Shadowing Practice: This New Pyramid Theory Explains the Missing Evidence - Learn English Speaking with Video
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About two years ago, I got an email from a guy who had a theory about the pyramids.
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And at first I kind of ignored it because, when it comes to the pyramids.
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The line between researcher and conspiracy theorist gets a little blurry.
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But he sent me all of his research, almost ten years of work.
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And, I did look at it eventually.
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And it completely changed the way that I look at the pyramids.
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He said the pyramids weren't built.
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They were unbuilt And maybe all the missing evidence that we've been searching for.
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The ramps, the tools and the machinery.
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It's not missing at all.
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It's actually right in front of us.
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Just misinterpreted.
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So I want to walk you through this theory today.
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But I'm not gonna lie, this email did take me down a very strange rabbit hole.
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Because for all the theories and simulations and 4000 years of research and speculation, we actually know very little about how these structures were built.
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We can't understand the pyramids without talking about time.
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Because the pyramids are very, very old.
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The cliché saying is that Cleopatra lived closer to the iPhone than she did to the construction of the pyramids.
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The ancient Romans would tour the pyramids like we tour the Colosseum today.
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And over that insane scale of time, things get blurry.
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But what we do know is that pyramids themselves were the end point of a massive architectural learning curve, each one taking about 10 to 15 years and each one getting us closer to the Great Pyramid.
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146m tall. 2.3 million blocks of stone.
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The base is almost a perfect square off by mere centimeters, with a slope so razor precise, because even the slightest variation would mean a failure at the top.
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And the whole thing is aligned almost perfectly to true north.
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Off by just 1/15 of a degree.
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And they did all of this without compasses or lasers or G.P.S..
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as far as we know, they used nothing but the stars.
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and if you scaled it to the size of the Earth, the height to base ratio would almost match the curvature of the planet.
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The latitude is the exact same number as the speed of light.
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And just 0.0002 degrees off from the pyramids.
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Latitude is also this subway in Louisiana, because a lot of things exist on that latitude.
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But you see, the pyramids seem so impossible and our understanding is so limited that it's just the perfect breeding ground for conspiracy theories.
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But it is worth remembering if any civilization could pull this off, it's probably the Egyptians.
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Every year the Nile flooded and it turned the valley into a surplus machine with ridiculous amounts of grain, enough to feed tens of thousands of people who weren't farming.
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Remember our video on the Romans?
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They got their grain from Egypt.
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And that kind of surplus meant Egypt had something incredibly rare in the ancient world.
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Time, labor and stability for massive, multi-year engineering projects.
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And they created incredible inventions like counter weighted lifting devices, mummification, star aligned serving tools, and one of the most accurate calendars on Earth.
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Long before most civilizations could even write.
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On top of that, you have a hyper organized bureaucracy that tracked everything.
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We literally have a 4500 year old site manager's logbook, Where the guy named Merer, documents how his crew boated the tour limestone to the pyramids site.
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in fact, we have records for everything, like how they brought the stone, who they hired, and even the payroll, everything except how they actually built the pyramids.
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Oh, by the way, they weren't built by slaves.
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archeologists found entire workers districts at Giza with bakeries and workshops and medical teams and even the tombs of the craftsmen.
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These were skilled labor crews, not an oppressed workforce.
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And despite keeping diligent records of all of this when it comes to the construction drawings, it's kind of like they said.
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Well, let's mess with those guys a little bit Because maybe they knew that we were going to be arguing about this for centuries.
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there are a lot of theories about how these pyramids were built.
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Cranes, counterweights, kites, water elevators.
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But there's two big ones.
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Ramps in the classic one, the external ramp theory workers dragged the blocks up a huge ramp as a pyramid rises.
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It's very simple in theory.
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to keep the slope gentle enough for normal humans and not physical 100 athletes.
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The ramp would need to stretch around two kilometers.
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Anything shorter or steeper?
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People probably start dying on you.
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Well, things get a little challenging.
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by the time you've built a ramp that's safe to walk on, you've basically cost yourself more materials and labor just to build the thing that builds the thing.
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And the real killer is there is zero archeological evidence of a mile long ramp ever existing or being torn down.
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then there's a twist on this theory.
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A ramp spiraling around the pyramid.
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Shorter, more compact.
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Reusing the same slope over and over.
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But now you have a different problem.
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The faces of the pyramid are perfectly straight.
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Otherwise, the edges can't meet at the apex.
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But to keep it at this precise angle, the builders had to constantly check the edges but with a fat ramp in the way, it's blocking all the corners that you need access to.
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So if the ramp is an outside, maybe it's inside.
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Do you? In the 1980s, someone saw a fox entering the Great Pyramid near the base and somehow popping out hundreds of feet higher.
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That little fox inspired the French architect Jean Pierre Houdini to propose a hybrid system, A short external ramp made of limestone for the very first third of the structure, which is then reused for the top part.
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Once it's done, then a hidden ramp spiraling inside the structure.
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It very neatly explains this missing debris, and it even answers some of the mysteries around the Grand Gallery, which Houdini thinks was a giant counterweight system for hoisting the granite beams, founded the King's Chamber.
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it also explains why it's so tall and narrow and lined with strange benches and covered in scuff marks, as if something hard and heavy slipped through it over and over again.
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It's elegant, but then in 2015, the pyramids got a giant CT scan.
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This is muon tomography.
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Think of muons as high energy particles from space that are constantly raining down on Earth.
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They pass through rock, but very dense areas slow them down.
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So if you put detectors inside and around the pyramid and wait long enough, you can build a 3D density map, kind of like a medical CT scan.
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And you can do all of this without touching a single stone.
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and in 2015, they found something crazy.
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A massive, unexplained void just above the Grand Gallery, which led to thousands of new theories overnight.
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But what they didn't find was a clean spiral running just under the surface.
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If a kilometer long round was hiding there.
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Let's say you would expect at least a faint trace.
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But instead, the scan shows scattered voids.
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It doesn't necessarily kill the idea, but it strongly weakens the argument.
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And then most other pyramid construction theories are variations on these two.
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The thing about these theories is that most of them actually work until you reach the top.
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The apex is actually the hardest part of the whole structure, because even a tiny error at the base becomes a huge deviation at the top.
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The edges need to be perfectly straight.
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So you need full access to all four faces and lots of room to work with an external ramp.
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You eventually have to remove it or drastically shrink the ramp right when you need it the most.
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With an internal ramp, the higher you get.
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You are losing the turning radius, the hauling space, and of course, the ability to check the edges.
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When you look at pyramids and other cultures, you start to notice a lot of them dodge this issue with a flat top.
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even Egyptian pyramids later lose their tips.
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this is why, according to this Egyptologist, although pyramids were made all over the world, only the Egyptian pyramids are considered a miracle of the world.
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In other words, this sharp apex actually is the rarest and hardest part to explain.
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And the key to the pyramids construction.
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By the way, all of this background research and custom assets we created for this video.
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We decided to put it on a dedicated page and we built the whole thing in framer.
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Who's also the sponsor of this video?
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Framer is a design tool that lets you iterate with precision and turn your design ideas into a live website with a single click.
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Each of the theories get their own section.
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But there are so many other interesting pieces of history that we are to include All the live previews and interactive alignment tools made it very easy for us to see results instantly.
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You can even animate the elements in full 3D without getting into code.
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Everything works through simple transform controls inside framer.
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Framer also has a huge built in font library, so although Papyrus might have been on theme, finding something Egyptian and also modern was surprisingly easy.
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and we didn't want to risk triggering any graphic designers.
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It's also super easy to see how it can adapt across different devices.
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And our whole team can build on the same project together in real time.
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You can find our research page linked in the description, along with a framer link and a discount code if you want to check it out.
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let's get to this email that I received two years ago.
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which actually kickstarted my obsession with the pyramids.
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His name is Huni Choi and he's not an architect.
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Not an Egyptologist.
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Just someone who spent ten years obsessively modeling every measurable stone at Giza.
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Like thousands of blocks hand placed in 3D.
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And at first, I thought it was a little bit, Feels a little conspiracy theory.
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But then I did read the research, and I realized he wasn't trying to solve the pyramid.
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He was trying to solve the system that produces a pyramid.
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He says the Great Pyramid wasn't built on its own, but through a chain of sacrificial structures that are designed to be cannibalized.
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Let me explain.
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Before the Great Pyramids was a natural limestone outcrop with small hills.
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Most of the core blocks for Khufu's pyramid was carried directly from this plateau, with finer casing limestone brought from Tura and granite from Aswan.
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And they really use this landscape to their advantage.
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first they identify the high points Shave them and terrace them turning the hill into a working platform.
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Then you overbuilt.
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Instead of starting with a pyramid shape, you create a rough, gigantic, trapezoidal stuck mass with an integrated ramp system.
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And once the ramp reaches its full height, you start carving it down into the final pyramid shape.
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Remember the apex problem?
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Even the tiniest air at the base explode into huge deviations at the top.
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But if you work downward from a wide, stable platform, It's much easier to retain this precise angle.
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The shape is actually super important here.
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If we were to apply the system to a pyramid shape, The ramp will get steeper and higher as you go up, Creating another that slide for the workers.
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But a trapezoid spreads outward at the top and it gives you this workable seven degree ramp all the way up.
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A flat, safe working deck around the apex and full visibility of all four edges as you carve the final geometry, instead of fighting the pyramid shape.
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You delay it until the very end.
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Once you carve down the stacked mask, the extra limestone is then reused for the other pyramids.
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The Great Pyramid is roughly 6 million tons.
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toys model estimates the initial step mass to be around 8 million tons.
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Carving that down gives you roughly 2 million tons of reusable stone.
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This gets split between the working mass for coffee pyramid end into the other annex buildings.
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Then this process is repeated for the other pyramids, each one going through the same recursive construction loop.
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Once you add all of the stone that moves through this loop, you get around 14 million tons circulating through the system with roughly 1 million tons left over.
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Which weirdly lines up with the mainstream volume estimates for the entire Giza complex.
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What's interesting about this theory is that it treats the entire plateau as a single construction engine, and a closed loop system.
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And it actually matches Egyptian behavior.
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because the Egyptians were really into recycling.
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They turn broken boats into furniture.
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Broken furniture became small objects.
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And later dynasties literally mined old pyramids for new buildings.
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So a cannibalizing system for the pyramids kind of feels like a very Egyptian thing to do.
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And the idea of shaping the Earth into realms that's not new either.
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Before the creed, which was invented by the Greeks in the sixth century BC, the landscape was the machinery, the domains, the carnegies and the early temples.
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They all shaped the earth into construction engines to build structures that feel impossible.
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and most importantly, this system explains one of the biggest flaws of the external ramp theory.
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The missing debris is the ramps weren't lost through time.
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They were repurposed.
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But this led me to another very unpleasant thought.
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See, most theories fail.
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Not because we find something wrong.
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It fails because we find nothing.
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The massive external ramp, no debris on the internal spiral ramp, no signs of a continuous spiral.
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The water shaft theory.
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no canals, no cuttings, no retaining walls.
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and this way of disproving based on negative evidence, totally makes sense from a proper archeological point of view.
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But what if that evidence didn't disappear through time?
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But by design? maybe for them.
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A sacred form should not have any trace of a human builder.
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Maybe they always recycle the construction evidence.
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Maybe they always restored the site to purity, removed every mark and trace they could give away the construction method.
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It also means that the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
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But sometimes an architectural detail.
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It can reveal the construction method.
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Even if they try to hide it.
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This YouTuber history for granite Went through an insane journey to catalog around 6000 surviving casing stones across three sides of Khafre's pyramid.
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And he found a pattern.
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Tiny tapered stones forming vertical streams on each facade, which he calls bonding stones.
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A more common masonry term is king stones, which are essentially smaller, special pieces of stone that can slide down to stitch two masonry runs together.
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And it actually reveals a lot.
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First different sections were laid simultaneously by different crews for efficiency and then stitched together.
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Second, since there's no bonding stones at the centers or the corners.
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These weren't ending lines.
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They were starting lines. the last.
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And most importantly, all three faces show the exact same pattern.
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this is pretty important, because if there was a giant external ramp attached to the structure, you would probably see hotspots of bonding stones around the working edge.
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It doesn't prove any single theory, but it strongly suggests that the casing had to be carefully stitched together from multiple directions, and the crews likely had a wide, stable working deck around a clean, unobstructed pyramid core.
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Again, this is not proof of any one theory, but maybe it can disprove some theories.
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So how do we know for sure?
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Like how does a theory become proof?
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Mr. Wizard, but it's a real power plant and will generate electricity when I move the gas flame under the flask.
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The water inside will be heated to boiling.
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in math or hard science, proof is pretty absolute.
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You run the experiment, anyone can repeat it.
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And if the result holds, then it's true until someone disproves it.
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But with archeology, well, you can't really run the build the Great Pyramid as a live experiment.
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So instead, a theory can get stronger if it first predicts what we should find.
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And then on ground, those predictions match the real traces.
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And different kinds of evidence all start making sense.
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Under that same explanation.
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and even then other experts will try to break it with a pyramid.
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It's even harder because we're missing the entire construction phase, and we can't dismantle Khufu and multiple methods could produce the exact same final shape.
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So it's less.
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This is absolutely true.
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And it's more for now.
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This is the least wrong answer.
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and after months and months of digging into this for a brief second, I also wondered, could it have been the aliens?
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And I think there's a tiny part of me that kind of wanted to believe in, because it really hurts to think that we might never know the answer, But I know that that's just my cognitive closure talking because our brains hate gaps in information But maybe that's the whole point.
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In a world where we can Google almost anything, the pyramids are one of the last things we can't force into clarity and maybe if we understood them perfectly, they would lose the thing that makes them kind of extraordinary.
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So what do you guys think.
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Do you think we're ever going to solve the mystery of the pyramids?
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Let me know in the comments.
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with that, I'll see you guys in the next video.
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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección
Esta lección de conversación de nivel B2 se basa en el vídeo “This New Pyramid Theory Explains the Missing Evidence”. Las palabras que más se repiten: pyramid, ramp, stone, theory. Este vídeo tiene 215 frases y 2952 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 19:05. El hablante habla a un ritmo natural de unas 155 palabras por minuto, cercano a una conversación cotidiana. Solo el 78 % 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:
| Palabra | Pronunciación | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| pyramid sustantivo | /ˈpɪɹ.ə.mɪd/ | pirámide |
| apex sustantivo | /ˈeɪ.pɛks/ | ápice, cima |
| limestone sustantivo | /ˈlaɪmˌstoʊn/ | caliza |
| spiral sustantivo | /ˈspaɪɹəl/ | espiral |
| trace sustantivo | /tɹeɪs/ | calcar |
| latitude sustantivo | /ˈlætɪtud/ | latitud |
| granite sustantivo | /ˈɡɹæn.ɪt/ | granito, berroqueña |
| slope sustantivo | /sloʊp/ | pendiente, cuesta |
| debris sustantivo | /ˈdɛbɹi/ | escombros, restos |
| scan verbo | /skæn/ | escrutar |
| precise adjetivo | /pɹɪˈsaɪs/ | preciso |
| blurry adjetivo | /ˈblɜːɹi/ | borroso, desenfocado |
| carve verbo | /kɑɹv/ | trinchar |
| masonry sustantivo | /ˈmeɪsənɹi/ | albañilería |
| reuse sustantivo | /ɹiːˈjuːs/ | reúso, reutilizar |
Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar
| Palabra | Significado |
|---|---|
| go through verbo | atravesar |
| go up verbo | subir |
| pass through verbo | atravesar |
Frases que vale la pena repetir
Frases cortas y completas del vídeo que puedes reutilizar en la conversación diaria:
- It's actually right in front of us.
- We can't understand the pyramids without talking about time.
- Who's also the sponsor of this video?
Gramática en este vídeo
Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:
| Estructura | En el vídeo |
|---|---|
| Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace | weren't built · were built · is aligned |
| Oraciones de relativo who / which + oración — información extra sobre una persona o cosa | guy who had · people who weren · structure, which is |
| Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahora | you've built · have been |
Pronunciación a tener en cuenta
El hablante usa 26 contracciones y formas reducidas, como can't, weren't, didn't. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.
- Los sonidos de “th”: athlete /ˈæθ.liːt/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/
- Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: machinery /məˈʃiːnəɹi/, variation /ˌvɛəɹiˈeɪʃn̩/, shaft /ˈʃɑːft/, obsession /əbˈsɛʃən/, prediction /pɹɪˈdɪkʃən/
- Palabras largas — cuida el acento: architectural /ˌɑɹkɪˈtɛkt͡ʃəɹəl/, machinery /məˈʃiːnəɹi/, importantly /ɪmˈpɔɹ.tənt.li/, geometry /d͡ʒiˈɑ.mə.tɹi/, speculation /ˌspɛk.jəˈleɪ.ʃən/
Sonidos difíciles para hispanohablantes:
- s + consonante al inicio — sin añadir una “e” delante: spiral /ˈspaɪɹəl/, slope /sloʊp/, scan /skæn/, stitch /stɪt͡ʃ/, steep /stiːp/
- /v/ — no es /b/: los dientes tocan el labio inferior: carve /kɑɹv/, carving /ˈkɑɹvɪŋ/, variation /ˌvɛəɹiˈeɪʃn̩/, invent /ɪnˈvɛnt/, void /vɔɪd/
- /z/ — sonora, no /s/: propose /pɹəˈpəʊz/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, surprisingly /səˈpɹaɪzɪŋli/
Cómo practicar con este vídeo
- Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
- Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
- Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como pyramid, apex, limestone.
¿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.