Pratica di Shadowing: Fever Feels Horrible, but is Actually Awesome! - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

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Fever feels bad, so we take medication to suppress it.
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But is this a good idea?
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It turns out fever is one of the oldest defenses against disease.
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What exactly is it?
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How does it make your immune defense stronger?
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And should you take a pill to combat it?
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The heat of life.
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On Earth, life is able to thrive between the extremes of minus 10 degrees Celsius in deep cool pools
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and 120 degrees Celsius in thermal vents.
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Step outside this range and die.
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Every animal or microbe has a temperature range that's ideal and one that's stressful but survivable for a while.
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Your ideal temperature is where your cells work best, where their internal machinery is the most efficient and the animal as a whole the best adapted to its niche.
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are warm-blooded animals and our bodies expend a lot of energy to keep us around 37 degrees Celsius or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
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Which seems wasteful, but this may actually be a defensive adaptation.
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Our temperature makes us almost entirely immune to one of the worst killers and parasites, fungi.
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Most colder animals and their insides are infected by them, but You are just too hot.
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Which brings us to fever.
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For any microbe that wants to infect you, your body is a world they want to conquer.
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Fever is defensive climate change, pushing an invader outside its ideal temperature range and making the world horrible.
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It evolved at least 600 million years ago and is widespread.
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Most animals increase their core temperature when they're sick.
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Fish swim into warmer waters, Lizards bathe in the sun, bees heat up the air inside their hive.
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But you, warm-blooded mammal, you have way more drastic options.
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Let's make you sick and see what happens.
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When your blood turns into larva.
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You're invaded by bacteria and viruses at the same time.
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The invasion is powerful and you need to slow it down as fast as possible.
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Fever is part of your first line of defense, triggered by a diverse group of chemicals called pyrogens, the creators of heat.
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They float away from the battlefield and pass right into your brain, where specialized receptors pick them up and crank up your internal thermostat.
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First, you begin to shiver.
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Your skeletal muscles contract really quickly, which generates a lot of heat in your core.
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At the same time, usually the blood vessels near your surfaces contract and prevent heat from escaping through your skin.
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Your skin cools down while your insides burn.
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Fever is a systemic body-wide response and is a serious energy investment for your body.
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You burn about 10% more calories to stay alive for every degree centigrade your body temperature rises.
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Fever is also a strong order to lay down and rest to save energy and give your immune system time to fight.
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Back to the battlefield.
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When the bacteria entered your body, they tried to be stealthy, but now they've switched into high production mode.
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Their goal is to multiply as fast as possible, which means they need a lot of resources and are highly stressed.
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Imagine running a marathon while eating a succulent Chinese meal and giving birth.
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The last thing bacteria need right now is more stress.
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So your immune system tries to stress them out as much as possible by ordering inflammation, which floods the battlefield with fluids, attack proteins and soldiers.
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Pretty stressful.
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Fever is even more stress.
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For the bacteria a moment ago, the temperature range was pleasant.
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Now the world burns.
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Heat can cause their organs to break and the membranes to rupture, damage their DNA and diminish protein production.
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They are seriously suffering from the heat.
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Why doesn't this affect your cells?
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It does.
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All of this is stressful for your cells too.
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Virtually every system and organ of your body works worse during fever except one, your immune system.
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Neutrophils are recruited faster, macrophages and dendritic cells are better at devouring enemies, killer cells kill better, and so on.
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And fever animates your immune cells to gobble up the critical resources your enemies need, like iron, glucose and glutamine, turning the battlefield into a food desert.
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The viruses that infected millions of cells are doing even worse because they are also very sensitive to heat.
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For example, the rhinovirus that causes the common cold can only infect your respiratory tract
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because it is significantly colder than the rest of your body, even without fever.
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The heat is also really bad for the millions of cells that are infected by viruses at this point.
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They are working super hard producing viruses, which is pretty stressful.
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As the heat becomes too much to bear, the super stressed cells panic.
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If their internal machinery is breaking and failing, they quickly produce billions of heat shock proteins, or HSPs, that start repairs, keeping them alive.
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But this is a trap.
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Even your healthy cells produce HSPs to deal with the heat, but if a cell makes too many of them, this means it's more stressed than it should be.
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And if it's too stressed, something is wrong and it should be killed.
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So your natural killer cells and killer T cells are activated
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and attracted by HSPs and start killing infected cells and all the viruses inside them.
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By trying to protect themselves, infected cells are calling out to be destroyed.
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But if fever is such an effective weapon, why don't your enemies adapt to it?
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How is it still viable in so many different animals after hundreds of millions of years?
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A wild reason is that fever actually might outsmart evolution.
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If your enemies survive fever long enough, natural selection changes them.
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The individuals that are better suited to deal with heat reproduce more.
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After a few days, they've adapted.
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But this becomes a handicap because the next step is to infect new victims in new bodies.
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And now, healthy humans are too cold for them.
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Not impossible to infect, just harder.
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And the heat-resistant microbes now compete with their cousins that like it colder and have an advantage infecting healthy hosts.
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This creates an evolutionary dilemma without a perfect solution.
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To circumvent this, serious pathogens like measles use hit-and-run tactics.
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The measles virus is the most infectious right before your fever hits with full force.
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It's brutally beaten back once your full immune response shows up.
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But by then, the damage is done.
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Fever is an effective part of the puzzle of your immune system, helping to attack and stress your enemies from as many angles as possible.
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But if fever is so great, why do we stop it when we're sick?
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Should you fight fever with medications?
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We think it's normal to have magic pills,
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but relatively harmless, over-the-counter pain medication like aspirin or ibuprofen only became cheap and widely available in the last century or so.
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Going to a pharmacy to get something for your headache is extremely new in human history.
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Pain feels bad, so we've gotten used to stopping it when we feel it.
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If you're sick, you're supposed to feel a reasonable amount of pain so you lie down and save energy.
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This is not a bug, but a feature of your immune system.
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But pain and fever are closely connected, and over-the-counter pain medication like ibuprofen and paracetamol also work against fever.
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Especially in children, fever is often suppressed by worried parents or doctors, sometimes because they think fever itself is the disease,
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or they're worried that it can do long-term harm.
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In general, it's fair to say that for temperatures below 40 degrees Celsius or 104 Fahrenheit, fever is not dangerous and doesn't need to be treated.
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Of course, there are also patients that should not have fever, like pregnant women, seniors and seriously weakened patients.
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For them, the extra stress may be dangerous.
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Fever over 40 degrees Celsius is dangerous to anybody, because it's most likely caused by your internal heat monitor failing.
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Things get more complicated in serious disease territory.
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We also have evidence that for some diseases like influenza or chickenpox, anti-fever drugs do not help you to heal faster.
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But we're also running into ethics problems here that make clinical trials difficult.
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In one study, doctors gave strong anti-fever treatment to critical care patients, but had to stop after mortality shot up.
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Overall, we have strong indications that more people may survive serious infectious diseases better with a fever.
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And there is very little clinical evidence that stopping fever leads to better health outcomes.
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But there are important exceptions like neurological injuries and stroke.
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We definitely need a lot more research.
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So, should you fight fever?
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Well, speak to your doctor and don't listen to internet videos.
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But this decision is really about payoffs.
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If a fever is not dangerously high and you can bear it, you're supporting your defenses and may even get healthy a bit faster.
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But if you feel really bad and are healthy in general, taking a pill against pain
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and fever will make you feel better quicker at the cost of a slightly less effective immune defense.
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However you decide, the next time you're burning up and feeling bad, you can rest easy in the knowledge that your enemies are having a much worse time than you.
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It's thanks to doctors and researchers that we have these insights.
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We're just doing our part by bringing them to you.
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Thank you.

Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione

Questa lezione di conversazione di livello C1 si basa sul video “Fever Feels Horrible, but is Actually Awesome!”. Le parole che ritornano più spesso: fever, heat, cell, immune, temperature. Questo video contiene 131 frasi e 1794 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 11:05. Chi parla ha un ritmo naturale di circa 162 parole al minuto, vicino a una conversazione quotidiana. Solo il 81% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese, quindi il lessico è impegnativo.

Vocaboli chiave di questo video

Le 15 parole più avanzate del video, con pronuncia e significato:

ParolaPronunciaSignificato
infect verbo/ɪnˈfɛkt/contagiare, infettare
bacterium sostantivo/bækˈtɪəɹ.ɪəm/batterio
stressful aggettivo/ˈstɹɛsfəl/stressante, logorante
battlefield sostantivo/ˈbætəlˌfiːld/campo di battaglia
microbe sostantivo/ˈmaɪkɹoʊb/microbo, microbio
adapt verbo/əˈdæpt/adattare
pill sostantivo/pɪl/pillola, compressa
ibuprofen sostantivo/ˌaɪ.bju.ˈpɹoʊ.fən/ibuprofene
infectious aggettivo/ɪnˈfɛk.ʃəs/infettivo, contagioso
aspirin sostantivo/ˈæs.pɹɪn/aspirina
circumvent verbo/səːkəmˈvɛnt/eludere, circonvenire
compile verbo/kəmˈpaɪl/compilare, assemblare
dangerously avverbioin modo pericoloso, pericolosamente
dendritic aggettivo/dɛndˈɹɪtɪk/dendritico
devour verbo/dɪˈvaʊɚ/divorare, trangugiare

I phrasal verb che sentirai

ParolaSignificato
lie down verbosdraiarsi, distendersi
turn out verborisultare
heat up verboscaldare

Frasi da ripetere

Frasi brevi e complete del video che puoi riutilizzare nella conversazione di tutti i giorni:

  • How does it make your immune defense stronger?
  • Let's make you sick and see what happens.
  • Why doesn't this affect your cells?
  • Should you fight fever with medications?

La grammatica di questo video

Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:

StrutturaNel video
Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo faare infected · are recruited · should be killed
Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adessothey've switched · they've adapted · we've gotten
Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosapossible, which means · viruses, which is

Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione

Chi parla usa 19 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come you're, we're, doesn't. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.

  • I suoni “th”: pathogen /ˈpæθəd͡ʒn̩/, stealthy /ˈstɛlθi/, thermostat /ˈθɝməstæt/, thrive /θɹajv/, thermal /ˈθɜːməl/
  • I suoni “sh” e “zh”: infectious /ɪnˈfɛk.ʃəs/, machinery /məˈʃiːnəɹi/, diminish /dɪˈmɪnɪʃ/, nutshell /ˈnʌt.ʃɛl/, shiver /ˈʃɪvɚ/
  • Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: ibuprofen /ˌaɪ.bju.ˈpɹoʊ.fən/, machinery /məˈʃiːnəɹi/, paracetamol /ˌpɛɹ.əˈsiː.təˌmɔl/, influenza /ˌɪn.fluˈɛn.zə/, neurological /nɝəˈlɑd͡ʒɪkəl/

I suoni difficili per chi parla italiano:

  • /h/ — va soffiata, non è muta: hive /haɪv/, handicap /ˈhændikæp/, harmless /ˈhɑɹmləs/, headache /ˈhɛdeɪk/
  • Consonante finale — senza aggiungere una vocale dopo: infect /ɪnˈfɛkt/, battlefield /ˈbætəlˌfiːld/, microbe /ˈmaɪkɹoʊb/, adapt /əˈdæpt/, measles /ˈmizəlz/
  • /æ/ — più aperta della “e”: bacterium /bækˈtɪəɹ.ɪəm/, battlefield /ˈbætəlˌfiːld/, adapt /əˈdæpt/, animate /ˈæn.ə.mət/, aspirin /ˈæs.pɹɪn/

Come esercitarsi con questo video

  1. Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
  2. Inizia a velocità 0,75×, fai shadowing frase per frase e torna alla velocità normale quando diventa facile.
  3. Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come infect, bacterium, stressful.

Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?

Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.

Tecnica dello shadowing: leggi la guida completa passo dopo passo →