Shadowing Practice: The real reason cheese is yellow - Learn English Speaking with Video

Creando lección...
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This is a story about a lie that we've been told our whole lives.
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It's a story about marketing, economics, science, and biology.
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And most importantly, it's about why a lot of cheese is orange.
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Cheesemaking basically starts here.
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I know, it seems like we're starting a little bit early on in the process, but hang in there with me.
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Animals like cows, buffalo, goats, sheep, they naturally eat grass, grass, which gives them the nutrients they need to produce milk, and that milk gets turned into cheese.
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That is one vascular udder, by the way.
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In the 12 and 1300s, sheep were often the main producers of milk, but the catch was that...
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A sheep can turn their grass intake into either wool or milk, but not the same amount of both, simultaneously.
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That's Paul Kinston, former president of the American Dairy Science Association and a multi-published author on the subject of cheese.
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right from undergraduate work, you know, and then through graduate school became my love, my first love.
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And talking about love, just hold on a second.
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And talking about love, if you love Vox content as much as Paul Loves Cheese and I Love French Fries, then you should know about our membership program.
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It's the best way to support our journalism and get some exclusive perks and pardon my eating while I explain this.
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I've been filming all day and haven't had a chance to have a snack.
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So, weeks of work go into the making of every Vox video.
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And that goes from mother.
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Weeks of work go into the making of every Vox video.
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And that includes things like writing, scripting, animating, editing, filming, talking to experts like Paul, fact-checking everything.
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All that takes...
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All of that takes a lot of time and effort.
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And support from our members makes all that time and effort possible.
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So if you want to ensure that videos like the ones that we make keep getting made on the internet, the best way that you can do that is by joining our membership program.
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So if that's something that speaks to you, go to vox.com slash memberships and join today.
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Now, back to the video.
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Switching the milk used for cheese from this to this had a profound effect on people's perception of cheese.
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All because of something in the grass.
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Beta-carotene.
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Beta-carotene is a complex compound that creates color.
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It's what gives carrots and apricots and sweet potatoes their signature orange.
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Grass when it's lush and green and in season, contains beta-carotene.
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When sheep process the beta-carotene in grass, it doesn't make its way into the milk.
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Therefore sheep cheese is pretty much always naturally white.
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In the cow it's a different metabolic pathway.
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Beta-carotene goes into the cow, passes into the milk, is part of the fat in milk, and then gets concentrated in the cheese,
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and that's what gives cow's milk cheese its yellow color.
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Cheese made in sort of the spring, early summer always has been recognized as really yellow, which it is, and also higher in quality.
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I mean, it was always revered.
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Because of that, people really wanted yellow cheese.
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But cheesemakers, they wanted to make money.
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And the second change in terms of marketing that happened that became really important, cow's milk forms cream easily.
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So cheese makers figured out pretty quickly that they could skim off some cream before making cheese to make butter.
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Butter had a better price in the marketplace.
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But the problem with the cheese was with less cream, there's less beta carotene carrying over because it's in the butter and so it didn't look as good.
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Farmers were ending up with yellow butter and pale cheese, but they realized
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that they could scam the system by dying the cheese to look like it was full of that beta carotene filled fat.
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So that begins to happen in the 1400s, 1500s and they used things like saffron or marigold or,
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believe it or not, carrot juice.
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But everything changed once these bad boys hit the market.
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The annatto seed.
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The seed comes from this shrub that grows in South America.
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The Dutch, who followed in the wake of the Spanish colonizers as traders, learned about annatto and they saw a market.
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So in the 1600s, they began to export annatto from South America to Europe.
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Because there aren't a lot of really good colorants available and Europe is getting very wealthy and they like colorful things.
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And so it didn't take long for cheesemakers to realize they could replace these expensive colorants like saffron
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or marigold or carrot juice, because they're not very intense.
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And annatto was superior and it was cheap
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and cheeses then began to be either surface applied with annatto like the dutch did for gouda
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or it was added to the milk to make english hard-pressed cheeses like cheshire and cheddar
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look like they were from rich spring milk you know full of beta carotene so the coloring was
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for marketing and this then becomes the tradition over centuries this is the way you know real cheese is made.
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And that's why today you still get cheeses that look like this.
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With factory farming, cows aren't as grass-fed as they used to be.
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Their diets tend to include a lot more corn and soy.
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But because we've been used to centuries of saturated colors of cheese, none of that really matters when it comes to marketing.
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We still expect our cheddar to maintain a golden hue, and you can still thank annatto for that.
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Annatto is used all over food too, often making its way into many other cheese-adjacent snacks all of which carry on that long orange legacy.
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But if you go to your local grocery store, you'll see that the cheese is varied.
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Take this cheddar, for instance.
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There's the yellow dyed cheddar that we expect, and then there's the undyed white cheddar.
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But if you go to your local cheesemonger, you might be able to find the perfect in-between, grass-fed cheddar cheese that's naturally tinted with beta-carotene,
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which, when you prefer, is up to your own taste and expectations.
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I grew up with white Vermont cheddar as a kid.
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I prefer raw milk cheddar, by the way.
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I live, you know, right down the road from a wonderful raw milk cheddar cheese maker.
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My kids grew up on it.
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It's pricey, but boy, it's good.
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And it's not colored.

Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección

Esta lección de conversación de nivel B2 se basa en el vídeo “The real reason cheese is yellow”. Las palabras que más se repiten: cheese, milk, carotene, cheddar, beta. Este vídeo tiene 78 frases y 1093 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 6:28. El hablante habla a un ritmo natural de unas 169 palabras por minuto, cercano a una conversación cotidiana. Solo el 80 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés, por lo que el vocabulario es exigente.

Vocabulario clave de este vídeo

Las 15 palabras más avanzadas del vídeo, con su pronunciación y significado:

PalabraPronunciaciónSignificado
carotene sustantivo/ˈkæɹ.əˌtin/caroteno
annatto sustantivo/əˈnɑːtoʊ/achiote, caituco
sheep sustantivo/ˈʃiːp/pusilánime, papanatas
carrot sustantivo/ˈkæɹət/zanahoria
cheesemaker sustantivoquesero, quesera
marigold sustantivo/ˈmæɹ.ɪˌɡoʊld/caléndula, margarita
saffron sustantivo/ˈsæfɹən/azafrán
snack sustantivo/snæk/tentempié, refrigerio
cow sustantivo/kaʊ/vaca
animate adjetivo/ˈæn.ə.mət/animado
apricot sustantivo/ˈeɪ.pɹɪ.kɑt/albaricoque, chabacano
cheesemonger sustantivoquesero, quesera
revere verbo/ɹɪˈvɪə(ɹ)/reverenciar
vascular adjetivo/ˈvæskjələ/vascular
nutrient sustantivo/ˈnuː.tɹi.ənt/nutriente

Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar

PalabraSignificado
figure out verboaveriguar, captar

Gramática en este vídeo

Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:

EstructuraEn el vídeo
Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hacewe've been told · has been recognized · was always revered
Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahorawe've been told · haven't had · has been recognized

Pronunciación a tener en cuenta

El hablante usa 12 contracciones y formas reducidas, como aren't, didn't, we've. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.

  • Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: sheep /ˈʃiːp/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, perception /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/
  • Palabras largas — cuida el acento: metabolic /mɛtəˈbɒlɪk/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, importantly /ɪmˈpɔɹ.tənt.li/, simultaneously /ˌsaɪmlˈteɪnɪəsli/

Sonidos difíciles para hispanohablantes:

  • s + consonante al inicio — sin añadir una “e” delante: snack /snæk/, scam /ˈskæm/
  • /v/ — no es /b/: los dientes tocan el labio inferior: revere /ɹɪˈvɪə(ɹ)/, vascular /ˈvæskjələ/
  • /dʒ/ — no es la “y” ni la “ch”: journalism /ˈd͡ʒɝnl̩ˌɪzəm/, adjacent /əˈd͡ʒeɪ.sənt/

Cómo practicar con este vídeo

  1. Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
  2. Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
  3. Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como carotene, annatto, sheep.

¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?

Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.

Técnica de shadowing: lee la guía completa paso a paso →