Name: No One Really Knows
Uploaded: 2020-04-13T16:10:10.000Z
Duration: 3 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

In lots of ways grown ups can seem very impressive.

But there is a big secret about them: they don't know everything.

Usually an adult only knows about a few things.

One adult might know a lot about trees or car engines,

but know very little about how a phone really works or what happened long ago.

Another might know a lot about books or electricity - but very little about Antarctica or sport.

In fact there are lots and lots of things - even quite important things - that no grown-ups know.

No-one really understands how to make cities very nice, for instance. If they did know all the cities in the world would be lovely.

No-one knows the best way to run a school - that's why there are lots of schools in the world that aren't very nice and why not every teacher is wonderful.

This isn't because grown-ups are stupid but because the problems are so difficult.

If you want to see a grown-up looking confused you could ask them what time is

- not what is the time (they will probably know that!) - but what is time itself?

or why are some jokes funnier than others or does a dog know that it's a dog?

They just won't really know. No one knows too well!

Grown-ups disagree about a lot of things. How should the country be run? What should we do about pollution? Who should get the biggest salaries?

You can yourself have conversations about these things and it doesn't matter if you don't know for sure - because grown-ups don't know either.

Grown-ups do know a lot. But - and it's important to keep reminding yourself of this - they're often very unsure about a lot of really important things in their own lives.

They can seem very impressive: they've got a job, they are married to someone, maybe they go on work trips to other countries in huge planes.

But maybe inside they don't really know why they got married to this person (maybe it would have been better with someone else);

they wonder if they should be doing a different job; they feel confused about how they've ended up having to work so hard so much of the time.

Perhaps they don't know if this would be a good time to move house or where it would be good to go on holiday.

They feel they have to make a lot of big decisions but they don't know if they are making the right ones.

That's why they frown a lot, and get snappy.

One day, you will be a grown up too. And the strange thing is that you won't feel so very different from the way you do now.

You'll still be you - though you'll have big shoes and will have learnt how to drive a car and will be able to stay up till very late.

But there will still be lots of things you don't know.

It's good to have a little part of your brain that constantly keeps in mind that there a lots of important things that grown-ups don't know.

This doesn't mean that adults are silly. But it's quite nice to imagine they they have thinking-problems too.

It can make some of them seem a little less frightening. It makes you feel a bit sorry for them.

It makes you see that actually you're not so different - and that you too have things to contribute.

We can actually be quite nice to each other when we realise that we're all faced with similar problems.

And we can all have a go at thinking - which is what ends up making the whole world cleverer.

Our perspective cards feature tools for a wiser calmer perspective on life they help to restore calm and clarity even during difficult times.