BBC 英语学习 News Review 伊朗抗议

Protests in Iran. Younger generation demand change.

This is news review from BBC Learning English.

I'm Neil

and I'm Beth. Make sure you watch to the end to learn

vocabulary to talk about this story.

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Like the video and try the quiz on our website.

Now, the story neither headscarf nor humiliation, freedom and equality.

This is one thing university students in Iran have been shouting.

Protests began in Iran and around the world last month, when a young woman died after being arrested by the morality police for not covering her hair.

Many members of the younger generation say they want a different lifestyle and don't identify with the Iranian regime.

Human Rights groups say 200 people have died in the protests.

So far, you ve been looking at the headlines, beth, what's the vocabulary?

We have Fan Flames Wave. And Jane said, this is News review from BBC, learning English.

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

This one is from The Financial Times.

Iranian celebrities fan flames of anti regime protests.

And so the headline is saying that celebrities inside and out of Iran are taking part in anti regime protests.

That's protests against the current political system.

But the expression that we are looking at is fan flames, or fully fan the flames of something.

And we need to break that down.

The 1st part is the word fan.

Now, beth, we are in a TV studio.

There are lights. They're quite hot.

Yeah, you're right. Sometimes it gets so hot in here that we have to fan ourselves to cool down.

Yeah, OK, so that's the 1st part fan.

We need to look at the 2nd part.

Now, flames. If you light a fire, let's say a barbecue, and you want to make the flames more intense, you can fan the flames, and they get stronger.

That's the expression Fan the flames.

But we're not talking literally here.

No. So generally speaking, fan the flames is an expression used metaphorically, and it usually means to make a tense situation even more tense.

Now, in this headline, celebrities are encouraging and supporting the protests, so that's why we're using it.

They are making the fire bigger or making the protests bigger.

That's right. So celebrities want to encourage the protesters to carry on until they achieve what they are trying to get.

They are fanning the flames. Do we have any other expressions like this?

Yes, we have. Add fuel to the fire.

Now, if you add fuel, something like wood or coal, to a fire, then it gets bigger.

Now, again, this expression is used metaphorically, and it means to encourage a situation in which there are strong or high emotions.

OK, let's take a look at that again.

Let's have our next headline. This is from France 24 Fame no shield from frightening Iran arrest Wave.

And so the headline is saying that fame, or being famous, is not a shield against arrest.

A shield is something that protects you.

So celebrities are also being arrested, but the word we're interested in is wave.

But we're not talking about water or oceans, are we?

No. But if you think about a wave in the ocean, it starts small and then it gets bigger before getting smaller again.

So in this headline, wave is used to mean that a lot of arrests are happening at the moment.

Arrest Wave? Yes. So since the protests began, there's been a large number of arrests, a wave of arrests.

This word wave, we can see used in other contexts with a sort of similar meaning.

Yes. So in the summer this year, we heard a lot about heat waves, that's high temperatures for a specific amount of time.

We also sometimes hear about a wave of sickness, which is lots of people getting sick at the same time.

Yeah. Are there any other words like wave that have this similar meaning?

Yeah. So we can use search

again. It's like a wave. It's connected to water.

But it's used metaphorically to mean a large amount of something happening at one time,

like a power surge or a crowd surge, e.g.

OK, let's look

at that one more time. Our next headline, please.

This is from The Telegraph. How jen Zad, or jen Z, as they say in the US, became the Iranian regimes Most fearsome opponent.

Yes. So the headline is saying that jen Zed is a fearsome opponent of the regime.

Fearsome means frightening, and opponent is someone or a group against another group.

And headline is saying that this group, jenze, are the most frightening opposition group for the government in Iran.

But who or what exactly is jen Z or jen Z?

Well, jen ZAD is short for Generation Z, and it refers to people who were born in the late 1990s and early 2000 Now in Iran, a lot of the protesters are school age or university age, and that is the age group that's known as jen Z.

But we have other names for other generations.

What are they? Yeah, so we have millennials.

That refers to people born between the early 1980s and the mid nineties.

That's me. We then have Generation X, they were born between mid 1960 and the early 1980s, and that's me.

And then there are the baby Boomers, who were born after World War Two, yes, and that's my paren'ts' generation.

So why do we have these expressions?

Why do we need them? Well, classifying groups of people by their age is an easy way to differentiate between different groups of people, different generations, and it can make it easier for the reader if they immediately know which generation, and they're kind of supposed characteristics that they're reading about.

Yep. OK, let's have a look at that again.

We've had fan the flames of something encourage an already tense situation wave.

Lots of things are happening at once.

And Jen said, the group of people born between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, don't forget.

There is a quiz on our website, BBC learning english dot com.

Thank you for joining us. And goodbye bye.

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