Shadowing Practice: The Real Reason We Left the Gold Standard - Learn English Speaking with Video
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The largest solid piece of gold ever discovered in recorded history, was found a mere 1.2 inches beneath the dirt in Australia.
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After pulling it out of the ground with crowbars.
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Seeing how much gold they had discovered, the two men immediately put it back in the ground.
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It was a Friday.
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Banks wouldn’t open for two full days.
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Getting paid wasn't the concern.
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It was being killed.
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After two long, restless nights, they unburied it, put it on a cart, snuck into town where the bank, not having a scale large enough to weigh it, broke it into pieces, determined it weighed 172 pounds and gave the men 9,534 pounds sterling.
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Within two days, the pieces had been melted down and cast into five gold bars.
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Within three weeks they were in the gold vault beneath the Bank of England in London.
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In this story are all the answers to why what is a relatively useless rock quickly became accepted as the pinnacle form of money, giving birth to the gold standard, and why it's widely misunderstood that leaving the gold standard wasn't a choice.
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It was an inevitability forced by the laws of nature.
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This video is sponsored by public.com.
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More on them later.
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One day, 34 U.S. dollars could be redeemed for one of these one ounce of pure gold.
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Just two days later, they could not.
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People were shocked, even today, many think it was a mistake that you should be able to walk into any bank, hand over cash, get gold back. That one day, one year or one century from now, the same amount of cash should get you the same amount of gold, because for millennia it had been the unquestioned, universally agreed upon form of money.
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It didn't need to be melted out of ore.
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You could just see it. Like the men who happened onto the world's largest gold nugget.
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Whoever the first human was to discover gold, that's how they found it.
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What is that shiny lump in the ground?
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Ooh, check out those shiny flakes in the river.
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Shiny, yellow, obvious, eye catching.
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Nothing else on the periodic table has what gold has.
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Silver dulls in a few weeks, gold never does.
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Leave it right here, come back in a thousand years.
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Blow off the dust and it will look just like this.
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Walking along the river What is that? Pick it up.
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You're not going to put it back down.
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By 1000 BCE, every continent was working with gold less than 1% of all gold had been mined.
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By 1500 that had grown to 5%, by 1900, 12%.
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Gold is spread so remarkably even over Earth's surface that during the period where it was easily found on or near the surface, everyone started using it.
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No one put it back down.
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Aztecs to the Egyptians.
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China. India. Africa.
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Everyone had discovered gold all on their own, and that, with a relatively small amount of heat, you could make stuff out of it.
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If you didn't like how that stuff turned out, throw it back in the furnace and make something new.
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All you needed was clay to build the furnace and the container, to put the gold in a couple of people to blow air on the fire.
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And after a few minutes out would come a puddle of gold, a puddle of gold that could be shaped or poured into molds that had all the impurities burned out, making it impossible to determine where it came from.
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Untraceable.
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Here's this thing that everyone agrees is money.
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You could go out and find it.
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Or exactly like the men who found that big gold nugget knew a thief could just steal it, melt it into a new shape, and voila!
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You can't prove I stole it.
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The world's biggest peacetime robbery ever.
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Exactly what happened when 6 thieves accidentally stumbled upon 6,840 gold bars in 1983.
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They're calling it the largest heist in history.
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Six armed robbers broke into a Brinks high security warehouse at London's Heathrow Airport just before dawn this morning.
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Police say the job took just 27 minutes.
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Robert, what are you seeing from above?
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It seems three tonnes of pure gold bullion were loaded into two stolen Ford Transit vans.
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One white, one blue.
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I'm hearing the gold wasn't the original target.
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That the thieves didn't know it was in the warehouse.
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I've been hearing the same thing.
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They didn't know the gold was there.
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They were only expecting to find a couple million in cash.
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But upon seeing the gold, they loaded it up.
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Drove on Bath Road to the M4 motorway, splitting the convoy into two.
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One van went to Kent.
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The other van went to South London.
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Within a month, two thirds of it had been moved to Bristol.
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The rest stayed in the original safe house in Kent.
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In the garages where they stored it, they melted it all down using propane fueled furnaces, with many of the furnace parts being common items that you'd be able to find on a construction site.
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But to make it fully untraceable, they mixed the melted gold with copper so bars could be passed off as scrap jewelry remnants.
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Over the next two years, the new gold bars smelted in Bristol were sold back into England in black market deals using London pubs and through an employee at the Sheffield Assay Office, one of just four official England organizations who test gold for purity.
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The ones in Kent were packed into car doors and moved through France and into Switzerland.
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This tale ends for us here, though we could go on because this became a ten year saga that included more than ten murders.
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Members of the gang getting caught and turning on each other, casinos, smuggling.
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It is a fascinating story, but to this day only a third of the gold has been recovered.
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Johnson Matthey Bankers, the official gold refiner of the Bank of England, which is Britain's central bank.
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They were the victims.
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It turned out to not be the government's gold they were moving this time.
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But what if it had been?
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What would have happened if we were still on the gold standard and the Bank of England's gold disappeared?
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Rewind real quick.
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Where the bank, not having a scale large enough to weigh it, broke it into pieces, determined it weighed 172 pounds, and gave the men 9,534 pounds sterling.
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That sounds like the bank bought the gold nugget, right?
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Here's what really happened.
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When those men took the 172 pound nugget to the bank, the local Australian bank gave cash out of their vault, shipped the gold back to England.
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Once in the Bank of England vault, the Bank of England printed paper bills worth 9,534 pounds sterling, and sent it back to the bank in Australia.
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Nobody actually bought the gold nugget.
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Or, to put it another way, if out in the world, there were 100 million pounds sterling before they found that gold nugget.
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Once it was in the Bank of England's vault, there were now 100,009,534 pound sterling out in the world.
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Gold was cash, and cash was gold.
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Legally, England could not make more money unless they acquired more gold and had to destroy money if they lost it.
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Like if those 6,840 gold bars had been stolen from the British government, 336 million pounds sterling would legally be required to be taken out of the world.
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You can't have more cash than gold.
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If gold disappears, it doesn't matter how, cash has to disappear.
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So you can immediately feel that tension, right?
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We've got to have gold.
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Cannot lose the gold.
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That is what it was like during those times.
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Each country's gold reserves were watched very, very carefully by everyone around the world.
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That's how you knew how much money a country had.
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If it was running out of money.
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The two scariest words the ruler of a country could hear were gold outflows.
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But why is the amount of money in circulation going down a bad thing?
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More money is bad, right?
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The more money printed, the less value the money you currently have is.
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So why would the amount of money going down be bad?
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The value of your money suddenly went up.
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Here's the deal.
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If cash is scarce, loans can't be made.
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If loans can't be made, that person can't build that hospital.
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Railroads can't find the capital.
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A new track if railroads can't lay new track, that little village can't become a town.
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If villages can't become towns, the economy can't grow.
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The world, and this is not new, runs on credit for millennia.
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Credit needs collateral, and banks must have reserve cash to offer loans.
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Less cash. Less collateral.
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Lower reserves.
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Even if the value of your money is going up, there's less stuff to buy, less innovation.
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You can't walk down the street to that hospital and pay with your more valuable money, because the hospital doesn't exist.
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Tying the amount of money available to how much gold has been pulled out of the ground is what we call a self-imposed constraint.
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But hear me out.
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More gold has been mined out of this 300 kilometer long band of earth than anywhere else in the world.
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Take a bulldozer, scoop out two tons of dirt, and one of these would come with it.
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20 years after it had been found digging just 50ft into the surface, it had produced 2% of all the gold humans had ever mined.
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Fast forward to today, and 22% of all the gold ever pulled out of the Earth by humans has come from Witwatersrand, the one area on Earth where a seven mile wide meteor had struck the ground so hard and so fast it dug up earth from miles beneath.
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At least twice as productive as almost every other gold mine on the planet.
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As this stretch of land goes, so goes gold production.
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What was 50ft from the surface in 1989 is now a two hour round trip, ten mile journey in a high speed elevator, winding all the way to the bottom two and a half miles beneath the surface, where now eight scoops of air must come up to get to one of these.
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What was almost pure profit to start Now most of this gold bar goes just to paying the cost of getting the dirt.
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It came from up and out of the bottom of the mine.
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And that is from the most important, most profitable gold mine on the planet.
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Today, 80% of all known gold reserves had been mined.
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The world started to and is getting closer to running out of new gold, all while the global population tripled between 1800 and 1950 and then doubled again by 2000.
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If the number of people on the planet wasn't going up.
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The gold standard would work well.
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The amount of gold per person would go up a little bit at a time.
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The amount of money available would be stable, but to keep the supply of gold rising at the same rate as the population was growing, amount of dirt that was being moved to produce just a little more gold went through the roof.
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500 years ago, about two tons of earth would give us an ounce of gold.
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Today, as an average across all mines, it's about 120.
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The final move off the gold standard was forced by the laws of nature, replaced by these little pieces of paper that many of us take for granted as useful and backed by the full faith and credit of our government.
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I mean, it says so right here.
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This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.
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But it also says something very similar on this one.
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It's implied on this one, and this one.
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But these statements, while they all say the same basic thing, are not all equal. Yes.
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You can trade them all for many things, but when it comes to trading one for another or taking it out of the country, the rules for these three, let's call it controlling.
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I'm sure you've seen these kind of counters at the airport.
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Take your cash from one country and turn it into the currency for another country.
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This is a very different experience elsewhere around the world, particularly in the countries where gold is flowing to the most right now India, Russia, Turkey and China.
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If I go in here, I can buy as many Indian rupees with my US dollars as I want, as much as they have.
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There is no limit in India, Turkey, China, Russia and a variety of other countries, you are not freely allowed to trade the currency for other currencies, particularly the US dollar. In India, you can only acquire 250,000 USD.
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China is 25,000.
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Turkey is 5,000.
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Russia it’s zero.
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And actually taking that money out of the country is a whole other process that requires forms, and often a refusal from the government to allow it.
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Now imagine for a moment that you have a briefcase and it's full of Russian rubles stuffed to the brim.
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You’re feeling good.
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Let's go buy some stuff.
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Maybe some caviar and vodka.
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But tomorrow the Russian government says you can do whatever you want with that.
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Except trade those rubles for U.S.
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dollars. Think almost everyone would be like.
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But why? Russian troops on the move in Ukraine, with blasts heard in multiple cities, including Kyiv.
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Oh that's why.
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You have that same briefcase full of yuan.
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Chinese government says you can't buy dollars.
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But why? A prolonged housing crisis in China.
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Come on. when things go bad or even just become uncertain.
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It is a universal human trait that we will protect what we have.
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You do not know how bad this is going to get.
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Dump the local currency for something more secure. Today, and for the foreseeable future, that is the US dollar, but also the Euro to a degree British pound and Swiss franc.
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By limiting how much of those you can buy what are called capital controls.
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Governments can prevent money from flooding out of the country in times of stress or panic, Which is the primary reason why gold is in such high demand in those four countries.
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China, India and Turkey are importing huge amounts of gold, while Russia is not allowing any of the gold it mines, which is a lot, to leave the country.
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It's called a safe haven asset for a reason.
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Everyone looks at it like that, but it's not nearly of the same importance as it is to the people in places who cannot do whatever they want with their money, especially when there are fewer places to invest it within those countries.
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Meager stock markets, housing crashes, low interest rates on saving accounts to people with money to spare.
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The siren song of moving money abroad is loud and gets louder during times of panic.
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But you can still buy gold.
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Legal market or the black market. A quarter of gold brought into China and India is smuggled.
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You can wear it.
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Gold rings, necklaces.
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What? It's not money to me.
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It's just jewelry.
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The world has permanently moved off the gold standard.
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But when push comes to shove in economies that are shakier than others, gold is and will be for the foreseeable future, the standard.
About This Lesson
In this lesson, you will explore the fascinating history of gold and its transformation into a fundamental form of currency. By engaging with the video's transcript, you'll practice listening comprehension and speaking skills through effective shadowing techniques. This immersive practice will help you improve your fluency, pronunciation, and overall confidence in English speaking, making it particularly beneficial for those preparing for IELTS speaking practice or similar assessments.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Gold Standard: A monetary system where a country's currency or paper money has a value directly linked to gold.
- Nugget: A small lump, piece, or mass of gold.
- Pinnacle: The highest point; used here to describe gold as the highest form of money.
- Redemption: The act of exchanging currency for physical gold or another item of value.
- Evocative: Bringing strong images, memories, or feelings to mind; relevant to the shiny nature of gold.
- Peacetime Robbery: A crime committed during a time of peace, highlighting the contrast to warfare-related thefts.
- Melt Down: The process of heating metal until it becomes liquid to reshape it.
- Untraceable: Impossible to trace back to its original form or owner.
Practice Tips
To maximize your learning from this transcript and enhance your English speaking practice, consider the following shadowing tips:
- Match the Speed: Pay close attention to the pace of the speaker in the video. The natural rhythm can greatly influence your shadow speech technique. Start by repeating sentences at the same speed, then gradually increase your fluency.
- Emphasize Key Phrases: Focus particularly on the robust vocabulary introduced, such as gold standard and nugget. Try to articulate these terms clearly to integrate them into your everyday vocabulary.
- Record Yourself: While shadowing, record your voice and listen back to identify areas for improvement in pronunciation and intonation. This exercise will help you feel confident in english speaking practice.
- Contextual Understanding: As you practice, think about the context surrounding each phrase. Understanding the background of phrases will help you use them more effectively in different conversations.
By focusing on shadowspeak techniques, you’ll not only enhance your speaking skills but also engage with compelling content, making your learning experience both informative and enjoyable.
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.