Shadowing Practice: The World's Most Beautiful Bridge Just Opened - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Taiwan has a new bridge.
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And it's a hit.
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It does all the things a bridge should do, but it also goes a bit further, because unlike most other bridges, this one is beautiful.
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With its minimal profile and swooping lines, the Dianjiang Bridge leaps over the Tamsui estuary in fact it
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could even become a new national symbol alongside the nearby taipei 101
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despite that there were some who doubted this day would ever come
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including the guy who built it who once wrote it off as impossible
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it may look effortless but building it was anything
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but straightforward this may be one the most challenging construction projects Taiwan has ever undertaken.
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So a couple of questions, why bother and how did they manage to make the impossible a reality?
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Okay so engineering is all about solving problems, what is the problem here?
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This is Taiwan, this is its capital Taipei and this is the mouth of the Tamsui River.
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On one side is Bali, an industrial zone housing one of the busiest container terminals in the whole of Taiwan.
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On the other is Tamsui, historic district, beloved beauty spot, and rapidly growing commuter town whose population has doubled in less than 30 years.
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Now, currently, to get from here to here, you need to go 6km this way, over this bridge, and back down here.
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Hardly ideal.
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But it gets worse.
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That bottleneck is shared by everyone from the port, the commuter town,
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and the planned new city of 300 ,000 people that Taiwan has been trying to build nearby for more than 30 years.
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But we're going to come back to that.
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This one kilometre section is one of the most congested in the city.
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On a bad day, and there are a lot of bad days, it can take over half an hour to drive through it.
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It's terrible for commuters, but it's also taking its toll on the venerable Guangdo Bridge,
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which was built in 1983 and never designed to cope with this much traffic.
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So the solution was obvious.
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Build a new bridge… here.
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Although perhaps it's not that obvious.
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First off, this gap is just under a kilometre wide, which although not record -breaking, is still a considerable distance for a bridge to span.
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The land on either side is soft and low -lying, and because the estuary opens directly onto the Taiwan Strait, it's exposed to enormous winds,
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not least in the form of typhoons that barrel across Taiwan every year.
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And as if all of that wasn't enough, it's also an active shipping lane, so any bridge deck would have to sit high enough for vessels to pass underneath.
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Okay, so tough, but nothing that an experienced team of civil engineers couldn't handle.
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Except there's one more thing.
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This is the mouth of the Tamsui River at sunset, and so is this, and this, and this.
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In fact, the estuary is one of the most photographed beauty spots in all of Taiwan.
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It faces west, out over the Taiwan Strait, perfectly framing the setting sun and creating one of Taiwan's true natural wonders.
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So much so that it was once considered one of the island's 8 views.
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That's a big deal, because across East Asia the number 8 is considered lucky or harmonious,
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and the idea of a place having 8 scenic views is part of a long tradition that carries a lot of prestige.
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For centuries, artists and poets have immortalised locations like this in the Chinese -speaking world and beyond.
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In other words, the decision to build a bridge across one of the most famous landscapes in Taiwan is not one that gets taken lightly.
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And it makes sense that if you have to build something there, then it's really got to do justice to its location.
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And so another requirement was placed on the bridge, one that couldn't be addressed through the cold hard logic of engineering.
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It would have to be beautiful.
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So the highway bureau did something unusual.
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They hired an architect.
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Zaha Hadid Architects, now known as ZHA, is responsible for some of the most iconic and complex buildings of the last 30 years.
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And now, those same boundary -pushing practices were about to be applied to a bridge.
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There are many teams submitted for the proposal.
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We are the only competitor.
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The team actually proposed one tower, one single mast.
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And the reason why we do that, very importantly, is because we analyze the sunset properly.
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We understand how we preserve this nature scene.
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And also, we don't want to intervene the wetland at the south side, because if you build a second mast at the south, you're going to destroy the wetland.
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We make the whole thing look very simple and elegant.
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First and foremost, the bridge had to appear as minimal as possible.
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We do the cable state bridge because we choose this bridge type because it's very, very transparent when you stay in the distance.
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The cable itself also dissolves into the sky.
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If we do the suspension bridge, you have this very, very thick and strong cable crossing to the air.
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Of course, you will see the gesture, but we feel like we don't want to see that.
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We want that the cable dissolve the structure itself.
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A single tower offset towards the eastern bank so it wouldn't interrupt the sunset views.
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A deck so thin and light it would seem to hover above the water rather than sit on it.
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And cables fanning down from the tower like the fingers of a dancer mid -performance.
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We feel like the bridge itself is such an important piece of infrastructure.
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Lots of cars driving by every day.
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We want to create very dynamic driving experiences.
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And coincidentally, there's a very important local dance group, contemporary dance group also based in Damsui.
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So that's why when we visited the location
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and then we understand how a very interesting link between the body's movement and also the whole design,
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we kind of try to transform this kind of very dynamic body gesture into the shape of the tower.
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The rhythm of the bridge, the way the tower rises,
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curves and splits, the way the deck gently undulates was all intended to echo the movement of dancers on a stage.
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Even the street lighting was designed around this concept.
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Instead of uniform lampposts marching across the deck, the lights raise and fall in a wave as if choreographed.
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Now all that sounds great, but there's just one thing.
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Architects don't usually design bridges.
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Unlike a museum or a skyscraper, bridges tend to be functional structures that civil engineers are more than capable of designing themselves, thank you very much.
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Most of the bridge, most of the infrastructure, you actually just need to engineer, make sure everything connects, nothing falls apart, and it works.
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But the Danjiang Bridge wasn't just meant to be another piece of infrastructure.
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This was intended to be a landmark, and with that came an allowance for architectural flair.
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The trouble was that flair created a whole new kind of complexity when it came to actually building the thing.
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It's a lot of media and the people were saying, oh, is it Zaha project?
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This is too simple.
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Where's the Zaha curve?
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It's too simple.
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Is it Zaha, the architect?
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But when a contractor step in and they start, oh, when we're looking for the value engineer, and they were looking for engineer, start looking for the design.
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It was like, oh my God, this is too difficult.
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Every sweeping curve and tapering surface had to be justified, and that was one of the big challenges this project had to grapple with.
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Take that tower.
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It doesn't just go straight up.
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It starts as two columns which meet just above the bridge deck, where it curves outward and then becomes convex as it rises,
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splitting into a gentle Y -shape near the top.
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A standard engineer's approach would have been to build a giant concrete column.
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Not because engineers lack imagination, but because it's the most efficient and cost -effective way of delivering the design.
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And that's largely because of the way it's built.
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If you've ever walked past a construction site in a big city, you'll no doubt have seen these huge concrete towers that form the basis of most high -rise buildings.
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They're built using something called slip -forming.
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Concrete is poured into a mould, the concrete sets, the mould is jacked up, and the process is repeated until you have your tower.
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It works best when you're building a really tall, simple shape like a cuboid or a cylinder.
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The mast of the Danjang Bridge is tall, but not exactly simple.
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So how do you build that for the same price as a solid column?
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Clearly what they couldn't do was build a new mould for each section.
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Instead, they turned to Slipform Specialist's Peri to create an ingenious solution.
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Together, they developed a mould made up of sections that could be repositioned, extended or retied as the structure rose.
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As the tower grew, the mould changed shape to accommodate the shifting geometry.
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Problem solved.
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Except the tower was the tip of the iceberg, and what nearly sunk this project from the start wasn't the design on the drawing board.
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but rather the drawing board itself.
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Of course, the procurement in Taiwan, the infrastructure procurement, still quite a traditional way.
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Unfortunately, the tender still going to 2D.
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These people are going to take the 2D drawing and then rebuild the whole project themselves, and which we will have concern about the accuracy.
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The project was put out to tender eight times.
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On the first seven tries, no contractor was willing to step in.
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In fact, Li Yongqing of Kangsing Engineering, one of the firm's approach to build it, described the project as mission impossible.
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The problem was the sheer complexity.
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Taiwan still requires projects like this to be based on drawings, 2D documents showing the project in plan, elevation and cross -section.
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But every element of the Danjang Bridge was geometrically unique.
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The twisting tower, the deck segments, each subtly different from the last.
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The connections between components had tolerances measured in millimetres across structures that were hundreds of metres long.
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Looking at the drawings, the contractors who were bidding for the project just couldn't get their head around how the structure was supposed to come together.
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And that's when one piece of software came to the rescue.
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At the beginning of the design stage, we feel like this is absolutely a perfect project to use Cotilla,
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because they can handle a complex geometry and also can handle lots of different components.
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TEM migrate from the V5 to V6, which is a very good thing to go to the cloud.
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So that's why we believe if we work here in London and people in Germany and Taiwan, actually we can use their cloud platform.
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Everything is going through the cloud in 3D, which means that we have very, very high precision work.
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When the German engineer actually also look into the model, everything and do their drawing, and we can check out the discrepancies immediately,
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and we can also exam to see everything can match the drawing or drawing can also can match the 3D model.
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So that was quite a good process.
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What Katia allowed the design team to do was build a complete, full -scale digital twin of the entire bridge,
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a one -to -one representation of every single component.
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Each cable was created with its precise geometry showing how it would hang
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and interact with the forces loaded onto the wider structure.
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Because the bridge was modelled this way, the entire thing could be taken apart digitally as an assembly.
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It allowed engineers to fly through it, take a section at any point, or check whether components clashed with each other all before a single piece of steel had been fabricated.
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For the Danjiang Bridge, where the geometry was changing in three dimensions simultaneously,
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that level of functionality and detail was quite literally the difference between this bridge being buildable and not even happening.
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Gamma also sees the value, so that's why they think this is quite a good way to present, because for the Gamma leader, they don't know how to model it,
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but we can explore the 3D XML that can spin around in their phone
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and see the stuff and that we can do the quantification
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and very precisely and that they can go to the costing
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and and quite quickly
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so that's why this whole KTIA operation is really kind of changing the nature about of a way of working
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and this also not just to the designer
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and also to the contractor physical drawings were still produced in line with Taiwanese regulations
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but it was by adopting a tear
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that this project finally became properly understood finally on the seventh
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tender a contractor was found to take it on none other
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than lee yung ching of consing engineering i grew up in taiwan
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and um to really build something in your home turf actually
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it actually gives you quite a different feeling you know one
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of the most comfort moments actually seeing your project being used every day by so many people.
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You see lots of happy faces, and you see family and people using it.
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And I think that as a designer, as an architect, I think this moment is highly rewarding.
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On the 12th of May, 2026, after seven years of construction, the Danjiang Bridge opened.
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Road users in this part of Taiwan are feeling the benefits immediately.
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But of course, course, that was only ever half the journey.
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The view of the river has changed permanently and you could even say for the better, thanks to engineer and architect.
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This bridge is holding up both sides of the bargain.
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This video was sponsored by Katia, you can learn more about that at the link below.
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Don't forget that whenever you guys take the time to go and check out one of our video sponsors, it massively helps us out here at the channel, so please do take the time to go and check out Katia,
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we would really appreciate it.
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And as always guys, if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction, make sure you're subscribed to The B1M.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “The World's Most Beautiful Bridge Just Opened”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: bridge, taiwan, project, tower, build. This video has 165 sentences and 2412 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:14. The speaker talks at a natural 158 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 83% 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
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| mould noun | /məʊld/ | Commonwealth standard spelling of mold. |
| contractor noun | /ˈkɒnˌtɹæk.tə(ɹ)/ | A person or company that builds or improves buildings or structures. |
| geometry noun | /d͡ʒiˈɑ.mə.tɹi/ | The branch of mathematics dealing with spatial relationships. |
| architect noun | /ˈɑɹ.kɪˌtɛkt/ | A professional who designs buildings or other structures, or who prepares plans and superintends construction. |
| curve noun | /kɚv/ | A bend, such as in a road. |
| commuter noun | /kəˈmjuːtɚ/ | One who commutes (etymology 1). |
| estuary noun | /ˈɛst͡ʃuˌɛɹi/ | A coastal water body where ocean tides and river water merge, resulting in a brackish water zone. |
| mast noun | /mɑːst/ | A tall, slim post or tower, usually tapering upward, used to support, for example, sails or observation platforms on a ship, the main rotor of a helicopter… |
| sunset noun | /ˈsʌnˌsɛt/ | The moment each evening when the sun disappears below the western horizon. |
| tender adjective | /ˈtɛn.dɚ/ | Sensitive or painful to the touch. |
| dissolve verb | /dɪˈzɑlv/ | To terminate a union of multiple members actively, as by disbanding. |
| kilometre noun | /kɪˈlɑmɪtəɹ/ | An SI unit of length equal to 10³ metres. Symbol: km |
| wetland noun | Land that is covered mostly with water, with occasional marshy and soggy areas. | |
| flair noun | /flɛɚ̯/ | A natural or innate talent or aptitude. |
| procurement noun | /pɹəˈkjʊəɹ.mənt/ | The purchasing department of a company. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| back down verb | To take a less aggressive position in a conflict than one previously had, or has planned to have. | |
| come together verb | /ˈkʌm tʊˈɡɛðɚ/ | To assemble; to congregate; to combine. |
| fall apart verb | To disintegrate, to break into pieces. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| hold up verb | To wait or delay. | |
| take apart verb | To dismantle something into its component pieces. | |
| take over verb | To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is shared · was built · is considered |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has doubled · have immortalised · you've ever walked |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 22 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, couldn't, wasn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: quantification /ˌkwɒn.tɪˌfɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/, elevation /ˌɛlɪˈveɪʃn̩/, clash /ˈklæʃ/, sheer /ʃɪɚ/, precision /pɹɪˈsɪʒ.ən/
- Long words — get the stress right: geometry /d͡ʒiˈɑ.mə.tɹi/, estuary /ˈɛst͡ʃuˌɛɹi/, kilometre /kɪˈlɑmɪtəɹ/, complexity /kəmˈplɛk.sɪ.ti/, digitally /ˈdɪd͡ʒɪtəli/
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 mould, contractor, geometry.
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.