Daily Dose of English 82
Oregon
Daily Dose of English 82
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 Oregon, the state of Oregon, which is where I'm from. I thought it might be kind of a fun thing to do is talk about some U.S. states every now and then, because the U.S. is such a large country, and each state is really quite different. A couple of them are pretty similar. So like I'll be talking about Oregon, which is relatively similar to Washington, for example. But Oregon is super different from something like Texas, which is super different from Florida, which is really different than Minnesota. Like there's so many, or not Minnesota, that's a state or a city. But the point is that, no, that is a state. Yeah, yeah, Minneapolis is the city, Minnesota is the state. Yeah, yeah, I was right, okay. But they can be so, so different that I thought it might be interesting to talk about. So I'm not sure how many I'll talk about. There are 50 different U.S. states, and I don't know much about most of them. But I figure that we can definitely start with some of the states that I do know, like the state of Oregon, because that's where I'm from. And so I want to just talk a little bit about the state and maybe tell you what you can expect and why I think it's a cool place. So first, Oregon is pretty far north. It's the state that's right above California. Most people know where California is because it's so famous and if you go up one state, that's Oregon. and it's on the west coast. So it's all the way on the west of the country, so all the way to the left, and right on the water, so it's on the coast. And it is not really an old, old state. because the United States kind of were created generally in the order of like right to left, give or take more or less. And so Oregon is the 33rd state to become a real official state. It's also not that populated in general. I believe there's less than five million people in the entire state, which is not really that many overall because it's just not that big, right? It's very large in terms of how large the state is. But the actual number of people there is pretty small. It's not a super populated state. The most populated city is where I'm from, which is Portland. The Portland metropolitan area ends up being a couple million people. But then the rest of the people live in a few small places all around Oregon. Nowhere else is really that big, which is, I think, kind of interesting. A humongous portion of people live in Portland. And part of that is actually because of how much, I guess, nature there is in Oregon. There's a very, very large amount of, I guess, just natural beauty, you could say. There's a lot of parts that are very green and have tons of trees. Even Portland, like the biggest city, is full of trees and green and forest. Lakes, rivers, there's actually two rivers that go through Portland. There's the river that separates Oregon from Washington, so there's a border, and then there is another river that goes right through the city, which is kind of cool, but pretty much no other parts are that populated. Looking at the numbers, There's three cities that have about 100,000 people, and there's two cities that have almost 200,000 people. And that's like it. There's a bunch of smaller ones, littler ones, or whatever. But two of those larger cities are actually just next to Portland. And so really there's only three kind of largish cities, maybe four if you count. That one's also close to Portland. But there's just not very many large places in Oregon with terms of people. And so when you drive through Portland or you go to interesting parts of it, you end up seeing lots of small towns, which can be really cool and interesting because it's very different than a lot of other places, which makes it feel unique. I also mentioned that it's on the coast, and the coast is where There's a lot of really cool small settlements, and that's where I would go with my family a lot growing up. We'd go to the Oregon coast, and we would go to smaller places. We'd go to restaurants and sort of enjoy the natural beauty, like I said. Oh yeah, I wanted to get back to that. So the natural beauty thing. Like I said, there is a ton of greenery, so forests, waterfalls, things like that. There's also the beach, right? The Oregon coast. And there's also mountains, right? There's a very large mountain, Mount Hood, which has a lot of great skiing and snow and lots of cool stuff there. And there's also things like, um... Wait, desert, that's the word. There's places that are very, very dry and with nothing there. There's also plenty of rivers and wildlife and all sorts of things, which makes Oregon an absolutely beautiful state to visit. It's also relatively high up in the economy of the of the US. It's number I think number 17 ish in terms of the average household income. So most people that are from Oregon are make more money than people from most of the other states. So it's in the top what, 40% of the country? Yeah, well, yeah, because 10% would be or 10 states is 20%. So yeah, it's in the top 40%. So it's not like the richest state or anything like that. But it's it's pretty high up there. But something that is interesting is that it is very, very low in the country in terms of education. Oregon State scores in terms of schooling and education is very low in everything. Most people, a lot of people do graduate, which is good, but like the scores and the education spending and all that sort of stuff is a lot lower than would make sense for a state that is relatively high in the economy rankings. That's always something that I've found interesting and difficult growing up there. I remember several times when I was growing up that we didn't have school because of a teacher strike. A strike is when a group of people, or in this case, teachers, say, we are not going to work. We are getting paid too little or we don't have enough benefits or whatever it is. We're not going to work. And then the employer, so in this case, the Portland Public School System, which is, I guess, the body that manages the schools in Portland, don't pay enough, essentially. And that's the short version of it. And so I remember several weeks of time where all the teachers were like, we're not gonna teach for a whole like, until we get whatever we need, because we can't live or whatever. Because Oregon is fairly expensive, especially in Portland, because it's a very fast growing city. And you can see that in especially the real estate. So the houses, the house prices is going up a lot faster than a lot of other places because it is fairly popular. And that's because of the different, I guess, how the city feels, more or less. There's a lot of art, there's a lot of greenery, there's a lot of nature. And so a lot of people are going to Portland because it's a pretty nice place to live, honestly. It's one of the better cities in all of the US. I'm very grateful to be from there and to have been born there. But there is a lot of problems with that growth. There's not enough space for people or really there's enough space. There's not enough homes. There's not enough affordability. The jobs aren't always great. And so there can be a lot of issues. It's also relatively close to Seattle, which is a very, it's a larger city and more popular and lots of cool stuff. Oregon, and really more specifically Portland, is also known for being pretty weird and liberal, I guess you could say. There's actually a famous bumper sticker that says, keep Portland weird. Like that's the slogan. That's the phrase that the entire city goes by. Keep it kind of strange. Keep it weird. There's tons of thrift stores with old styles. There's lots of little strange restaurants and cafes. And it's a pretty open place to do things how you want, to express yourself in art or how you dress or how you wear your hair, whatever it might be. And so a lot of people like that ability to be more open and free and have the greenery around and all that stuff and So it's a pretty popular place to go I could keep talking about this, but I think I'm gonna let it go for let it go I'm gonna leave it there for today because we're already at about ten and a half minutes but I hope that you enjoyed this episode and you maybe learned a little something about one of the US states and Maybe I'll do more of these. I'm not quite sure. Anyways, I'll see you in tomorrow. Bye you
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.