Name: Heatwaves across the world - BBC News Review
Uploaded: 2022-05-19T16:50:09.000Z
Duration: 6 min 46 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...

Heatwaves cause record temperatures around the world.

This is News Review from BBC Learning English.

I'm Neil. And I'm Sian. And you can learn lots of vocabulary

You can. And remember, subscribe to our channel, like this video

Heatwaves are pushing temperatures to their highest levels ever recorded.

It has reached over 40 degrees in parts of Europe, North America, Asia

and the Middle East. Wildfires have been burning out of control. Experts

say heatwaves like this have become more frequent

because of climate change caused by humans.

Sian, you've been looking at the headlines.

We have 'scorch', 'bakes', and 'wrestles'.

This one is from Earth Observatory from NASA.

So, let's start with that word 'heatwave' which is everywhere,

and it just means 'a period of time where the temperature is much higher

than usual'. But from the headline, the word

we're looking at is 'scorch', and it's connected to heat, isn't it?

And we've got a lot of words about heat in English.

It means 'to heat something to a level, which damages it'.

have you ever walked on a pavement in bare feet on a hot day?

It can scorch the bottom of your feet. And that word 'scorch' -

we can use with the word 'marks'. Now, for example, if you're ironing a shirt,

you want to make your shirt nice and flat.

If you leave the iron on the shirt for too long,

it can leave scorch marks. It does. I have done this before,

means 'the heat from the Sun actually, literally damages the grounds,

Yes, and as you said, it's literal use here,

but we often use scorching to talk about hot weather.

we don't usually mean that the ground is burning.

Exactly. And here's a bit of useful British slang

So, we can describe a very hot day as 'a scorcher'.

Yeah. We have had a few too many scorchers recently.

The word we are going to talk about is 'bakes'.

Now 'bakes' means 'to cook something in an oven like a cake'.

We do, but we also use bake to talk about very hot weather, and

it's very common in English to use cooking words to talk about hot

We don't say that. We normally use the cooking words

You also mentioned that we use other cooking words in this same way.

But you can also say 'it's absolutely roasting today.'

isn't it? Because 'roasting' and 'baking' - these are strong adjectives.

We can't use 'very' with strong adjectives that sounds wrong.

Are there any other cooking words we can use, Sian?

So we also have 'boiling'. So, water boils,

but we can use 'boiling' to describe very hot weather,

words can be used to describe hot weather.

We don't say it's 'frying outside' or 'it's really grilling today'.

Let's have the next headline, please. This is from the Financial Times.

Now, if you wrestle with someone, you fight them.

So, how can you wrestle with the heatwave?

So, the important thing here is the idea of fighting with something.

Yeah. And this is very common to talk about

you have a difficult problem that you're trying to solve. So here,

the heatwave is the difficult problem and Europe is trying to solve it.

It is not a simple problem to solve so we have to wrestle with it.

Yeah. And there's an interesting spelling and pronunciation

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Heatwaves across the world - BBC News Review

literally

absolutely

pronunciation

situation