BBC 英语学习 News Review 饮食能提高记忆力吗

Could apples, berries and Cacao improve our memory as we get older?

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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Now the story what you eat could improve your memory as you age.

That's according to new research in the US that found people with a diet rich in flavnols may be less likely to lose their memory.

The substance is found in tea, berries, apples and cacao, the seeds that chocolate is made from.

But while some scientists think eating more dark chocolate could help, others say more research is needed.

You've been looking at the headlines, beth, what's the vocabulary?

We have? Keep something at bay, stave off and drive.

This is news review from BBC, learning English.

Let's look at our 1st headline.

This is from The Mail Online.

Six squares of dark chocolate a day may keep the memory loss at bay.

So this headline is suggesting that eating dark chocolate can help prevent you from losing your memory as you get older.

The expression we are looking at is Keep something at Bay.

It's a quite a strange sounding expression.

What does it mean? Well, quite simply, it means to stop something bad or dangerous, harmful, from happening to you.

So in this case, the harmful thing is memory loss.

We want to prevent memory loss, so we want to keep it at bay.

Yes? And this expression does have a wider use.

It's not only about memory loss.

No, it's not. We can use it for lots of harmful things, but it is often related to health.

So, e.g., washing your hands can keep infections at bay, or exercising can keep heart disease at bay.

Yes, and take note, we can also use the word hold instead of keep, hold something at bay.

It means exactly the same thing.

Let's look at that again. Let's look at our next headline.

This is from The Guardian. Tea, apples and berries could stave off age related memory loss.

Study suggests again, this headline is about preventing something bad from happening to us, in this case, memory loss.

The expression we're going to look at is Stave off.

Now, that word stave, that's an old fashioned sounding word for a long stick, isn't it?

It is, yeah, and it might help you to think about that long stick to understand this expression.

So Neil, imagine something is physically threatening you, maybe a pack of wild dogs, and you have a long stick, what you're going to do with it?

Well, if a pack of wild dogs was attacking me, I would use that long stick to protect myself.

Maybe I could wave it and the dogs would go away.

That's a strong mental image. It might help you to remember the meaning of this frasal verb.

But actually, we don't usually use staveoff in a literal sense anymore.

We don't, but it does have the same meaning.

It just means to prevent something bad from happening, just like a 1st expression, keep something at bay.

And again, this is something we often use with health.

Some people say that drinking orange juice can stave off a cold.

But we can also use it to mean prevent other general negative things.

Yes. And one more interesting thing to note stave off is a frasal verb.

And it's the kind of frasal verb that you can split in the middle, so you can say, orange juice staves off colds or you can say, orange juice staves colds off.

Let's look at that again. Let's look at our next headline.

This is from the Independent Diet Low in flavnols may drive age related memory loss, scientists claim.

So this headline is looking at the same story, but from the opposite angle.

It's saying that a diet low in flavonols.

Now, that's that substance that you find in apples, berries, tea and cacao, a diet low in that could cause memory loss.

And the word we're looking at is drive, a familiar word used

differently here, yes, but we're not talking about cars here, So drive actually has a wider meaning than the one we all know connected to cars and driving.

And it can also mean to force something in a certain direction.

Yes? So when the headline says that a diet low in flavonol's drives memory loss, it means that that diet pushes in the direction of memory loss.

And in the same way, when you drive a car, actually what you're doing is just forcing it to go in a certain direction.

OK, let's look at that again.

We've had keep something at bay, prevent something bad affecting you.

Stay off also, and prevent something bad affecting you, and drive force in a certain direction.

Did you know that exercise can also help our brains?

To learn more? Watch this episode of News Review.

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another video. Thanks for joining us.

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