Shadowing Practice: President Obama: FULL INTERVIEW | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Okay, we're here with the President.
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We're very excited to be here.
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I'm very excited to be here.
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Very grateful.
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Thank you very much.
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You must be a little wistful.
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You must feel a little like David Ortiz about a month ago, where you know you're going on to great things in the next chapter of your life.
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And I'm still hitting.
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And you're still hitting.
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But my feet hurt.
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But you know you'll never quite have a job as exhilarating.
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Well, you know, it is time.
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You know, I tell people that this has been a great run.
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I have loved this job.
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I'm not going to pretend that there haven't been moments of great frustration, but it is a singular privilege.
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I think I'm as good a president now as I've ever been, because you learn stuff over eight years.
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The President Trump Sure.
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You've sort of been around the track a bunch of times.
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But I also see now the wisdom of the founders
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that at a certain point you have to let go for the democracy to work.
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That there has to be fresh legs, there have to be new people, and you have to have the humility to recognize that,
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you know, you're a citizen and you go back to being a citizen after this office is over.
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So we're just trying to run through the tape.
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And the great thing is I've got an unbelievable team around me of people who have done extraordinary work.
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I'm sort of the front man for it.
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Well, that's very modest.
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Well, you know, the fact
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that the team won't be there in the same way I
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think is the only thing where you have a little bit of regret.
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So we're a week out from the election.
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And you're a history buff.
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I think when we look back, if Mr. Trump is defeated,
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I'm hopeful that the takeaway will be that socialism was not such a dirty word anymore because of our friend Bernie Sanders.
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And I'm just wondering, as someone who was accused of being a socialist before, what do you think about the idea that in America,
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yes, we're capitalists, But some things just should not be for the profit motive, health care, prisons, the military, elections.
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And I would add news gathering.
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People say get the money out of politics.
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I think you've got to get out of the news business first or we're never going to learn anything.
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Well, a couple things I'd say.
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First of all, if you look at the United States, Canada, Europe, all the advanced democracies,
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then clearly you've got to have a market -based system
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because it's really productive and it spurs on innovation and freedom and entrepreneurship, and you've got to have a social welfare state.
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And in some ways, the label socialism doesn't make
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that much sense in a context where there's no economy that doesn't have some socialist elements,
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meaning that there's some common goods that we all agree everybody should have.
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That's what Social Security is.
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That's what Medicare is to some extent.
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That's what public schools are.
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We all chip in to make sure that everybody, no matter the circumstances of your birth, have these baseline goods.
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And as you know, I felt pretty strongly that health care should be one of those goods.
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But I've also said in the past that if I were designing a system from scratch, I would have probably looked at a single -payer system.
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But we do have legacy systems.
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And that's the only thing that sometimes when I've had conversations with Bernie, I've said to him that we don't start from scratch.
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You've got a $1 trillion healthcare industry, for example, and you've got a lot of people who are working for it and a lot of special interests involved.
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And so my goal in the Affordable Care Act was if I can get millions of more people insurance,
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then that's my first goal.
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Because for them, this is not an abstraction.
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It's like I'm not going to lose my home or my kid's going to get coverage.
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And that's what we've done.
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But I see it as a starter home.
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And then the question is, how do we make sure everybody ultimately gets it?
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Because there's still gaps in coverage.
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I think the same is true when it comes to some other issues.
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To me, I think there is a pretty bright line around prisons.
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I agree with you that the criminal justice system should not be infected by the profit motive.
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This is the awesome power of the state, saying we can take somebody's freedom away.
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We can lock them up because they've breached some part of the social contract.
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the notion that you might incentivize people to lock more people in?
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or keep them there longer, or not provide the kind of rehabilitation services so that they can get out of there.
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I think that's a problem.
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And so I'm very proud of some of the work that we've been trying to do along these lines.
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We've got more work to do.
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When it comes to the media, you know, that's a tougher call.
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Because, look, state -run media, that's what they've got in The President - Well, not state -run, but just like it it used to be,
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where it was a lost leader for the networks.
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They didn't have to make a profit at CBS.
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Partly because they had a monopoly, though, to some degree, right?
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So they were fat and happy.
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In this kind of environment, it's hard to figure out how you would do that,
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but I think the question I'd have when it comes to the media is how do we create a space
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where truth gets eyeballs and is entertaining, and we can build a common conversation.
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What is true, when I leave here, one of the things I'm most concerned about is the balkanization of the media, where you've got 800 stations,
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you've got all these websites.
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People have difficulty now just sorting out what's true and what's not.
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And if you don't have some common baseline of facts, we can have a disagreement about how to deal with climate change.
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But if we have a big chunk of the country that just discounts what 99 percent of scientists say completely,
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it's very hard to figure out how we move the democracy forward.
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So I don't have a good formula for that, but I think that it's something that I'll spend a lot of time thinking about
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and seeing if maybe we can build some platforms where everybody says okay let's let's let's agree on facts
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and then argue about means after that okay let me ask you about a question
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that I know people who watch our show are interested in
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which is marijuana reform is that something
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that you care about I do something I care about it's now we both made jokes about it
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but it's not funny to the people who get arrested yeah
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which is over half a million I think last year you know you
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and I both could have had our lives ruined not really by smoking it
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but by being arrested for it right
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and you know I feel like you had a checklist about
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let's get rid of a lot of the stupid stuff like
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opening up Cuba you know you came out for gay marriage
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I was hoping ending the drug war would be on
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that list it's on the ballot now in nine states in a week including california for recreational and arizona
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and medical in places like north dakota isn't it time the federal government caught up to progressive states like arizona
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and north dakota Well, here's what I'm,
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I have always believed that to the extent that the society legitimately wants to guard against any kind of substance abuse,
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that you treat it as a public health problem.
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Look, I'm an ex -smoker, cigarette smoker.
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Ex?
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Ex.
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Really?
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Yeah.
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Did you wink or did you get something in your eye there?
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I thought I caught a wink.
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It's true.
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I'm chewing the heck out of Nicorette.
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Really?
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Yeah.
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But, no, when I passed health care reform, I think I'd had my last cigarette.
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But the reason is because there was this enormous public health effort to get kids not to pick up smoking
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and to make sure the parents felt guilty if they were passing on that habit to their kids.
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And so that's where I think we need to go with pot, alcohol.
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And so I don't think that legalization is a panacea, but I think
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that we're going to have to have a more serious conversation about how we are treating marijuana and our drug laws generally.
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The good news is, is that after this referendum, to some degree it's going to call the question.
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Because if, in fact, it passed in all these states, you now have about a fifth of the country that's operating under one set of laws, and four -fifths in another,
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the Justice Department, DEA, FBI,
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for them to try to straddle and figure out how they're supposed to enforce laws in some places and not in others.
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And they're going to guard against transporting these drugs across state lines.
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You've got the entire Pacific corridor where this is legal.
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That is not going to be tenable.
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Now, it's not something that I think is going to happen overnight,
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and I think there are some legitimate concerns that people have about how you draw lines on these issues.
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But it is indisputable that right now the biggest drug crisis we have is with opioids,
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many of which are legal and are ravaging entire communities all across the country.
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And for us to resort how we think about these problems
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and not think of everything through the criminal justice lens but also through the public health lens, I think is something that's going to need to happen.
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Okay.
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Switching topics, I don't know
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if anybody from my tribe of atheists ever thanked you for giving us a shout -out at your first inaugural, but you did mention non -believers.
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I think it was part of it.
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More than once.
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More than once.
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I mean, it's not just in that speech.
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I've done it often.
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Well, we appreciate it.
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Because we do feel like untouchables to a degree.
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I mean, I don't know if you saw the latest religion survey, but almost a quarter of the country are nuns.
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I don't mean the ones who hit me on knuckles with a ruler in Sunday school.
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I mean they put none for religion.
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None of the above.
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Right.
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No, they're atheists, agnostics, or they just don't want to get up on Sunday morning.
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And we have no representation in Congress.
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If our numbers were represented, there'd be over 100 Congress people who felt that way.
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It just seems like we are not included in the basket of diversity in America, which is odd because we are the biggest minority.
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That is a bigger minority than any other minority you can
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name don't you think we should get a little more love
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you know I guess my question would be whether there is active persecution of atheists I think
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that there are certain well I I think for like a candidate I I think you're right
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that there are certain we might be occupations probably most prominently
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politics where there would be a bias against somebody who's agnostic or atheist in running for office.
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I think that's still true.
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Outside of that arena, though, you seem to have done all right with your TV show, Matt.
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I don't get a sense.
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To the extent that they're boycotting you, it's because of your other wacky ideas rather than your particular view on religion.
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What a better wacky idea.
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I usually agree with you.
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I think the average American, if they go to the workplace,
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somebody's next to them they're not poking around trying to figure out what their religious beliefs are
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so so so here's what I would say that I think
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that we should foster a culture in which people's private religious beliefs
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including atheists and agnostics are respected and and and that's the kind culture
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that I think allows all of us then to believe what we want.
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That's freedom of conscience.
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That's what our Constitution guarantees.
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And, you know, where we get into problems, typically,
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is when our personal religious faith or the community of faith that we participate in tips into a sort of fundamentalist extremism,
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in which it's not enough for us to believe what we believe, but we start feeling obligated to,
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you know, hit you over the head because you don't believe the same thing, or to treat you as somebody who's less than I am.
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The President - But we might be more pro -science in America if we were less religious, don't you think?
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The President - Well, you know,
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I think the issues we have with science these days are not restricted to what's happening with respect to religion.
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There are a lot of very religious scientists around.
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I think the problem is that in our school systems, and to some degree, and this is where it is relevant,
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with school boards around the country that are mandating curriculums and textbooks,
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you start seeing this weird watering down of scientific fact so that our kids are growing up in an environment,
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and this connects to what I was saying earlier about the media, where everything is contested, that nothing is true,
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because if it's on Facebook, it all looks the same.
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And if you're reading something from a Nobel Prize -winning physicist next to some guy in his underwear,
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you know, riding in his basement or his mom's basement on text, it looks like it's equally plausible.
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And part of what we have to do a better job of, if our democracy is a function in a complicated, diverse society like this,
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is to teach our kids enough critical thinking to be able to sort out what is true and what is false,
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what is contestable and what is incontestable, and we seem to have trouble with that,
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and our political system doesn't help.
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Okay.
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I want to ask you this question.
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Again, it's an issue I think we don't get asked a lot about, but it's important to my audience.
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I know people will roll their eyes and say, it's so California to ask this, but food purity.
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Something that means a lot to me.
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Somehow it got to be elitist or liberal.
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I don't get that, to want food that isn't full of pesticides
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or food that wasn't created by torturing animals in factory farms.
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Isn't full of antibiotics, which is a problem in itself.
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I feel like we're upside down on food we eat too much corn
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because we grow too much corn because we subsidize too much corn
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and you know one of the problems with the affordable care act is that people were found sicker right than expected
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and that's partly because of the food i think and obesity
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and all the work that michelle's been doing yeah yeah
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but shouldn't the food be put more at the top of the agenda
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when when we come to addressing health care there's no doubt about it
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that right now we've got a disease care system we should have a health care system.
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And health care system would include nutrition, exercise.
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But also pushing back on corporate.
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Well, and so I think what is true is
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that for a long time agribusiness has had a obviously a prominent seat at the table in Congress.
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It's bipartisan.
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Some of the reforms that we've tried to initiate, for example, on the school lunch program, have actually made some progress on this front,
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and Michelle deserves a lot of credit for it, as do a bunch of organizations that have worked on this.
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I think the strategy has to be one of persuasion and it has to be more demand -driven
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in the sense that one of the things Michelle's finding is
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that when she worked with Walmart or Kraft or what have you, and she said, look, here's the data, this is what parents want,
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the profit motive can actually work in favor of food purity, as long as there's good information out there.
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And so part of our strategy has been, how do we make sure that consumers are aware they've got the information they need?
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Now, I will tell you, and this may be controversial in some of your audience, It is important to look at the science on this stuff.
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So when it comes to antibiotics, for example, the science is clear.
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We pump our animals full of it.
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And that's not just a problem in terms of what we're ingesting.
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It's also a problem that more and more bacteria is becoming resistant to antibiotics.
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But in some cases, like, for example, the GMO debate, there are areas where there are legitimate concerns.
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There are some areas where the science seems to indicate, well, this is okay.
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We just got back to the science, and it says it doesn't increase the yield.
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Well, exactly.
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And they use just as many, if not more, pesticides.
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Well, that's, so my point is that what we have to make sure we're doing, whether we're on the left or the right, is being driven by the science.
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And if it turns out that some of these genetically modified foods aren't healthier,
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aren't more productive and use more pesticides, then we should follow the science.
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If in some cases they're not causing any harm, then we should follow the science there as well.
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And that's what I've tried to do in this administration is, And then this goes beyond just nutrition policy.
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What I always say to my teams are figure out what is right as far as best we can tell.
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Figure out what the best policy is.
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Figure out what the science tells us.
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Figure out what the facts tell us.
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What are our best ideas out there and sort through them.
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And then once you figure that out, then we'll worry about the politics after that.
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don't start with the politics and then try to get the facts to fit into the politics.
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And I think that if, you know, At minimum, what that does is it keeps us tethered to reality.
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It makes us go to bed at night feeling pretty good about what we've been trying to do
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because we're not constantly trying to tack to whatever's fashionable or what public opinions are out there.
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We just try to figure out as best we can what is the right answer and follow that.
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Do you think we ask too little of the public?
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Politicians, you know, of course, are always kissing up to the public and saying things like if we only had a government as good as the people.
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But the people aren't very well informed.
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They don't exercise their right to vote.
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And when they do, they don't know much about it.
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I just feel like we don't ask the people very much.
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We're afraid to ask the people, eat better.
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You know, the phrase was, yes, we can.
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I feel like they're not pulling their weight on the we.
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It's a partnership with them.
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Eat better, vote more, learn something.
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You know, I actually think that part of the pitch I've made throughout my campaign and throughout my presidency is exactly that,
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that change doesn't come from on high.
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That if you're waiting for Congress, then you're going to be waiting a long time.
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Even a pretty capable, well -meaning president is going to only be able to take the country so far without out people,
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ordinary folks all across the country, being engaged, being involved, being active.
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Yeah, I constantly quote Louis Brandeis, who said, the most important office in a democracy is the office of citizen.
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It's not president, it's not senator, it's not mayor.
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And so I have tried consistently to say to the American people that this is only going to work if you're engaged.
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Now, I will tell you, having traveled every state, met with people from every walk of life, people are basically good.
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You know, I am a glass -half -full guy and an optimist about the human spirit.
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You are right, though, that people are busy.
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They're stressed, and they don't have time to follow the intricacies of some debate around Medicaid or what's going on in Syria.
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And so part of the, when I say I want a government as good as the American people,
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what I mean by that is that I think people's instincts,
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their gut, what they want out of life and how they want to see people treated is actually pretty good.
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But the question then becomes, how do we get enough information in front of them to be able to make good decisions?
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I've always believed that if I could get into, you know, if I could sit in a living room with every person in America over,
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you know, that I've got the majority on my side
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and a healthy majority on my side on every issue that we work on, just by having a conversation.
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The problem is we've got all these filters.
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And, look, if I watched Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me either, right, because, you know, you've got this screen,
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this funhouse mirror through which people are receiving information.
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How to break through that is a big challenge.
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This whole conversation that's been had lately in the aftermath of the rise of Trump,
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This notion that part of what's happened is that both Republican and Democratic elites have neglected the white working class.
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The truth of the matter is that every policy I've put forward would make a huge difference with the white working class, and the black working class,
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and the Latino working class, whether it's raising the minimum wage, or the Affordable Care Act, giving people health care who don't have it and who are working hard and need help,
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or making sure that unions are strong so that you can have a little more leverage at the workplace,
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or making sure that something like the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is protecting against some scam mortgage.
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But what is true is that
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because it's hard to get into the details of all these
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issues with folks who are running around dropping off their kids at school
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and trying to punch the clock and figuring out how to make ends meet
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and just want to relax when they come home and not watch, you know, meet the press,
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then in that environment, a lot of what people take in is just symbols and signifiers.
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And you get into identity politics and culture wars.
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And what I'd like to figure out, and I think Democrats do have an affirmative obligation to do this,
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is to work harder to figure out in this new age what's the equivalent of getting into people's living rooms
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and being able to have a conversation and being able to listen to people.
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And I've been able to do this successfully during my campaigns.
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I have not always been able to do it as successfully here in this White House, partly because of this bubble that's created around me.
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Does America need to be an empire?
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We have more troops in more places than any empire in the history of the world.
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We spend over $600 billion on defense, and that's not including the nukes, taking care of veterans, homeland security.
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When you add it all up, it's probably over a trillion to keep the monsters away.
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I'm wondering if we could be just as safe spending half as much.
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Eisenhower warned when he was close to the end of his second term, like you are now, about the military -industrial complex.
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And it seems no president of either party ever makes any progress on that, pushing back on that.
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Will it ever happen?
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Did you want to do that?
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Well, look, keep in mind, Bill, when I came into office, we had 180 ,000 troops just in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Now we probably have about 15 ,000.
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So that's a pretty big bunch of folks.
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But we still spend as much.
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We still spend more.
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Well, you know, actually, our spending, I think, has been steady,
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here's what I'd say, that humility in foreign policy is a useful trait,
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particularly in the Oval Office.
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I think bad things happen around the world, and our natural instinct is we should do something.
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There are times where our intervention makes a difference.
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But there are a lot of times where unintended consequences can result in more problems when we intervene.
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And sorting out where those issues play out is,
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I think, one of the biggest challenges that any President has.
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My bias is that if it comes to defending the American people against al Qaeda,
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ISIL, somebody who wants to blow up a train station in Midtown,
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Manhattan, that I'm going to go after them and I make no apologies about it, and I want a vigorous military in place.
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And when it comes to maintaining a basic international order so
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that a guy like Kim Jong -un in North Korea doesn't suddenly start holding all of Asia hostage
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because he is building a bunch of nuclear weapons and feels free to threaten everybody else,
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it's important for us to have alliances in place and to be able to work on the international scene.
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And us having the most powerful military on Earth helps that happen, it helps check the impulses of some other bad folks.
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And I will tell you, as somebody who has now served as Commander -in -Chief for the last eight years,
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not only are the men and women in uniform that I work with extraordinary.
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You know, you meet 23 -year -olds who are in charge of life
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and death missions and maintaining billion -dollar pieces of equipment and they just execute and do it unbelievably well.
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But what you also discover is my top brass,
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Joint Chiefs of Staff, they're not the chicken hawks who are going around trying to get us into every single war.
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You know, the generals, the colonels, the commanders that I work with,
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they know the wages of war.
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And they're actually pretty thoughtful about it.
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And typically, in the situation room, they're the ones who are like, well, before we go half -cocked on something, let's really think about this, because this is what would be involved,
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and they have seen what's involved.
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Because most of them are people who were fighting in Iraq and fighting in Afghanistan, and they know how hard these environments are,
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and that no matter how good our intentions, and a lot of times it can go haywire.
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But having said all that, I think we should have restraint.
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I think we should have humility.
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I think we have to, wherever possible, work multilaterally and not just unilaterally, because if we can't organize coalitions to do things,
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that means that maybe we haven't thought everything through.
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Having said all that,
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it turns out that as flawed as sometimes our foreign policy can be or whatever blind spots we have,
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we really are the indispensable nation.
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I mean, if we, if there is a typhoon that wipes out out someplace in Southeast Asia.
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Our military is the only organization that has the infrastructure to help those folks quickly.
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When Ebola came out, we actually had to build the platform whereby everybody else could even think about bringing their doctors and nurses in.
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If you have a rogue nation
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that decided it was going to take action that significantly threatened a lot of people.
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I'd want to know that the U .S military was there.
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And so, and I can tell you, setting aside our military power,
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there's not an international meeting I go to in which if we weren't sitting at the table,
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nothing gets done, because for the most part,
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other countries don't have either the capacity or the inclination.
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And when you've got a bunch of authoritarian governments out there and a creeping authoritarian impulse around the world,
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we also are the ones who are pushing back most effectively,
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imperfectly, but most effectively against locking up journalists and killing human rights activists,
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and making sure that poor people get food, and dealing with public health crises.
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I think if you see the world from my seat, I won't.
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A sort of, the one thing I think is important for progressives
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to guard against is a tendency
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sometimes to not fully appreciate
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that America is not just a great nation in the sense that it's powerful,
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but that our values and our ideals actually matter.
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And we do a lot of good around the world.
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And there's some things that we do that are either ineffective or imperfect,
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but there's a lot to be proud of, and there's a lot to build on.
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And now what we've got to do is make sure that we get our own
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house in order so that we can keep on doing good around the world.
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The President - Yeah, I know you're off to Ohio, right?
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You've got an election to rig.
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And I want you to get out there because, boy, it's a very nervous time for a lot of people who are worried about Mr. Trump.
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The stakes are high.
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I know we were getting the gong, but I will say this.
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The choice in this election should be really clear. So clear.
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And anybody who's watching your show and was a supporter of mine, was a supporter of Bernie's,
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you know, is a progressive generally,
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this idea that somehow, well,
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you know, both of them have problems and nothing will change either way.
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Look, listen, all the progress we've made on climate change,
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Paris agreement, HFC agreement, aviation agreement,
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the 20 million people who have health insurance right now that didn't have it before, all the progress that we've made on
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trying to check the excesses of Wall Street and Dodd -Frank
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and and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau any chance of immigration reform,
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including the work that we did to make sure that
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These amazing dreamer kids all across the country who are now going to college
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or serving in our military are not suddenly deported or at risk of deportation.
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Every single issue
396
that we've made progress on over the last eight years is
397
going to be on the ballot in the form of this choice.
398
And I have worked with Hillary Clinton.
399
I know her.
400
And she is somebody who cares about these issues.
401
She does her homework.
402
She cares deeply about ordinary folks.
403
Her policies are aligned with yours and mine.
404
And, yes, she is somebody who believes in compromise and that you don't get 100 percent of what you want.
405
But you know what?
406
That's the way this democracy works.
407
Anybody sitting on the sidelines right now or or deciding to engage in a protest vote, that's a vote for Trump.
408
And that would be badly damaging for this country, and it would be damaging for the world.
409
So no complacency this time.
410
So get out there.
411
Get out there.
412
Thank you so much.
413
You did a hell of a job in this office.
414
I know I speak for myself and my audience.
415
It means a lot that you did this for us.
416
And even though I wasn't on the show that often, I watched it all the time.
417
Really?
418
I did.
419
Well, that's nice to hear.
420
Thank you, Mr. President.
421
Appreciate it.
422
All right.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 422 sentences and 5340 words to shadow. The speech runs for 36:55. The speaker talks at a steady 145 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| extent noun | /ɪkˈstɛnt/ | A range of values or locations. |
| minority noun | /maɪˈnɒɹ.ɪ.ti/ | The state or condition of being smaller, inferior, or subordinate to something or someone else; lesserness. |
| citizen noun | /ˈsɪtɪzən/ | A resident of a city or town, especially one with legally recognized rights or duties. |
| partly adverb | /ˈpɑɹtli/ | In part, or to some degree, but not completely. |
| affordable adjective | /əˈfɔɹ.də.bəl/ | Able to be afforded; inexpensive or reasonably priced. |
| corn noun | /ˈkɔːn/ | Any cereal plant (or its grain) that is the main crop or staple of a country or region. |
| motive noun | /ˈmoʊtɪv/ | An incentive to act in a particular way; a reason or emotion that makes one want to do something; anything that prompts a choice of action. |
| humility noun | /hjuːˈmɪlɪti/ | The characteristic of being humble; humbleness in character and behavior. |
| antibiotic noun | /ˌæn.taɪ.baɪˈɑ.tɪk/ | Any substance that can destroy or inhibit the growth of bacteria and similar microorganisms, generally transported by the lymphatic system. |
| belief noun | /bɪˈliːf/ | Mental acceptance of a claim as true. |
| successfully adverb | /səkˈsɛs.fə.li/ | In a successful manner; with success; without failing. |
| wage noun | /weɪd͡ʒ/ | An amount of money paid to a worker for a specified quantity of work, usually calculated on an hourly basis and expressed in an amount of money per hour. |
| ordinary adjective | /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/ | Having regular jurisdiction; now only used in certain phrases. |
| extraordinary adjective | /ɪksˈtɹɔːrdɪn(ə)ɹi/ | Out of the ordinary; exceptional; unusual. |
| progressive noun | /pɹəˈɡɹɛsɪv/ | One with liberal or progressive political beliefs. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| get out verb | To leave or escape. | |
| sort out verb | To clarify by reviewing mentally. | |
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. | |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. | |
| blow up verb | To explode or be destroyed by explosion. | |
| break through verb | To gain popularity. | |
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | we've been trying · michelle's been doing |
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | If our numbers were represented, there'd be · if I watched Fox News, I wouldn't vote |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · have loved · haven't been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is defeated · was accused · should not be infected |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 143 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, authoritarian /əˌθɑ.ɹəˈtɛɹ.i.ən/, gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, aftermath /ˈæf.tɚˌmæθ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: socialist /ˈsoʊ.ʃə.lɪst/, notion /ˈnoʊʃən/, nutrition /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ən/, socialism /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/, partnership /ˈpɑɹtnɚʃɪp/
- Long words — get the stress right: minority /maɪˈnɒɹ.ɪ.ti/, affordable /əˈfɔɹ.də.bəl/, humility /hjuːˈmɪlɪti/, antibiotic /ˌæn.taɪ.baɪˈɑ.tɪk/, successfully /səkˈsɛs.fə.li/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like extent, minority, citizen.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.