Podcast 153 - Friendship

B1-level English story

Story starts at 13:50

Alien planet - B1 English

Today I'm going to talk about cognates. Again, yes, those words which sound similar in English and in many other languages, especially Latin-based languages. But in particular some words, which I think will be very useful to students who are studying for the Cambridge Preliminary B1 level, or even B2 as well, because they're words which can be used in a lot of different ways. They have their own meanings, more specific meanings. And we can call them collocations when they're used in certain situations with certain words. Then there is a more universal meaning. And by that I mean, they can just be used to talk about something or anything which is positive. I'll explain what I mean.

Here we go... [introduction]

Okay, as I was saying in the introduction, then, I'm talking about these cognates and they're words which you may recognize, even if you didn't know any English at all. And they are:

extraordinary, terrific, brilliant, marvellous, magnificent.

There are other words as well. But these are particularly B1 words. So I'm going to concentrate on these ones today. I'm going to use them in a story later for you to recognize.

First of all, I'll explain their uses. First of all, let's just look at their specific uses as collocations - the words they go with.

Now, extraordinary, really is written, 'extra ordinary', though we don't say it like that. We say extraordinary. And it means something which is strange, unexpected, or surprising. So, for example, if you see somebody in a very strange hat, with lots of decoration on feathers, perhaps it looks even a little bit ridiculous. We could say,

What an extraordinary hat

Or somebody says to you something, which you think, well, you weren't expecting them to say it. And you're surprised at what they say. So you could say,

What an extraordinary thing to say.

Okay, the next one is terrific. Now, this is a word which can be confused easily for something which is scary. And it's true the other derivatives of this word like 'terrifying' and 'terror' do refer to things which are scary. Though notice we don't say in English,

a terror film.

We talk about a 'horror film', which is a film like Dracula or something like that, which is quite scary. Not a terror film in English. But the word 'terrific' used to be used to talk about something scary. I noticed that when I looked it up in an old Oxford English Dictionary, but if you consult the latest dictionaries, and also in its usage more recently, it is not used to talk about scary things. It's used to talk about something which is very large, or very great. So you can say for example,

Oh, I've got a terrific amount of work today.

Meaning you have a lot of work to do.

He drove at a terrific speed

meaning that he drove very, very fast. Now here's the next one: brilliant. Brilliant has two meanings. One is very clever, very intelligent, skillful. So we could talk about Einstein was a brilliant mathematician or a brilliant physicist, a brilliant student, the student at school who always gets a 10 in his exams!

It also has another meaning as well, which is referring to light. A brilliant light is a very bright light, a light which you have to close your eyes to look at, or you put on sunglasses, or something like that. Because the light is so bright, we say it's brilliant.

Then I've got another one here, which is marvellous. And marvelous, well, this one as an adjective, I don't think is very different from the one I'm going to explain the version that I'm going to explain a little later. It just seems to mean something which is extremely good. I think where it's perhaps different is its noun, which is a marvel. A Marvel is something or somebody who is a wonderful and surprising person. A person who is extremely good at something, I suppose maybe like 'brilliant' in a way, but not necessarily intellectually, or because they're intelligent. Maybe just because it's such a wonderful person. Wonderful I suppose that's like marvelous as well. Whatever quality it is, its a very positive quality.

And my next word is magnificent. And magnificent is very attractive.

A magnificent building.

A church or a cathedral or a mosque, or something which has been built, and it took a long time to build and was meant to look beautiful. We could say,

The Taj Mahal is a magnificent building.

Or it could just mean something which is very attractive. But when I say very attractive, I mean something stunning, something very beautiful and magnificent. A Diamond. Or perhaps here's one for you,

Cinderella looked magnificent, after she was magically changed by her fairy godmother.

Or we can say something like,

You've done a magnificent job.

Somebody who has achieved something quite splendid. I was reading recently about a project to clean up the plastic from the oceans of the world. The seas which are full of plastic, and little by little, they are extracting the plastic from the sea. That is really is a magnificent job, isn't it?

Okay, so those are the real meanings, if you like, or the meanings that you'll find in the dictionary. Although the dictionary will also explain that they can be used in another way, which is very useful for you, as I said earlier, as a B1 student in your oral exam or in the writing exam, because you can use these words. In fact, you just use them if you want to say something is very, very positive.

Now usually we do that... A lot of students do it with words like 'great' or 'fantastic'. But those words can be used, well, a little bit too much perhaps. So we can say,

Yeah, I had a fantastic day yesterday. We went for a picnic in the countryside with the family. And it was beautiful weather and the food was great. And we really had a fantastic time.

Or a great time. Yeah, it was really great yesterday. Now, if we could add other words instead of fantastic or great all the time. Well, then we'll impress the examiner by our knowledge of English.

I had a terrific day yesterday.

Okay, a terrific day. So that's not really its meaning that I spoke about earlier, meaning something which was very, very large or very, very great. It just means fantastic. A terrific day.

Yeah, it was great. We went to the countryside, we had a picnic, etc, etc.

Or,

I had an extraordinary day yesterday. Wow, it was good.

I had a brilliant day yesterday. Yeah, it was just really fun.

We had a marvellous day yesterday. Marvelous. Oh, it was marvelous, a magnificent day. Yes, we It was magnificent.

So as you can see, we can use all these words. And so we can interchange them and not use 'fantastic' all the time just to talk about something which was really positive. A terrific holiday.

'Did you have a good Christmas?'
'Yes, it was marvelous.?

An actor, for example, in a film,

'What was he like in the film? Was he good?'
'Yeah, brilliant, really brilliant, magnificent.'

A singer. Somebody on YouTube you like very much and brings out a new song. They record a new song.

'What's the new song like?'
'Oh, it was extraordinary. Terrific. I loved it.'

I bought a new book recently, a novel and I'm really enjoying it. You're enjoying the book.

'Is it good?'
'Good. It's magnificent. It really is terrific. I love it.'

So that's great, isn't it? We can have all these words. We can use these situations for our writing of our speaking, and we don't have to say 'fantastic' all the time, which is often used too much really. It doesn't perhaps impress the examiner so much as these other words might.

So what I'm going to do is to read you a story, and in the story, these words will appear or some of them will appear. What I would like you to do is to listen out for them. And then one in the story, just one, I'm going to use in both its contexts. As its meaning and also just as a positive word. So here we go...

Here's the story. I've written it actually, as a B1 story that you might write. It's longer than the 100 words that you're expected to write. But not a lot longer. And I've actually used a sentence... As you know, when you're doing the writing the story, what you have to do it is to follow a sentence which is given to you and continue the story from there. And this was a sentence used in a previous exam, which is:

As the plane flew lower, Angela saw the golden beaches of the island below.

So that's my first line. And I'm going to continue the story from there. So here we go. Enjoy, and listen out for those cognates that I've mentioned in the previous section. The story is called friendship...

[The story starts...]

The audio script of the story is not included here.