BBC 英语学习 News Review Heatwaves across the world

Heat waves cause record temperatures around the world.

This is news review from BBC Learning English.

I'm

Neil, and I'm Shhan, and you can learn lots of vocabulary about this story in the program.

You can and remember, subscribe to our channel, like this video, and try the quiz on our website.

Now,

today's story Heat waves are pushing temperatures to their highest levels ever recorded.

It has reached over 40 degrees in parts of Europe, north America, asia and the Middle East.

Wildfires have been burning out of control.

Experts say heat waves like this have become more frequent because of climate change caused by humans.

Shaun, you've been looking at the headlines.

What's the vocabulary? We have a scorch, bakes and wrestles.

This is news review from BBC, learning English.

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

This one is from Earth Observatory from NASA.

Heat Waves and Fires scorch Europe, africa and Asia.

So let's start with that word heat wave, which is everywhere, and it just means a period of time where the temperature is much higher than usual.

But from the headline, the word we're looking at is Scotch.

And, uh, it's connected to heat, isn't it?

And we've got a lot of words about heat in English.

Yes, we do, and Scorch is one of them.

It means to heat something to a level which damages it.

So, E.G. Neil, have you ever walked on a pavement and bare feet on a hot day?

Horrible, isn't it? It can scorch the bottom of your feet.

And that word scorch we can use with the word marks.

Now, e.g., if you're ironing a shirt, you want to make your shirt nice and flat, if you leave that iron on the shirt for too long, it can leave scorch marks.

It does. I've done this before, and scorch, in this headline, means the heat from the sun actually literally damages the ground.

So it scorches the ground. Yes?

And as you say, it's literal use here, but we often use scorching to talk about hot weather.

It's an exaggeration. When we say it's scorching, we don't usually mean that the ground is burning exactly.

And here's a bit of useful British slang for you connected to this word, so we can describe a very hot day as a scorture.

Yeah, we've had a few too many scorchers recently.

Absolutely. Let's have a look at that again.

Let's have a look at our next headline.

Yes, this one's from the standard hottest UK day ever, predicted as London bakes in heatwave.

The word we are going to talk about is bakes.

Now, bakes means to cook something in an oven, like a cake.

We bake cakes. We do. But we also use bake to talk about very hot weather.

And it's very common in English to use cooking words to talk about hot weather.

Okay, so how do I use it?

Do I say, the weather bakes me.

I see what you mean. But no, we don't say that.

We normally use the cooking word in the I NG form to make an adjective.

So today it's bacon. It's bacon in here.

Yeah, it is baking out there.

You also mention that we use other cooking words in the same way.

Can you give us some examples?

Yes. So we also have roasting, so you can roast meat in the oven, but you can also say it's absolutely roasting today.

Yeah, absolutely roasting. And that's important, isn't it?

Because roasting and baking, these are strong adjectives We can't use very with strong adjectives.

It sounds wrong. Very roasting. Very baking.

No, absolutely roasting. Are there any other cooking words we can use?

So we also have boiling, so water boils, but we can use boiling to describe very hot weather.

But be careful, because not every cooking word can be used to describe hot weather.

That's right, we don't say it's frying outside or it's really grilling today.

Let's have a look at that again.

Let's have the next headline, please.

This is from The Financial Times, climate Change Shoved in our face.

Europe wrestles with heat wave and forest fires.

Wrestles is the word now. If you wrestle with someone, you fight them.

You try to throw them to the ground.

So how can you wrestle with a heat wave?

Well, like lots of the vocabulary we look at in news with you, this is not

literal. It's used metaphorically. So the important thing here is the idea of fighting with something, yeah?

And this is very common to talk about, particularly difficult problems.

Yes? So if you wrestle with a problem, you have a difficult problem that you're trying to solve.

So here the heat wave is the difficult problem, and Europe is trying to solve it.

It's not a simple problem to solve, so we have to wrestle with it.

Yeah? And there's an interesting spelling and pronunciation of this word.

It is not a wrestle. That's very difficult to say.

So W is a silent letter, like lots of words in English, we have silent letters everywhere.

So a useful tip If you see W-R, the W is silent.

So wrist or wriggle, yeah, you are not wrong.

Let's have a look at that again.

We've had Scotch damage with heat bakes heats to an uncomfortable level.

But it's not just for cakes and wrestles struggles with a difficult situation.

But don't wrestle with your English.

Go to our website, where you'll find a quiz to help you.

Thank you for joining us. And goodbye.

Goodbye.

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