Pratica di Shadowing: Why we might be getting the birth rate panic wrong (again) | BBC Global - Impara a parlare inglese con YouTube

C1
When I was growing up,
⏸ In Pausa
138 frasi
Se le frasi sono troppo corte o troppo lunghe, clicca su Edit per modificarle.
1
When I was growing up,
2
people worried about there being too many people on Earth.
3
But in the last few years,
4
that script has flipped for much of the world.
5
Some countries do still have populations that are growing,
6
but in much of the West,
7
birth rates are hitting all-time lows.
8
That has a lot of people worried.
9
But recently, I sat down with demographer Jennifer Schuber,
10
who thinks we're looking at this all wrong,
11
and
12
that aiming for a correct population size is a lot less important than how we adapt to the population we actually have.
13
I think where we get this idea of a correct population number is it's the one
14
that allows us to be the laziest.
15
Because if you have rapid population growth,
16
you are really focusing all your time and attention
17
and policies on how do we make sure that there are enough schools being built?
18
Do we make sure there are enough jobs?
19
And we've been doing that for decades, right?
20
So that's comfortable.
21
If you're going to upend it,
22
how do we make sure we train gerontologists?
23
How do we make sure that there's enough long-term care?
24
That's really, really hard.
25
It's not opaque what needs to be done,
26
but it's politically really difficult.
27
I'm old enough to remember when overpopulation was the big anxiety.
28
And I remember actually, I even have family members who very,
29
you know, confidently said, I'm only going to limit myself to having one
30
or two children because I don't want to add to this massive overpopulation that we have around the world.
31
They turned out to have been wrong.
32
So how confident are we that the latest fears we have about this declining population are valid?
33
I think part of what we need to do is separate the fears from the data.
34
But if we really look at the heyday of rhetoric around overpopulation,
35
talking like late 60s into the 1970s,
36
it seemed that overall population growth was just exponential.
37
I mean, it's more than doubled in my own lifetime.
38
But what was happening beneath the surface was that the growth rate of the population was declining already in the 1960s.
39
This was happening, but it takes a while for that to show up on the surface.
40
We were worried about the headline number.
41
We should have been looking at the growth trends.
42
Maybe so, but it's hard because that's what we experience, right?
43
Like we're not experiencing some underlying tectonic force that no one can see.
44
We're experiencing how bad is the traffic?
45
What's competition for job really like?
46
But now what's happened in our lives is that we've caught up.
47
I haven't looked at the data that just got released a few days ago,
48
but over 42% of U.S counties were shrinking.
49
So for people in those counties,
50
they would actually feel what has been happening beneath the surface.
51
And certainly we know that there are over 40 countries in the world with shrinking populations.
52
So it actually has changed.
53
And then the fear around it,
54
of course, is a different topic.
55
It's really about how societies handle the changes,
56
not about the changes themselves.
57
That's right.
58
And I wish we would talk about that more.
59
But how societies handle it is really difficult, right?
60
It's hard for a politician to stick their neck out and say,
61
I think we're going to need to raise retirement age.
62
Well, that person has just put themselves out of a job.
63
If we assume that we are on this path for a while where populations are going to decline for a while longer.
64
And who knows, maybe in 20 years time,
65
we'll be having a very different conversation for whatever reason.
66
But let's assume we're on this path for the next 20 years.
67
What do countries and governments need to do to adapt in practice?
68
What are a few of the things in practice that they need to do to adapt to this?
69
Yeah.
70
Well, I mean, so we care,
71
health infrastructure certainly came up when we talk about gerontologists.
72
Care is another one.
73
So So there's so much care that we all need at different points in our life and including the end of life.
74
And we have really most societies in the world have been set up
75
that that women perform most of that care
76
and they perform it unpaid many are happy to do
77
so of course uh it's not we have to be careful
78
when we talk about things like a care burden
79
but it is a care situation and it is one where it's not sustainable
80
when you have an inverted we would say demographic pyramid where there are
81
so many older age dependents and so few people to actually take care of them.
82
So we need to think about this at the systemic level and think about how it affects different people differently, right?
83
The poorer you are, the harder it might be.
84
If you are a woman who has a job outside the home,
85
it might be more difficult as well.
86
We also need to think about skills and education.
87
We have had a really linear view around this, right?
88
The many people try to,
89
they amass their education and their skills in this first part of life,
90
and then they put them to work in the second part.
91
Then they retire those skills and hopefully the education stays with them.
92
But when we live longer and we know that we need to work longer,
93
do we move that to also show up at different parts of life so that we retrain,
94
we upskill, we learn different areas,
95
and we can make sure that we have income security more so in the long run,
96
particularly as the number of people of working ages decline?
97
Is it possible, with all of the caveats that you've mentioned,
98
to determine whether quality of life is meaningfully different in a growing society versus a shrinking one?
99
That's a great question that I'm tempted to overanalyze because I think we actually need to update our definition of this.
100
But if I keep it simple in what we know to be true,
101
quality of life has actually been much higher in societies that have had declining fertility rates.
102
We have much longer life expectancy.
103
We have higher education rates.
104
And that's because fertility rates tend to come down when you have a rising standard of living.
105
And these things, of course,
106
interact with one another and feedback on one another.
107
What will be interesting for us,
108
we are entering into an era of the unknown.
109
And we have really been,
110
it seems like we moved very quickly off of our celebrations of success that went along with declining fertility,
111
like amazing opportunities for women to work outside the home of the fact that we're even here doing this.
112
What a celebration.
113
Go us.
114
And we moved past that really quickly to just talk about the bad parts of things.
115
How do we redefine what success
116
and wellbeing look like in the context of a population
117
that is not infinitely growing and perhaps doesn't have an infinitely growing GDP?
118
We need new vocabulary around this.
119
Before we go, Jennifer, I'm going to make you prime minister or president or monarch for the day.
120
if you were to design a society from scratch,
121
where you knew the population was going to decline over time,
122
how would you design it?
123
I would design it where we have really strong local communities.
124
I think so much of where we get off track these days is
125
that we have this national level policymaking that is all felt at the local level.
126
And there's such a disconnect in that.
127
And the way we live our lives really is neighborhood by neighborhood,
128
street by street, community by community.
129
And by building those really strong communities,
130
I think we lay the foundation for resilience that is needed whether
131
or not your population is going to grow or is going to shrink.
132
And that's actually something that we can do if we increase our knowledge about these trends more and more,
133
which we're doing through this.
134
I think there's a lot of folks with probably really innovative ideas at the community level and I'd love to see them.
135
Yeah, a better community is better care for all of those older people as well.
136
Jennifer Schuber, thank you so much for joining me.
137
Thank you.
138
Thank you.

Scarica l'app

Valutazione AI per ogni frase che pronunci

Scansiona per scaricare
Scansiona per scaricare
Download on theApp Store
Get it onGoogle Play
TRENDING

Popolari

Perché esercitarsi a parlare con questo video?

Questo video della BBC offre una prospettiva interessante sul tema della demografia e della natalità, rendendolo un ottimo materiale per la pratica di conversazione in inglese. Discutere argomenti complessi, come le dinamiche popolazionali, permette di ampliare il vocabolario e migliorare la fluidità. Attraverso l’ascolto e la ripetizione delle frasi, puoi esercitare il tuo shadow speak, migliorando la tua pronuncia e la tua intonazione. Inoltre, tale argomento stimola riflessioni personali e può generare discussioni coinvolgenti, rendendo l'apprendimento dell'inglese più significativo e motivante.

Grammatica ed espressioni nel contesto

Durante il video, la relatrice utilizza diverse strutture grammaticali e espressioni chiave che possono essere utili per migliorare la propria competenza linguistica:

  • “What we need to do is separate the fears from the data” - Questa frase esemplifica l'uso della forma passiva, che è fondamentale per esprimere idee in modo più obiettivo.
  • “It seemed that overall population growth was just exponential” - L’uso del passato e delle espressioni comparative è utile per descrivere stati e cambiamenti.
  • “We should have been looking at the growth trends” - Questa costruzione condizionale sottolinea l’importanza di analizzare i dati in modo critico, un’abilità essenziale in conversazione.

Imparare l'inglese con YouTube, utilizzando contenuti reali e attuali, permette di vedere questi esempi in contesto, facilitando una comprensione più profonda delle strutture linguistiche.

Trappole comuni nella pronuncia

Nel video ci sono parole e frasi che possono risultare difficili da pronunciare, soprattutto per chi sta imparare l'inglese con youtube. Ecco alcune trappole comuni:

  • “Demographer” - Fai attenzione alla pronuncia della "g", che può essere confusa con una "j".
  • “Exponential” - Questa parola contiene molte sillabe e può essere complicata; assicurati di pronunciarla lentamente all'inizio.
  • “Population” - La combinazione di suoni “popu” e “lation” può creare confusione. Prova a dividerla in sillabe per migliorare la tua pronuncia.

Utilizzare tecniche come shadowing in inglese con questo video ti aiuterà a padroneggiare queste pronunce e a migliorare la tua competenza orale.

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.

☕ Offrici un caffè