Hello and welcome to Real Easy English.
In this podcast, we have real conversations
in easy English to help you learn.
And don't forget, you can now watch a version of this podcast
on our website at bbclearningenglish.com.
I'm pretty good. How about you?
It's the morning, so my brain is fresh and ready for the day.
Excellent, because we're talking today about our brains.
We are. We're going to talk about how we keep our minds active.
So, kind of like exercise for our brains.
So, Neil, do you think you have a good memory?
I can remember things that happened years ago
that don't seem very significant at all.
And then I can struggle to remember what I did at the weekend.
I guess that's the difference between our long-term memory –
so, that's things that happened a long time ago.
And the short term memory –
so, things that we did this morning,
I also struggle to remember what I had for breakfast and things like that.
So, Neil, is there a time recently where you couldn't remember something
Well, I did a quiz with my daughter, and she's 15 and quite sharp.
And I knew all of the answers.
I mean, I have better general knowledge than her, I think.
But she said all the answers quicker than me.
I think just the distance between her brain
and her mouth is shorter than mine.
Were the answers on the tip of your tongue?
The answers were on the tip of my tongue,
but they just didn't get a chance to get out there.
So, I have a story as well.
A time when I couldn't remember something.
My friend was talking about something that...
about an event where I was and I didn't remember it at all,
and she had to ask another friend to get evidence,
to prove to me that it had happened because I didn't believe her.
And it was so strange because it was true that it happened,
but I didn't remember it.
Do you think you have a quick brain?
I'm the kind of person that needs some time to process things –
what people have said or...
Yeah, I don't like it when people ask me my opinions of things on the spot.
I prefer to think about things and form my opinions in my own time.
So, no. I have a slow brain.
What do you do to keep your mind active?
Well, I... I like to study languages
and that's very good for the brain
because you've got to remember all kinds of things and what order
they're said in and what happens to the words and that kind of thing.
You have to use your brain to read, to follow a story.
But I don't do puzzles and crosswords and sudoku
and all of those things that other people do. Maybe I should.
Yeah, I... I do jigsaw puzzles, although I haven't done that much recently.
I also... I think exercise is quite good for your brain.
It gets you out of the house, you get some fresh air.
I feel like that's quite good for your brain.
What kind of things, Georgie,
make your brain less effective?
Well, my brain, as I said at the beginning, works better in the morning.
In the afternoon, my brain starts not working very well,
so I tend to do less important tasks in the afternoon.
I also think that, before I go to sleep,
if I use my phone too much, too much screen time, I sleep worse.
And then I wake up feeling a lot less functional in my brain.
Yeah, I agree, I think sleep is massively important.
then it's very hard to use my brain effectively the next day.
Yeah, and that's quite common for you, unfortunately, isn't it...?!
OK. Let's recap the language we heard during the conversation.
We talked about our 'memories'.
Your memory is your ability to remember things.
Yes. And Georgie mentioned 'short' and 'long-term' memory.
'Short-term memory' is for things that happened recently.
And 'long-term memory' is for things that happened a long time ago,
even when you were a child.
which is an adjective used to describe someone who thinks quickly.
We heard 'on the tip of your tongue', which is an expression which means
that something is there that you want to say,
but you can't say it quickly enough.
We also heard 'screen time',
so this is the amount of time someone spends looking at their screen –
so, your phone, a tablet, a computer.
That's it for this episode of Real Easy English.
Why not try the worksheet on our website to test what you've learned?
That's bbclearningenglish.com.
扫码查看听力音频
点击查看听力音频
链接:https://wxmpurl.cn/4tMFU5voDQq