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  • Hello.

  • My name is Emma and I am about to teach you "about to".

  • Okay?

  • So, "about to", what does it mean and how do we use it?

  • Well, let's look at an example to really understand this.

  • "I am about to clean my room."

  • I want you to think for a moment.

  • Do you think this sentence is about the past, the present, or the future?

  • So: "I am about to clean my room."

  • If you said this is about the future, you are correct.

  • We use "about to" when we're talking about something we will do very soon in the future.

  • We're not talking about far in the future.

  • We usually use "will" for that.

  • We're talking about very, very soon like in the next five minutes or in the next couple

  • of minutes.

  • So, I am about to give you some examples of "about to".

  • So we have here "I" as a subject: "I am about to", and then after "about to" we have a verb.

  • I put this in colour to help you remember it better.

  • We have: "You are about to" and the verb.

  • "She or he is about to" and a verb.

  • "We are about to" and a verb.

  • "You guys are about to" and a verb.

  • I've put here: "You guys", which is a bit informal, but when we're talking about a group

  • of people in an informal situation we can use: "You guys", and: "They are about to"

  • with a verb.

  • So what can we do with the verbs here?

  • Well, if you look up here I have: "I am about to clean my room."

  • We keep the verb in the infinitive in this case.

  • "I am about to study English.",

  • "You are about to listen to me speak.",

  • "She is about to watch TV.",

  • "We are about to go to the gym.",

  • "You guys are about to listen to Justin Bieber.",

  • "They are about to take a shower."

  • Okay?

  • So now let's do some together, let's put the verb in the proper form together.

  • Okay, so just to remember: When we're talking about "about to", we're talking about the

  • future and usually we're talking about either the immediate future, meaning the next 5-10

  • minutes or the next couple of hours or we can also be talking about soon.

  • Soon is different for different people, so I might be talking about in the next couple

  • of days or in the next couple of weeks, but what I really mean is soon. Okay?

  • So I can say: "I am about to go on vacation", and that means soon I will go on vacation.

  • Okay, so now let's do some examples together.

  • "I am about to _________."

  • How can we change this verb into the proper form?

  • "I am about to..."

  • Well, this was a trick question.

  • You said:

  • "call"-and we add a little period here-you are correct.

  • It's very easy to use "about to".

  • We just need the subject, "am", "about to", and the verb.

  • All right, let's look at the next example together.

  • "Ednan is _________ do homework."

  • Now, I want to talk about Ednan in the immediate future, what he's going to do very soon, so

  • what can we put here?

  • If you said:

  • "about to", you are correct.

  • "Ednan is about to do his homework."

  • Okay?

  • Now, let's do one more: "Jess is about to _________."

  • And here we have the verb "study".

  • So, again, very easy.

  • What do we write?

  • "Jess is about to

  • study."

  • Which means she is going to study soon.

  • Okay?

  • I hope you are about to subscribe to my channel.

  • There, you can find a lot of really great resources on all sorts of things English,

  • including conversation, listening, speaking, IELTS.

  • I have covered a lot of topics, so I hope you check that out.

  • I also want to invite you to practice "about to" by visiting our website, www.engvid.com.

  • There, you can actually do a quiz.

  • I hope you're about to do this quiz where you can practice everything you learned today.

  • So until next time, thanks for watching and take care.

Hello.

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