Daily Dose of English 97
The Desert
Daily Dose of English 97
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 can make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about the desert. I don't know why I put this down on my list of topics. I have a spreadsheet with all of the different episodes and topics and things. And I put down topics in advance. And so like I know what I'm gonna talk about tomorrow and the next day. But I don't remember putting the desert onto my list. It's kind of a weird topic. But I think it's kind of an interesting one. So let's go with it. So, the desert isn't a very complicated word. Oops, I just hit my keyboard. What happened? Nothing. Okay, we're good. You've probably heard it before and I'm sure you think of just sand and places that are very dry with no water. And that's what a desert is, really. There's not much more to it. I think the literal definition has to do with a lack of water that is in water form, like liquid water, there we go, in liquid water. And so actually there's a fun fact of Antarctica being the largest desert in the world because there's not really, all the water's frozen. There's no real liquid water there. But that's a surface level kind of boring thing. Nobody really cares. When we say the desert, we mean hot and dry and usually sandy. A lot of people will think of places like the Sahara desert in Africa, That's really it, that's like the most famous desert, I think. There's plenty of other deserts. There's some deserts in Oregon. Actually, a fairly large part of Oregon is a desert, which is why it's a pretty big state. I think it's like the 13th biggest state or something like that. But a lot of that space is not super used. It's pretty small, no. It's pretty uninhabited, that's the word. Why can't I think of words? And that's pretty common for a lot of deserts, except there are some where there are plenty of people live. Lots of people live in deserts, especially in parts of the Middle East, Egypt, even parts of the U.S. are really very deserty. Las Vegas is pretty famous for being very, very hot during the day, and so everybody just goes between the buildings to keep cool. I lived in Ciudad Juarez in the north of Mexico for a while, which is right south of the border with El Paso, Texas. And that's a pretty deserty region. I think it's actually considered like a high desert or something like that because it's pretty high elevation, relatively speaking. And that was an interesting experience. Living in a desert is weird if you're from a rainy, kind of foresty part like I am. I'm from Oregon. And so when I lived in a desert, it was a little odd. It was like, there's things that you don't really realize are different, right? It's a lot drier. That's just a thing you get used to. The air is really dry. There's just less water in the air and sort of around. There's still water, like you can drink water and everything like that. There's plenty of water to drink. But the water just in general is different. And so you might notice that with your hair or with your skin being pretty different. And you might have to take care of yourself differently depending on how dry the area is. But the other thing that I realized about many deserts, not all, but many deserts, is that the sun is the source of heat. And the reason that it gets hot during the day is because it's able to absorb a lot of the sun's heat and it's just in a spot where the sun is very strong. But what that means is that at night, the heat is not there, the sun is gone, and so it can get really cold. And that was something that kind of surprised me about Juarez, was that during the day, it would consistently get to 35 degrees, 36 degrees Celsius, up to maybe even 100 degrees in the summer. But then that very same day at night, it would get down to eight or nine degrees Celsius. It would go, it would get pretty cold down to like 40 even in Fahrenheit. I'm mixing those for fun. You're gonna have to figure it out, I guess, but I didn't really realize that when I hadn't lived in a desert and I have kind of learned that there's this big difference between temperature because so much comes from the sun rather than other things, right? If like the air holds on to heat or there's heat from other areas water like big bodies of water can hold on to heat or in the case of Many bodies of water actually put off a lot of coldness cold air if you're on a bay, so a bay is when there's water that kind of comes into the land and and the land kind of goes around it. So think of like, in the US we have the very famous Bay Area, which is where San Francisco is and a bunch of different cities, Oakland, Alameda, places like that, where there's water that kind of comes from the ocean into the land a bit and creates like this inverse island. Not quite, that would be like a lake. A lake is sort of the opposite of an island, but it's the water coming in rather than being like on the coast. And on a lot of bays, it's quite windy and the wind comes into the land and it grabs all of that cold air from the water, more or less, and makes it really cold. And so in the Bay Area, if you're right on the water, it's very cold. It's very windy and cold. Same goes for Seattle, there's a big bay up there as well and it gets pretty cold. But yeah, I don't know why I started talking about that. Anyways, let's go on to other things. I wanted to tell a little bit of a funny story about when I was growing up learning to spell in English, I would constantly get confused by desert and desert, because they're spelled almost the same, D-E-S-E-R-T or D-E-S-S-E-R-T. Desert is with two S's, and desert is with one S. Yes, they both have Z sounds like a Z. So it would make sense to make it be desert with a Z and dessert also with a Z and probably not really spelled differently. It's just a stress difference, right? Desert, dessert. There's a very different stress pattern there. And as a growing English speaker, I knew the differences very well. It was very obvious, hearing the words, saying the words, that was fine, but spelling them was hard. And because as an eight-year-old, I wanted dessert more often than not, I would want to... I would sort of learn that two S's is better than one. So two S's makes dessert, which is better than one, which is a desert. And that was the way that I remembered it. I remember that one of the ways that I learned it as well is that I heard it a bunch was because a parental trick is to spell words so that your kids maybe don't know what you're talking about. And so it's like when you're at the dinner table and one of your parents asks, oh, should we have D-E-S-S-E-R-T today? And the other parent goes, no, we already had some this afternoon when you weren't here. And they go, oh, OK, cool, cool, cool. And then the kids go, what is that? What is that secret word you just said? Because they can't spell yet. But I figured out how to spell and I caught on. So yeah, anyways, that's that story. Not a very long one. But I guess I'll just end by talking about deserts in general. After living in the desert a little bit, I have become fairly interested in living in a desert, I guess. I don't really know why, but I find it kind of intriguing, and not like the way where you force it to not be a desert and pretend like it's not a desert, air condition everything, put grass in, give it tons of water. That I think is ridiculous and doesn't make any sense, and it's just a waste of time and money. But I find it pretty interesting that people that live in deserts, because in a way that makes sense, So for example, like growing deserty foods. a lot of the foods that we eat today don't grow well in the desert. And I think that people that live in deserts should kind of learn more about that and understand, oh yeah, this is the food that grows well here. So for example, in Mexico, a relatively common food are called tunas. Not to be confused with tuna in English, which is the fish, but tunas are like the fruits of cactuses. and you can eat those and they grow quite well in the desert because they're off of cactuses. But especially in the US, that's not that common. And so I feel this interesting pull to the desert. Again, I don't really know why. And I want to do it in a way that fits with the desert and is, I guess, almost in harmony and in a way where you understand how to live with the heat and how to be to the heat, as we say, and to not get too hot and to cool your home in a way that makes more sense for the place, it's not a huge waste of energy, and all these different questions about living in the desert, I think are interesting. I don't live in a desert now though, so we'll see if it ever happens in the future, but yeah. Anyways, that's all for this kind of, again, another random episode, but I hope that you enjoyed it and maybe learned a few words here and there. And let me know down in the comments what kind of climate you live in. And I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye!
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