Shadowing Practice: The biggest peach myth in America - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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This is a peach.
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Soft, fuzzy, sweet, and oh -so -delicious.
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When you get a really good peach, it's a tremendous kind of sensory experience.
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The U .S produces 600 ,000 tons of this stone fruit each year, and it's synonymous with one place, Georgia.
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That's one of those Georgia peaches.
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Georgia peaches.
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Those are considered the best.
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In your outfit, you look like a little Georgia peach.
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It's on license plates and road signs and at the end of almost every film you've ever watched.
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There's even an entire county named after it.
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But here's the thing.
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Despite its nickname, Georgia doesn't even produce the most peaches in the U .S.
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So there's an act of myth -making it's really not a southern fruit in particular.
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So how did Georgia become the peach state?
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A peach is what's called a stone fruit, meaning there's a hard pit at the center.
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There are clingstones, which cling tightly to the pit, and freestones, which pull away cleanly.
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They could be yellow or white, fuzzy or smooth.
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Those are nectarines, same fruit, just no fuzz.
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And like most crops grown in the U .S., peaches came from somewhere else.
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The earliest evidence we have for peach usage dates back to China around 7 ,000 years ago.
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They came to Europe via the Silk Road, and so they acquired the scientific name Prunus persica because it was assumed they originally came from Persia.
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From there, Spanish explorers carried peach bits across the Atlantic in the 1500s and planted them across Florida, where Native Americans used them for food and medicine and spread them up the coast.
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So by the time English colonists arrived in Virginia in the early 1600s, peaches were abundant.
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But they weren't glamorous.
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Most peach usage seems to have been for foraging hogs and making cider and brandy.
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It tastes like peach brandy to me.
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No one was calling it a state symbol.
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It would take a war, a broken economy, and a new generation of horticulturalists to turn
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that idea into an industry when the civil war ended george's economy was shattered
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because cotton had built the old south there's a really strong push among a lot of newspaper men
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and sort of upper class folks in the south to develop
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a new reputation like a new face for the south there was also in georgia really active horticultural society
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so there's a lot of language like queen peach is dethroning king cotton to sort of say georgia is doing something different.
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We're making a new kind of agricultural civilization.
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Peaches were already growing in Georgia, but getting them to market was the issue.
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They bruise easily and spoil fast, so if Georgia was going to build a new identity around this fruit, it needed a peach that could travel.
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Enter Samuel Rumpf.
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In Georgia, the most important commercial peach variety was developed.
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It was called the Alberta by Samuel Henry Rumpf, done in Marshallville.
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Rumpf likely crossed Chinese cling with a yellow freestone known as early Crawford.
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However, he was never able to provide a clear genealogy for the Alberta.
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He named it after his wife.
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That was also kind of an important move for, you know, a Southern gentleman.
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And at the same time Rumpf was experimenting in his orchards, something else was changing.
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The development of refrigerated transport, that was a key part of getting the commercial industry going in the South.
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Georgia really is kind of the first peach growing region that's
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shipping at a considerable distance to some of the big marketplaces of the north.
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There were at one time more Alberta peaches grown than any other fruit variety.
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By the early 1900s, Georgia was known for its peaches.
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Labels on crates shipped north featured the word Georgia front and center.
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Macon, Georgia hosts a big peach carnival in the 1890s.
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That culminates in the 1920s in Peach County.
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Peaches were becoming something people in Georgia rallied around.
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There were pies and cobblers and crisps.
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Even during During World War I, peach pits were burnt down and packed into the filters of gas masks.
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But despite their many uses, peaches never really did overtake cotton.
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Peaches were never more important than cotton economically, as far as I can tell.
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Peaches fit kind of hand in glove with the cotton economy, especially with regard to labor.
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But the story stuck.
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More than a century after the Alberta peach was introduced, Georgia made it official.
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In 1995, the peach became the state fruit.
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But today, George's reputation is bigger than its harvest.
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no antibiotics, and no growth hormones.
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So when you're on your next grocery run, consider checking out Stonyfield Organic Yogurt.
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It's also important to note that Stonyfield Organic didn't dictate the content of the story, but their support made this tasty reporting possible.
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now back to peaches south carolina and california have both overtaken peaches
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and and today california produces by far the most peaches in the country
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but even they're dwarfed by china china produces way more in
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peaches than anybody else in the world by the 1920s nearly
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150 000 acres of peaches were planted across the state
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but by 2017 georgia just had nearly 12 000 acres of peaches left in georgia peaches
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and the people growing them look different today the mostly black labor forest
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that powered these early orchards declined during the great migration
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and modern orchards rely heavily on immigrant labor mainly through h2a guest worker programs
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and labor isn't the only challenge peaches needed a certain amount
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of chill hours every winter time below 45 degrees to reset
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and bloom properly in the spring too much cold and there's risk
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if peach trees start to bloom
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and then there's a late freeze you can lose most of
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your crop in 2023 some georgia growers reported losing more than 90 % of their peaches.
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The season was described as disastrous.
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But despite all this, Georgia is still the peach state.
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At that moment when the South was really looking for this sort of new reputation, a new face, peaches were there.
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They were emerging as a major crop.
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I think there's been a continuation of a maintenance of the myth.
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Because it turned peaches into a story.
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And that lasts longer than any crop ever could.
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Where we're doing really cool stuff, like chats with our reporters, and where Dolly just did a taste test of all the different bananas she found in her last video.
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It's so important to support independent journalism.
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Your membership allows us to keep making videos like this, and allows us to have fun and research really cool, weird stories, but also really dig into the investigative reporting.
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And if it doesn't make financial sense for you to support us today, you can still follow us on Patreon for free, and stay up to date with all of the great reporting going on at Vox.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “The biggest peach myth in America”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: peaches, georgia, peach, fruit, cotton. This video has 91 sentences and 1149 words to shadow. The speech runs for 6:47. The speaker talks at a natural 169 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 76% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| peach noun | /ˈpiːt͡ʃ/ | Any tree of species Prunus persica, native to China and now widely cultivated throughout temperate regions, having pink flowers and edible fruit. |
| cotton noun | /ˈkɑt.n̩/ | A soft, fibrous, usually white substance consisting of fine hairs, especially the substance around the seeds of a plant of genus Gossypium. |
| crop noun | /kɹɑp/ | A plant, grown for it, or its fruits or seeds, to be harvested as food, livestock fodder, or fuel or for any other economic purpose. |
| reputation noun | /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/ | What somebody or something is known for. |
| orchard noun | /ˈɔɹ.t͡ʃɚd/ | A garden or an area of land for the cultivation of fruit or nut trees. |
| usage noun | /ˈjuːsɪd͡ʒ/ | A custom or established practice. |
| myth noun | /mɪθ/ | A traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience, and in which often the forces of nature and of the soul are… |
| acre noun | /ˈeɪ.kɚ/ | An English unit of land area (symbol: a. or ac.) originally denoting a day's ploughing for a yoke of oxen, now standardized as 4,840 square yards or 4,046.86… |
| bloom noun | /blum/ | A blossom; the flower of a plant; an expanded bud. |
| fuzzy adjective | /ˈfʌzi/ | Covered with fuzz or a large number of tiny loose fibres like a carpet or many stuffed animals. |
| brandy noun | /ˈbɹændi/ | An alcoholic liquor distilled from wine or fermented fruit juice. |
| membership noun | The state of being a member of a group or organization. | |
| label noun | /ˈleɪ.bəl/ | A small ticket or sign giving information about something to which it is attached or intended to be attached. |
| worker noun | /ˈwɝ.kɚ/ | One who works: a person who performs labor for a living; traditionally, especially, manual labor. |
| decline verb | /dɪˈklaɪn/ | To move downwards, to fall, to drop. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). |
| pull away verb | To move ahead. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 10 contractions and reduced forms, such as doesn't, we're, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: myth /mɪθ/, smooth /smuːð/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, delicious /dɪˈlɪ.ʃəs/, migration /maɪˈɡɹeɪʃ(ə)n/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, continuation /kənˌtɪnjʊˈeɪʃ(ə)n/
- Long words — get the stress right: reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, considerable /kənˈsɪdəɹəbl̩/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, economically /ˌiː.kəˈnɒm.ɪ.kli/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like peach, cotton, crop.
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.