BBC 6分钟英语学习 深夜：对健康有害

do you late night or early mornings.

One of those choices could

be bad for your health. This is news of you from BBC, learning English.

I'm Neil, and I'm shin. Make sure you watch to the end to learn vocabulary about today s story.

And don't forget to subscribe to our channel like

this video and try the quiz on our website.

Now, our story

late into the night. For some people, it's just the way they prefer to live, but it may be affecting their health.

New research from the US found that night owls may be more likely to develop heart disease and diabetes.

It's because people who get up early burn fat for energy more easily.

You ve been looking at the headline shone.

What's the vocabulary? Okay, we have a night owl, chronic and prone to This is news review from BBC, learning English.

Let's have a look at our 1st headline.

Okay, this one is from Sky News.

Early bird or Night Owl. How your sleep cycle put you at risk of heart disease and diabetes?

So the headline asks, what kind of sleep pattern you have?

Er to stay up late, or do you like getting up early?

And there are two expressions in there for those two situations.

What are they? Okay, so the one we're gonna look at is at night owl.

What can you tell me about owls?

Neil Well, owls are a type of bird, and they they stay up late, they stay up all night, and they are very active at night.

That's when they do their work, which is hunting, in this case, exactly.

And so we call people who stay up late night owls.

It means they stay up late, but also they are mentally or physically active at night.

What about the opposite now? Well, we can also see in the headline the expression Early Bird, which comes from the saying, the Early bird catches the worm.

And it describes someone who likes to get up early.

There are other ways of saying that as well.

You can call someone an early riser or a morning person.

Uh? Which one are you sure?

I used to be a night owl, and I think, naturally I'm a night owl, but I want to be a morning person, so I've made myself become one.

How about you? Well, the same.

Yeah, I like staying up late, but it's never a good idea.

Let's have a look at that again.

Let's have our next headline. This one is from CNN Night Owls at high risk of certain chronic diseases.

Study says the headline is saying that night owls, that's the expression we just looked at, are at a higher risk of developing chronic diseases.

And that's the word we're looking at chronic.

And if we use chronic to describe an illness, it means it's long lasting, so it doesn't go away.

E.g., if I hurt my back in an accident and the pain lasts forever, I can say I have chronic pain or a chronic back ache.

Yeah. And in a medical sense, the opposite of that is acute.

So if you hurt your back, but you get better after a couple of weeks, that is not chronic pain.

That is acute pain. Um. We use this word, though, chronic for more than just illnesses.

Don't we share? That's right. We can use it to describe situations which are long lasting and bad.

So, E.G., we can talk about chronic unemployment, or we can say there's a chronic shortage of doctors.

Yeah. And as you said, that's for a bad situations.

And in fact, in Slang, you can use the word chronic on its own, just to mean bad.

So, E.G., did you see that new Detective drama on TV?

It was chronic acting was terrible.

And one more thing to note about the pronunciation.

So the spelling and pronunciation are a bit tricky.

Normally, when we see C-H, it's pronounced Chuck, like cheese, but here it so chronic.

Let's take a look at that one more time.

Our next headline, please. This one's from The Guardian.

Night owls may be more prone to heart disease and diabetes, study finds so in this headline, we see that word night owls again, and it's saying that people

who stay up late are more likely to develop diseases.

And we're looking at the expression Prone to that's right, so if you're prone to

something, it means you're likely to be affected by something

bad. So, E.G. smokers are prone to lung disease, or professional footballers are prone to leg injuries.

So the structure is prone to followed by something bad.

Yeah. And we also use this expression, prone to to describe certain negative types of behavior that people have in their personality.

So, e.g., if someone doesn't tell the truth a lot, we can say they are prone to lying, or someone that exaggerates a lot can be prone to exaggeration.

And we have another phrase, which is accident prone.

So if someone is accident prone, then they tend to have a lot of accidents.

Yeah, but be careful. You can't just create an adjective like that by adding prone at the end accident.

Prone is a set expression. We wouldn't say lying prone.

Okay, let's have a look at that.

We've had night owls, people who stay up late and are active at night.

Chronic. It's bad, and it lasts a long time and prone to likely to be affected by something bad.

Don't forget. There's a quiz on our website at bbc learning english dot com.

Thank you for joining us. And goodbye.

Good bye.

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