on the first impression, on your first seeing of it or a person even, try to find the different layers that there are to that thing and maybe think about this episode a little bit when you are trying to be happier or more interested in things in general. Anyways, I think that's enough about layers. Those are some interesting and common uses of the word layer. I hope that this episode helps you to learn a few new things and that you had a nice time listening to a daily dose of English. I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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