Shadowing Practice: What’s really happening in the ocean’s “dark zones” - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Most of our world is hidden in darkness.
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This is the deep sea, which is the vast majority of our planet.
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And even here on Google Earth, we're looking at digitally modeled shadings of the ocean floor, not pictures of the surface like we have on land.
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And forever I thought that's because there wasn't much to look at out here.
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Just an endless blue expanse.
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Hard to travel to, not much going on.
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But a few months ago my colleague Kristoff told me that there's something happening out here.
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Something worth looking at.
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I have a story that I think we could do together
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that I think takes advantage of the things in reporting
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that you're good at and the things in reporting that I'm good at.
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Christoph's thing is diving into mysteries using internet tools and open source intelligence.
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My thing is mapping.
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What happens next is a dedicated effort to peek behind the curtain of this pixelated,
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fuzzy blueness to see what happens on the high seas when seemingly no one is looking.
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But lately, someone has been looking contact to say we saw you, okay my wife, phone number.
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The players who are out there who are not transmitting and those are often some of the bad actors, you know, because they've gone dark for a reason.
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I think there's a real power in just making this data visible, making it accessible so that anyone can see it.
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So there is no hiding this activity because it's all visible now.
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Now we can put it all together on a map to shine a light on this dark space.
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To reveal tens of thousands of vessels that right now are on the high seas, hiding from view.
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Kristoff and I want to find out what they're up to.
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There's a lot going on down there that they're not showing us.
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So how do we track ships?
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I've been doing a bit of reading on this already
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and the main system of keeping tracks of where ships are at any point in time is called the automatic identification system.
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AIS, it's the most generic name possible.
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At a basic level allows any vessel to see the traffic that's happening around it and to be seen by that traffic.
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And when you look at like a map of what all of them look like, you know, air traffic control for the entire ocean.
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Geez, wow, this is crazy.
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It's a stunning amount of detail in real time that's publicly available.
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I guess we're starting out with this reality
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that like we have a pretty good set of eyes on the high seas
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because every one of these ships has its GPS turned on all the time by law.
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Right.
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So we have a pretty solid way of seeing what's going on out there.
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It's like pretty solid, but if you look at what an AIS transponder actually looks like, you can kind of see where the problem is.
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Because essentially like these things are required to have on legally, but in practice the ship's master can just press that button.
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They can turn it off and the ship effectively disappears from that map.
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They disappear from public view and all of a sudden they're not tracked and they can get away with something fishy, for lack of a better word.
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Every time a ship does this, it's called going dark.
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Everything that they do in that time is called dark activity.
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So you'll hear a lot of these terms of like going dark, dark vessels, dark activity.
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There's also this whole sector of like
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if you are going through an area with really intense piracy You might want to turn it off
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and you're doing it at that point like for your own safety Yeah, because like real-world pirates if you have an AIS receiver
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It's almost like a treasure map of like where ships are
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around you You can literally see like where the where the cargo ships around me in real time right now
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So that's allowed to like flip the switch press the button turn it off
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if you are are like fearing for your safety.
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Yeah.
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The caveat is that if they do that, they do have to put together a report after the fact.
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And you have to put in your ship log book.
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You have to kind of explain why it happened.
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So like here, for example, this is a ship that turned its AIS transponder off right here.
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Because it was warned about pirate activity close to Oman.
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We only know this because of this big safety report that it wound up having to put together.
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What's crazy is like because it's all public, we can see this happening.
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Like they're doing this to be kind of under the cover of darkness, but if we just look at historical AIS records, we can see those disappearances happening.
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December 2012, this is a Spanish fishing vessel that's approaching Western Africa.
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Boom, it disappears.
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July 2015, there's an Australian fishing ship doing the same thing around a marine reserve.
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Disappears.
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October 2014, there is this Panamanian fishing vessel that approaches the Galapagos and then boom, disappears.
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And these are the people we're after.
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Like this is what we want to understand is what do they do when they press that button and go dark?
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Right.
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The fact that you can see their last location and then where they pick up again is a context clue.
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It's a clue for sure.
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And there's so much data available.
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Like this is what I want to start to go down the rabbit hole on is like aggregating all this data,
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looking for the trends and trying to understand what we can learn about what happens when these ships go dark.
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So we're talking a lot about shadowy activity happening in the dead of night.
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The graph of the total number of requests that they've sent out.
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The ones that are in progress, 222.
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Let's get back to the ocean.
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After looking through all this data, step one is to start filtering things down.
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And I started to filter down by fishing, just fishing vessels.
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Let's just start there.
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That's a lot of vessels, but it's not every vessel that is being tracked.
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In doing that, you can start to see, it's still a big thing, but you can start to see where these ships spend their time.
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It's fishing vessels, probably where there's lots of fish.
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And I'm also putting on this map EEZs, which is a reminder that every country has ocean borders in
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which they are allowed to do economic things and no one else is allowed to.
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When you look at all of this AIS data aggregated across the whole world, you start to see some bright spots.
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Specifically here, this is one I started to focus on quite a bit.
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It is this water off of the coast of Ecuador surrounding this archipelago called the Galapagos Islands,
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like where Charles Darwin invented evolution.
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Invented it.
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Didn't exist before, but he figured it out for us.
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He invented it.
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Made it up right there.
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Now this is within Ecuador's exclusive economic zone.
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They have exclusive rights to this water.
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And it is also a protected marine area, but it's also teeming with valuable seafood sharks,
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jumbo flying Swiss, skipjack tuna.
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This is protected area.
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And so you can see that a lot of this fishing activity happens right outside of these EEZs in international water.
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And remember, I'm trying to figure out what people do when they go dark, when they press this button, turn off their transponders, like what are they up to?
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The next clue comes when you do this.
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Flags.
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So this is all Chinese flagged ships.
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right outside of the EEZ of the Galapagos Island, which belongs to Ecuador.
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And what we are looking at here is something monumental.
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The biggest, most centralized, most powerful fishing effort in human history.
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So, seeing this, I'm starting to get tired of just pure data and shading.
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I wanted to see what does this look like in real life.
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Yeah.
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Whoa.
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Yeah, it's kind of creepy, right?
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So those are all ships that have their lights on.
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Those are all ships.
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In the middle of the night.
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It's almost like a city skyline of like a futuristic water city.
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It's crazy.
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Like we are in the middle of the ocean.
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Hey, before we continue, I just want to let you all know that we are very close to launching New Press, which is something I've been working on for like over a year and we're getting super close.
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It's a place where we are doing a new kind of journalism, not just making stuff for all of you, but inviting you in to help us make it.
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Our current media landscape is noisy and drowning in headlines without context.
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This isn't working and we want to make something different.
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New Press is here to be the next evolution in our journalism.
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And for those who you join early, you'll actually get in on a reproduction of one of my favorite maps.
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A little gift from me and the team.
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If this is at all interesting to you, you can get on the waitlist at NewPress.com.
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Now back to the story.
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So here's some quick context.
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By the 1980s, China had basically depleted the fish in the waters near its coast.
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Huge population, rapid industrialization, they were eating a lot of fish and as they built up their economy, they just got aggressive.
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The local fish stock started to disappear.
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So the Chinese government stepped in.
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They said, okay, let's build a bigger fleet, one that can go way beyond our waters.
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And they did.
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They subsidized the building of these massive ships capable of sailing deep into international waters, even halfway around the world.
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And today that fleet is just enormous.
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A recent analysis estimates that China has about 57,000 industrial fishing vessels
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and that they account for roughly 44% of all fishing activity on Earth.
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44%.
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Dumbing number.
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Isn't that insane?
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That's half of all fishing is this fleet.
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Right.
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So they just put a ton of money towards like building boats
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that are capable of going really far out at sea
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and building this whole infrastructure to bring all that back to China to be processed.
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But I'm imagining it is not all winds up in China.
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It goes across the world.
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Exactly, it's a part of a massive seafood industry.
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But yeah, it is the Chinese government subsidizing these companies, helping them not just with subsidies but also with security.
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Sometimes the Chinese government will send security, intelligence ships will go with them.
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It is a part of the state effort to project power, and it also has resulted in the ability to fish aggressively
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anywhere on Earth intelligent ships in the sense of like keeping the fishing vessels safe
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or making sure they don't get in trouble when they push the rules?
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Fill in the blanks with whatever you suspect.
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We don't exactly know what they're up to but just know this is a geopolitical act.
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I mean it feels like Belt and Road but like on the sea.
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Yep, that's exactly it's a big economic push that results in a lot of fishing all around the world.
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There's so many red dots that they have turned white.
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Yes.
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Yes.
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Okay, so I mean, is this illegal, what they're doing?
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To be sending these ships all the way across the world, right next to other countries, is any of that illegal?
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No, actually not.
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It's concerning because they are aggressively fishing, but per this AIS data, which shows that they don't cross the line,
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they are not doing anything illegal from this view.
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So the thing is, all of these are just AIS pings, which means this doesn't account for the fact that they can turn AIS off at any point in time.
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Exactly.
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So this is just the publicly tracked available data.
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The fact that they can go dark is not pictured in this at all.
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Absolutely.
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This is not the full picture.
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Like the AIS data is really helpful for me to see Chinese phishing efforts around the world
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and to focus in on a hotspot where they're clearly doing a lot.
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But I now want to see what's happening actually on the ground here.
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And for that, I need someone who's actually been out here.
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My name is Ian Urbina.
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I'm a journalist.
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I spent 17 years at the New York Times and then created the Allocean Project.
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Every year, you know, two to three hundred squid vessels traverse the globe and sort of hover in very specific squid fisheries.
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So the goal was to get out into that patch, into that fishery.
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And if possible, get on board the Chinese vessels, where they are, who they use as workers, how long they're staying at sea, what sort of crimes are they involved in, what are the conditions on the boats.
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So, I think I have an understanding as to why it's so hard to regulate the deep sea, like way out in the high waters.
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It's so far away from everything.
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To get out onto the high seas, you typically have to be in a pretty large vessel because the waters are pretty rough.
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These are long trips.
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Like getting out there, enforcing anything is just logistically difficult.
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And part of it is like it's logistically difficult for like fishing vessels to get out there, for anyone to be out there for a long time.
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Like this hasn't been a huge problem because no one's been able to actually be out there in a huge way.
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But that's changing.
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As fishing companies get more sophisticated, get more money, get more consolidated,
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they can afford to send out like big operations that can be out there for a really long time.
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And the leader of all of this is China.
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The scope and scale of Chinese fishing is unbelievable.
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It's not just the number of vessels, it's the way that they do it.
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They bring out all of these vessels and then they have these motherships, the huge reefers that are big refrigerated vessels.
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And the way that it works is that the smaller fishing boats are able to go out, fish, and come back to the mothership, drop off all their stuff,
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get refueled, get resupplied, and then just go out.
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So they don't have to dock at any point, they don't have to go back to shore?
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They never have to go back to China.
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Yeah.
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They can be out there kind of indefinitely because that reefer eventually will fish, fish, fish, and then it will go back to China
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while the fishing vessels will stay out there and then a new mothership will arrive.
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Before we look into satellite stuff, I'm curious what you've been finding, but The first thing you see is how invisible it is.
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And the only reason why we know the scale and scope of this is because they do have their transponders on, like most of them do.
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And you can see just from the publicly available data,
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just these fleets of fishermen nonstop working in these clusters.
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And they're often clusters that are hugging right up against the economic waters of other countries.
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Ecuador, a lot of places in South America, Argentina, you'll see these clusters of fishing vessels.
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Most of those are Chinese.
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That's about it.
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That's all you can see.
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And from that perspective, it's like pretty legal.
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They're just sort of sitting there.
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Yes, they're fishing.
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Yes, it's kind of crazy.
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Yes, we need new regulation to determine if this is okay.
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But on paper, it actually looks pretty fine.
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But it's like why else would you go right up to the border of something
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if it's not to like occasionally pass over?
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Exactly.
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There's no reason to be clustered like that.
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Right there.
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Right on the border.
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Fishing is the world's most dangerous profession in terms of fatalities globally.
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Ian Urbina has spent years investigating what actually happens out here on these ships.
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And what he's found is pretty bleak.
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The guys said we're being held against our will.
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They took our passports desperately want to come home.
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You know, there's violence on board.
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I've seen and interviewed workers who are on two-year contracts and they never come to shore.
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He's documented crewmen who have been at sea for years, literally years, against their will sometimes.
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Cut off from their families, trapped by debt and fake job promises, their passports taken away from them, stuck indefinitely.
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Because now that these boats can drop off their fish and get fuel and supplies from these motherships, they never have to go back to port.
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We are not going to go.
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He is not going to be able to get us.
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Even if we are in a hospital, we are not going to be a crime.
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Then I said, I don't want one minute.
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He is not going to be able to get us.
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It's not just falling overboard from exhaustion or getting hit by a heavy piece of equipment.
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It's also just infection.
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It's suicide.
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It's lots of other forms of slow motion threat to a brutal, brutal type of work.
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The mental health kind of burden of being in solitary confinement, essentially for two years of this sort, you can see in these guys.
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These men develop horrible illnesses.
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They get injured, they're malnourished, they're abused, and all of it, the sickness, the exhaustion, the despair, happens in total isolation, way out here,
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far from anyone who might see it.
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Squid vessels in particular are also just gruesome because squid inks
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when it panics and they're bringing thousands per hour on board and they ink everywhere.
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So it's like climbing, sorry to gross you out, but into someone's nose.
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There's just mucus, layers, years of layers of mucus on every imaginable surface.
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The railings, the floor, you can't get that stuff off, so it's insanely slippery, there's vermin everywhere, it smells, it's very ammonia smell,
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because squid use ammonia for buoyancy, so it smells like piss.
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That's the kind of thing that you can't see.
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It's very well hidden.
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And again, on paper, when I look at these maps of their transponders, they are behaving per what we can see on the satellite.
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And that's what I'm curious about is like when they turn off
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that transponder and they can't be pinged and they can't really be seen, what happens?
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We track some of this data and you see these boats that go right up to the EEZ.
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They disappear for 72 hours or seven days
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and then they pop back up in safe zone and then they disappear and then they pop back on.
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What is going on there
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and how can we know what is happening during those dark hours and days when the transponder is turned off?
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Because that's the crucial time.
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They're so far away, no one's going to see them.
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So anything they do during that time is completely unseen.
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How's it going, Kim?
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How are you?
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I talked to a couple people at Global Fishing Watch and they helped them kind of understand
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how we are able to have eyes on what is happening even when AIS goes dark.
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It turns out AIS is not our only source.
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There is another way.
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Based on AIS there you'll see a lot of fishing activity along the northern coast of Mediterranean
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and in the Strait of Sicily, also in the Adriatic.
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You'll see almost no fishing activity along the coast of North Africa.
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That doesn't mean that there is no fishing happening along the coast of North Africa, it's just that we can't see it based on AIS.
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That's because a lot of these fleets are comprised of small vessels that don't have access to AIS devices.
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So relying on just one data stream tells us only part of the picture in this case.
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This is where we start to use these other data streams.
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Night light detections which are based on vessels using bright lights at night.
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Radar detections which detect large metal objects.
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Optical imagery which is basically high resolution photos of vessels at sea.
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This allows them to detect objects that aren't being detected on AIS.
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You'll suddenly see that then all of this area that had previously been completely dark, but now with radar imagery,
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we can now kind of fill in those gaps and we can see a lot of vessel activity along North Africa.
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Using these satellite detections, we can detect where these vessels are, even if they disable their AIS devices.
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Can we go to Galapagos and see the nightlight?
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Because that's a huge one.
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Yeah.
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There we go.
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Yeah, right there.
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But so, we can look at something like this and see all of a sudden, okay, here's AIS unmatched optical detections.
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The Galapagos goes from being completely clean inside the edges to all of a sudden, dots all over the place.
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Wow.
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Dude, they go dark, but here they are.
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And it's also interesting because each of these different kinds of satellite imagery overlays is limited in its own way.
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Every layer, every data stream has its limitations.
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Optical imagery is exciting for us, but it is typically limited to taking images once or twice a day.
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So it really only gives us snapshots of activity and doesn't allow us to recreate what these vessels are doing.
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And as you can see by these footprints, it doesn't scan the entire ocean, but usually looks at areas close to shore.
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Same is true for radar imagery that looks at areas close to shore.
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It doesn't tell us much about what's happening on the high seas.
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And then nightlight detection is particularly useful for vessels like squid jiggers, which fish using very bright lights at night.
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None of these datasets by themselves can really paint a full picture.
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They will all be missing part of the activity.
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But it's something, right?
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It's eyes where we previously had no eyes before.
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Okay, so we have all these other views that aren't just reliant on AIS and Ian and his team's cameras.
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Can we actually see what is happening during dark activity?
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Like, what do we learn about the Galapagos and what these ships might be doing when they turn off their transponders?
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Right, so in a situation like in the Galapagos where you have, you know, ships on AIS going dark right around the edges, overlaying something like radio frequency,
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all of a sudden you can see pings of places where those ships might be.
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So all of a sudden you go from just knowing that a ship is disappearing and maybe doing something or not, but having no hard evidence, by overlaying these different kinds of satellite imagery,
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all of a sudden you have evidence that they were somewhere else.
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We have all these ships that are going dark right on the edge of the Galapagos EEZ, but we don't necessarily know that they're going inside.
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And when we look at radio frequency signals, we can see that they are going inside.
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And then because there are multiple different kinds of imagery sources, we can overlay SAR data and have even more detail.
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We can see ships inside.
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So this is using that radar ping that just looks for something dense or shiny.
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And you can now see that where on my map it looks clean and legal.
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This shows that there's actually activity happening inside the EEZ.
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Right.
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It's obviously not an end-all be-all.
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I feel like you might see this map
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and think by being able to see past the AIS dark activity zones
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that all of a sudden we have like perfect eyes on what's happening.
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But we don't really.
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All of these are kind of individual snapshots.
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They're just a moment in time, but they do give us a way of, you know, when something looks suspicious to be able to have like a higher level of detail as to what's going on.
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Yeah.
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It's basically a way of catching ships in the act
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when they think that they're getting away with something by turning off one kind of tracker.
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Either they leave another kind of tracker on
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or they wind up being visible by another kind of satellite imagery that's passing overhead.
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But it still seems like piecing together the puzzle with this kind of data versus that kind of data, like it seems quite manual.
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It's very manual labor, the kind of thing that is only kind of helpful at a very large scale.
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So I mean this used to only be helpful kind of one example at a time.
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This was like not something that really gave us broad insights, but that's changing fast with the people that I talked to.
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I mean it's so much data and it is so many images and it's a constant process of cross-checking those things.
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It's more than any human can do.
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but we are obviously moving into an era where machines can do that.
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Rather than labeling all these data manually, by hand, by visually inspecting these tracks, that's where we use machine learning to do this at a global near real-time scale.
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I guess my question now is like, what do we know now about what's happening at sea that we didn't know before?
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I mean, what this leaves us with is a much better picture of just how widespread
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dark activity is of just how many ships are going untracked.
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Before this we had no sense of exactly how many ships we knew was happening.
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We didn't know exactly like what they were doing
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when they went dark but we didn't know how globally widespread the problem is and now we do.
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When we put all of these data sources together Global Fishing Watch found
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that between 72 and 76 percent of all fishing activity around the world is untracked.
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And potentially illegally, meaning in places that are supposed to be protected.
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I mean, the crazy part about that is you kind of start off thinking
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that this is maybe some small problematic minority that is committing crimes, but the fact that it's 75%,
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that it is the great majority of all fishing, means that going dark is the norm.
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It is a practice that many, many ships are doing.
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Maybe it is to commit crimes or to get away with things unseen, But maybe it's just for a bit of a competitive advantage
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to be fishing somewhere where they know they have the best access to fish.
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And maybe it's just out of non-compliance, unawareness about the laws.
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There's a whole bunch of reasons that ships could be going dark or not turning on their AIS.
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But they all kind of enable the worst of this problems.
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They set the stage for the worst offenses to be committed.
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Going into China's fleet, which is just one of many countries that have this problem, but it's the biggest and the most aggressive,
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I think following the rest of that story of where that seafood goes, it's important to sort of like get our head around why this is a problem.
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Because what I learned from my reporting is that after it is in the Galapagos and it goes into the mothership, it kind of gets washed,
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meaning it gets blended with product and squid from a bunch of different other sources that did have their tracker on, and then it's invisible story is completely washed.
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The mothership goes back to China.
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It delivers the squid to a buyer who then mixes it with even more squid from other sources.
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It gets processed sometimes from even more forced labor from either Uighur Muslims
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that are re-educated and forced to work in the seafood plants
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or North Koreans who are in China working for the North Korean state.
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And then it's shipped out to the world.
395
70% of China's seafood is actually shipped out and it's a huge industry for them and it comes to all of us.
396
So we're eating it.
397
Yeah, absolutely.
398
I didn't really know that.
399
It can go somewhere else in Asia, maybe it's turned into sushi in Japan or it goes to Europe where it is cooked into a risotto or canned.
400
But a lot of it ends up in the United States.
401
Calamari.
402
Calamari, cheap calamari.
403
It's like in every restaurant you can get calamari.
404
And now I kind of understand where that comes from.
405
Like this isn't a black market.
406
This isn't a renegade thing happening in some organized crime ring.
407
This is the norm on the high seas and it is something we all participate in.
408
And being in the maps, but especially being in the footage and the interviews, you realize how in that product is hidden the true cost,
409
which is environmental degradation, human suffering, depletion of our fish stocks and theft from national resources.
410
It makes me appreciate the people working on this.
411
It makes me grateful for the technology
412
that enables better views of these hidden spaces
413
and it puts urgency on how important this issue is because if we can solve it, if we can get eyes on the ocean in a new way,
414
it can have a huge impact on all of these domains.
415
There is a really weird disparity between seeing the activity mapped out here where it looks very busy,
416
but then you think about what it must actually look like in real life.
417
The empty, empty oceans.
418
It's such a vast quantity of space.
419
Even in the places where it looks so condensed, so busy, it must still be just impossible to police any of that.
420
It's incredibly logistically complicated and dangerous to be on the high seas.
421
I started this story feeling like AIS was this like amazing tool for safety
422
and surveillance at sea
423
And now I see just how easy it is to press one little button
424
and to disappear
425
and do whatever you want I'm feeling like this is a really hard problem to tackle
426
because of the nature of being on the high sea
427
And it's not gonna be through humans going out to catch the bad guys
428
that we solve this I'm convinced of that now.
429
Right.
430
Like if we're gonna actually See this and stop this it's gonna have to be something else I'm sorry.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 429 sentences and 5467 words to shadow. The speech runs for 30:58. The speaker talks at a natural 177 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 85% 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 |
|---|---|---|
| vessel noun | /ˈvɛsəl/ | Any craft designed for transportation on or in water, such as a ship, boat, or submarine. |
| disappear verb | /dɪsəˈpɪɹ/ | To vanish. |
| imagery noun | /ˈɪmɪd͡ʒɹi/ | The work of one who makes images or visible representation of objects. |
| sudden adjective | /ˈsʌd.ən/ | Occurring quickly with little or no warning or expectation; instantly. |
| satellite noun | /ˈsætəlaɪ̯t/ | A moon or other smaller body orbiting a larger one. |
| seafood noun | /ˈsiːfuːd/ | Food from the sea, including that derived from fish, shellfish, crustaceans, cephalopods, seaweed, algae, marine mammals, and other marine organisms. |
| fleet noun | /ˈfliːt/ | A group of vessels or vehicles. |
| shore noun | /ʃɔɹ/ | Land adjoining a non-flowing body of water, such as an ocean, lake or pond. |
| radar noun | /ˈɹeɪˌdɑɹ/ | In full primary radar: a method of detecting a distant object and determining its position, velocity, or other characteristics by analysing radio waves… |
| detect verb | /dɪˈtɛkt/ | To discover or find by careful search, examination, or probing. |
| helpful adjective | /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/ | Furnishing help; giving aid; useful. |
| layer noun | /ˈleɪ̯ɚ/ | A single thickness of some material covering a surface. |
| visible adjective | /ˈvɪzɪb(ə)l/ | Able to be seen. |
| publicly adverb | /ˈpʌb.lɪ.kli/ | In public, openly, in an open and public manner. |
| clue noun | /kluː/ | Information which may lead one to a certain point or conclusion. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. |
| get away with verb | To get away, or escape, taking (something) with one. |
| turn off verb | To power down, to switch off, to put out of operation, to deactivate (an appliance, light, mechanism, functionality etc.). |
| drop off verb | To fall asleep. |
| get out verb | To leave or escape. |
| go out verb | To leave, especially a building. |
| put together verb | To assemble, construct, build, or formulate. |
| bring out verb | To elicit, evoke, or emphasize (a particular quality). |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 91 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: shore /ʃɔɹ/, wash /wɑʃ/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, occasionally /əˈkeɪʒənəli/
- Long words — get the stress right: essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/, invisible /ɪnˈvɪzəb(ə)l/, indefinitely /ɪnˈdɛfɪnɪtli/
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 vessel, disappear, imagery.
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 | has been looking · I've been doing · I've been using |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | they've gone · They've supported · they've sent |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is hidden · is called · be seen |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | sea, which is · people who buy · EEZs, which is |
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.