Episode 0191

My name is Catherine and today we're talking about something that has always been very confusing for me.

Uh for me as well, I don't understand very well what this is about. We're gonna be talking about time zones and a little bit about daylight savings time.

Before we get started though, let's take a look at this phrase in today's vocabulary preview.

Vocabulary preview.

All right, so the phrase is daylight savings time. Okay. So we're trying to save daylight, pretty much.

That's right. So this is the time of year when we change our clocks. What does that mean? That means in the fall, there's a special day and everyone has it on their calendar and we change the clocks, we put them back one hour. So if it was 8 o'clock, now it's 7 o'clock.

Okay. So everything is earlier, starts earlier.

Yes.

And that's basically to take advantage of the daylight, right? That's why it's called daylight savings time.

Exactly. And so that's for the winter and then when the winter's passed, we change the clocks again. We have the spring daylight savings where we change our clocks ahead.

Okay. So it sounds kind of complicated. Many countries don't have daylight savings time. They don't change their clocks at all. But we're gonna be talking about this in a little bit more, so why don't we listen to our dialogue for the first time?

Did you set your clock forward for daylight savings time?

What? Why do we have to do that?

Well, at the start of the spring, we usually have more daylight in the mornings and less in the afternoon. This is basically due to our position on the planet and the rotation of the Earth. In any case, to take better advantage of the daylight available, we compensate by moving our clocks forward one hour.

I see. That's convenient. I never understood things like this such as GMT. I never know what time zone we are in or when to change my clock.

That just stands for Greenwich Mean Time. Here in California, we're in Pacific Standard Time. That is eight time zones west of Greenwich. Remember when we were in Beijing? Well, then we were in China Standard Time and that's eight time zones east of Greenwich.

That's why it was so weird traveling from Beijing to LA, because of the huge time difference. Even though we left Beijing at noon and flew for more than eight hours, we still arrived in LA the same day at noon. It's like we went back in time.

All right, we're back. So that was a pretty clear explanation of why we do these things, but maybe there are a couple of words that you didn't understand, so let's take a look at those now in language takeaway.

Language Takeaway.

Well, Marco, what you were hinting at before this idea that we have shorter days in the winter and longer days in the summer has to do with the rotation of the Earth. And so the rotation of the Earth is our first phrase.

Okay. So the Earth rotates. What does that mean if it rotates?

Means to spin around. Um, but not just to spin around anywhere. It means that if if you draw a line through the middle of something, it never leaves that line, it just kind of turns.

Okay. So it's spinning.

Like the wheels on a car. They rotate. That means they go around, but they are fixed.

To the car.

To the car. Right.

So this is one of the reasons why we need to compensate our clocks because of the rotation of the Earth.

And that's our next word to compensate. This is a verb to compensate. And it's often used with money, but it can be used with time as well, time or sunlight. So with money you'd say, uh, I paid him $100, but I owed him 150. So I'm gonna compensate him for the extra 50.

Means I'm going to fix it.

Okay, so to compensate would be the verb and compensation would be the noun. Now, in this case we're talking about time. So how can we compensate time?

Well, that means that if we have lost an hour because we changed the clocks, we have to compensate. We have to try and gain that hour back. And so that's why in the spring, after the days start to get longer and longer, we have to compensate for that by changing the clocks again.

Okay. So we're compensating time. Now, related to daylight savings and this whole time thing is time zones. We have time zones all over the earth and you've probably noticed this if you've traveled, you have to change your clocks or many times you see in hotels what time it is in London, in Hong Kong, in Berlin, etcetera.

And this makes a lot of sense because like we said, the Earth is rotating, and so if it's daylight in Moscow and it's uh nighttime in New York, obviously it's not the same time. Right. So to compensate for this difference, we have different time zones and each time zone is pretty much an hour or so and, you know, half an hour different from the next one.

Right. So most countries actually have different time zones throughout their country unless they're small that they don't really need to compensate any change. Or, for example, China, just to unify everything, it's a big country, but they have one time zone, China Standard Time.

Exactly. But in the United States, we have four time zones. Right.

All right, so that's time zone. And now related to time zone is time difference.

Okay. Well, think about math here. Difference is a word that we use in math. And a time difference is the amount of time. That means how many hours uh there are between one time zone and another time zone. So, for example, Beijing and New York City. These are very very far away from each other. If it's day in in New York, it's night in Beijing. So that means if it's 7 in the morning in Beijing, it's probably around 7 at night in New York.

So the time difference would be more or less 12 hours.

Exactly. But when it's daylight savings time, it's 13. So be careful.

Right. Okay. I think that's pretty clear. I think we should go back and listen to our dialogue again and we'll be back soon with fluency builder.

Did you set your clock forward for daylight savings time?

What? Why do we have to do that?

Well, at the start of the spring, we usually have more daylight in the mornings and less in the afternoon. This is basically due to our position on the planet and the rotation of the Earth. In any case, to take better advantage of the daylight available, we compensate by moving our clocks forward one hour.

I see. That's convenient. I never understood things like this such as GMT. I never know what time zone we are in or when to change my clock.

That just stands for Greenwich Mean Time. Here in California, we're in Pacific Standard Time. That is eight time zones west of Greenwich. Remember when we were in Beijing? Well, then we were in China Standard Time and that's eight time zones east of Greenwich.

That's why it was so weird traveling from Beijing to LA. Because of the huge time difference. Even though we left Beijing at noon and flew for more than eight hours, we still arrived in LA the same day at noon. It's like we went back in time.

All right, we're back. So now let's take a look at three key phrases in fluency builder.

Fluency Builder.

Well, let's go back to the beginning of this dialogue. The person who's explaining all of these interesting things is saying that, well, in any case, to take better advantage of the daylight available, we compensate by moving our clocks forward one hour. So this is an important phrase. You could say to take better advantage of or to take advantage of. Let's talk about this, to take advantage of something.

So, to take advantage of something is to use it efficiently, right? Or to take better advantage. So, for example, if you drive to work every day and your neighbor drives to work every day and you work at the same place, you could take better advantage of your car and the cost by sharing the same car to work.

Exactly. Or when people started to use computers, you could say, well, they were taking better advantage of their time by speeding things up, by making things faster with the computers.

Right. Or many mothers say, take better advantage of your time and read something instead of playing those video games.

Exactly. So it means uh it means, like you said, to be more efficient, to do useful or important things.

That's right. And now when we talked about what daylight savings time means or GMT, what that stands for. This is an interesting phrase. It stands for.

Well, think about it as a picture. So, if something stands for something else, that means the original thing is not there anymore. And so, um in words and phrases like GMT, you GMT doesn't mean anything by itself, but the G stands for something, the M stand, it's an acronym. So this is an acronym that stands for, that represents three big long words.

Greenwich Mean Time.

Right. So we use this a lot when we are defining words or when we are defining an acronym. Like GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time or, for example, USA stands for United States of America.

Your last name. Right.

So you can use this when you see things that you don't understand, maybe an acronym or an abbreviation, like, does Cathy stand for Catherine? Yes, Cathy stands for Catherine. It's a short version of Catherine.

To go back in time. So we went back in time. This is what the person says about the flight from Beijing to LA. Um what's interesting is that to go back in time is kind of a fixed phrase. We always say it like this. So we could say, if you went back in time, where would you go? What time, what, what place?

Right. So to go back in time, you usually use it like this. Now, what if I wanted to say to go into the future? Could you say go forward in time?

You can go forward in time or you can go into the future.

Right, go into the future. So, remember, if you want to talk about going back in time is usually traveling to the past.

Mhm. Exactly.

All right, so that's all the phrases we have. Why don't we listen to the dialogue for the very last time?

Did you set your clock forward for daylight savings time?

What? Why do we have to do that?

Well, at the start of the spring, we usually have more daylight in the mornings and less in the afternoon. This is basically due to our position on the planet and the rotation of the Earth. In any case, to take better advantage of the daylight available, we compensate by moving our clocks forward one hour.

I see. That's convenient. I never understood things like this such as GMT. I never know what time zone we are in or when to change my clock.

That just stands for Greenwich Mean Time. Here in California, we're in Pacific Standard Time. That is eight time zones west of Greenwich. Remember when we were in Beijing? Well, then we were in China Standard Time and that's eight time zones east of Greenwich.

That's why it was so weird traveling from Beijing to LA. Because of the huge time difference. Even though we left Beijing at noon and flew for more than eight hours, we still arrived in LA the same day at noon. It's like we went back in time.

All right, we're back now. This is actually something that really does happen, right? If you take off in an airplane from Beijing, you fly for a certain amount of hours and you reach California and it's still the same time. You you reach it in the same day.

It's very strange. The same thing happens to me when I go home. So I leave Shanghai and I arrive in Chicago and I arrive at the exact same time I left on the same day.

So it's like if time never passed.

No, it's the longest day of your entire life. Because it's not 24 hours. The flight is 14 hours, it's really 24, 38 hours long. Right. So it's really intense and and exhausting.

And then what happens is when you do the opposite, you go from Chicago to Shanghai, then you go into the future pretty much, right? Because you left on a Sunday, but you arrive on a Tuesday.

Or in my case, yeah, you you leave on a Sunday and you'd arrive on a Monday. And you lose half a day of your life. You're just sitting there and all of a sudden, it goes past you.

Yeah. So it all evens out in the end.

Right, right. So when you go back or when you come, it all evens out. You you you recover, you you get those hours of your life back pretty much.

They're not gone forever.

All right. So if you guys have any questions, any doubts, you can send us an email at [email protected] or come to our website englishpod.com.

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