Shadowing Practice: Where Did All The Good Jobs Go? - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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It's getting harder to find work in the United States.
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In August, businesses added just 22,000 new jobs.
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That's actually quite a weak number.
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Looking at that in isolation, that would actually be a lot more consistent with the start of a recession, you know, historically.
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Gone are the days of 200,000 jobs every month.
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We're likely to be in an environment where job growth is hovering around zero, essentially.
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The U.S labor market is worse than previously thought.
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Less than half of the people polled by the New York Fed
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say they could find a new job if they lost their current one.
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The three main reasons younger Americans will likely have to work longer than baby boomers are 1.
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People are living longer and healthier lives.
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2. Social Security benefits won't cover the full cost of living in retirement. And 3.
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Many Americans don't save enough throughout their lifetimes.
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If they do save, unexpected expenses can wipe out what they have.
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For decades, retirement relied on a multi-pillared system economists call the three-legged stool.
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Social Security, pensions, and personal savings.
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But for most Americans, employer-funded pensions are gone.
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We're in a situation where that economic uncertainty is manifesting itself in fewer people quitting, as well as fewer organizations hiring.
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There's kind of less movement in the market right now.
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I think wage growth has cooled, job switching premiums have shrunk, And a lot of workers worry that their pay won't keep up with rising costs.
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So I think they're clinging to stability in a time of uncertainty.
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64% of Americans surveyed are more worried about running out of money in retirement than they are about dying.
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And one in four Americans surveyed believe they won't ever be able to retire.
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The average life expectancy in OECD countries is about 80 years old.
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That's around a 13 year increase since 1960.
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As a result, retirement ages are rising in more than half of OECD countries.
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I think the key thing that drives that is an improvement in longevity and honestly in health.
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We have more options for extended work lives today than we've ever had before, and Americans are taking advantage of them.
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But wanting to work longer and being able to are not the same.
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Over half of people who retire, retire sooner than they ever plan to.
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The data in the U.S shows that pretty much everybody relies on social security benefits,
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which is why it's so critical to restore the system to solvency.
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Here's why younger Americans may end up working longer than their parents
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and whether planning to work longer will actually help people in retirement.
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Roughly eight in 10 Gen X, Millennial
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and Gen Z workers believe it will be harder for their generation to achieve financial security than it was for their parents.
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Gen Z Americans are often very pessimistic about retirement.
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They look at Social Security, they see it's underfunded.
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They realize they have to save a lot of money on their own.
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And so some of them are on the verge of giving up up.
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At the same time, the data show a much more positive story that at this stage in their lives,
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Gen Z has actually saved more for retirement than the generations who came before them.
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Younger workers today often have more in retirement accounts by age 30 than boomers did.
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Gen Z have been faced with having to do it themselves
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and they have savings in something called a 401k that older people didn't have because they didn't need it.
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But it doesn't mean that Gen Z is better off.
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The three main reasons younger Americans will likely have to work longer than baby boomers are one, people are living longer and healthier lives.
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Two, Social Security benefits won't cover the full cost of living in retirement.
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And three, many Americans don't save enough throughout their lifetimes.
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If they do save, unexpected expenses can wipe out what they have.
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For decades, retirement relied on a multi-pillared system economists call the three-legged stool.
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Social Security, pensions and personal savings.
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But for most Americans, employer-funded pensions are gone.
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In 1989, 63% of full-time workers at companies with more than 100 employees had a pension.
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Today, only about 15% of private industry workers do.
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Social Security was supposed to provide the foundation, private pensions on top of that, and then additional individual saving above that.
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At the beginning of their careers, baby boomers relied on a system built around Social Security and employer sponsored pensions, not personal investing.
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For most of the 1970s, when baby boomers were entering the workforce, 401ks didn't exist yet.
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And even in the early 80s, they weren't widely available to workers.
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They started being marketed to employers for their high income people right around 1981.
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And then the employer said, whoa, I can actually get rid of my real pension plan
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and just kind of slowly move my workforce to a voluntary 401k plan.
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And it's great for me because I get credit for offering a retirement plan, but I don't have to put a cent in it.
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The other issue is a lot of boomer retirement savings is nested in the equity of their homes, which younger people today may not be able to replicate.
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I know Gen Z is not better off because we know
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that home equity is probably not going to accrue like it did in the last 10 years.
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It's just not possible.
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Baby boomers do enter retirement wealthier than previous generations, but that picture is uneven.
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Roughly half of boomers did not buy a home in their 20s and 30s and thirties.
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The poorest boomers are worse off than their predecessors and racial and educational gaps remain wide.
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That wealth disparity repeats itself throughout generations.
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While the average millennial has less wealth at the age of 35 than previous generations,
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the top 10 percent of millennials have 20 percent more wealth than the top baby boomers at the same age.
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The other complication for Gen X, millennial and Gen Z workers is student loan debt.
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Younger cohorts are way more likely to carry student loans.
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39% of Gen Z, 36% of millennials and 24% of Gen X have them compared with about 7% of boomers.
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All the stories that you get about Easy Street is really not a generational story.
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It's a class story.
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So the system has worked well for people with high incomes, steady jobs and basically steady lives.
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They didn't have a divorce here or there or tragedy with their children or their own medical problems.
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The shift from traditional defined benefit pensions to defined contribution retirement accounts like 401Ks,
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they don't penalize delayed retirement the way traditional pensions do.
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With a 401K, the longer you work, the higher your benefit.
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With a traditional pension, there's often a point where you top out.
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But a majority of U.S retirees rely heavily on Social Security.
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Fifty-eight percent say it's one of their major income sources, but only 35 percent of non-retirees expect to depend on it.
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That expectation gap has persisted every year since 2002.
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The public pension systems are suffering rising fiscal stress,
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and the U.S is a good example where our Social Security system is facing insolvency within seven years.
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So working a little bit longer reduces the period of time you need to support yourself in old age
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and obviously contributes to a bigger nest egg to live on in retirement.
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Social Security is financed on what's called a pay-as-you-go basis,
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which means that the taxes paid in by today's workers immediately go out the door to pay benefits for today's retirees.
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That means that Social Security is very subject to demographic changes, to the number of workers per retiree.
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If you go back to the 1960s, we had five or six workers paying in for a retiree collecting benefits from the system.
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Today we have about three going forward will only have around two workers per beneficiary.
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That means the cost burden on each worker goes up.
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But the work longer solution could run into real world limitations.
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We saw unprecedented numbers of older people, and I mean like in their 50s, being pushed out of their job.
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So you can't work longer because of age discrimination and
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because the labor market may not want the skills
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that you've acquired over 40 years because the labor market
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and the skills required have moved forward is the main myths behind this idea.
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Well, we don't have to solve Social Security.
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We don't have to solve tensions because people just work more.
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In a perfect world, what I would like to see is a reform of Social Security
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that remains solvent so that people working today can predict with confidence
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that when they get to be 65 or 75 or 85, that the system would be there for them because that's what we need.
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70% of U.S workers surveyed who have not retired yet considered pushing back their retirement date,
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with nearly half of those surveyed citing fears that they wouldn't have enough money and 44% saying they're worried about inflation.
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Younger Americans are pessimistic about retirement, but many of them are saving.
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A lot of that anxiety seems to be about the future of Social Security.
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Millennials are saving at a higher rate at this age than Gen Xers or Boomers.
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So I guess I would say if they're nervous and it's making them save, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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I like to tell my students, many of whom are Gen Z, Social Security will not disappear.
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You will not get zero benefits.
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You will get something.
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So this is a major issue that Congress should have handled decades ago.
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When we first became aware that Social Security faced this long-run funding crisis,
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unfortunately, it's always easier for politicians to kick the can down the road, to leave the decisions for a future Congress.
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But that only makes those decisions harder.
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So I don't fear that we're going to see a 20% benefit cut from Social Security in the near future.
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Congress will step in to address that.
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President Donald Trump signed an executive order in August 2025
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that clears a path for alternative assets such as cryptocurrencies and private equity to be added to 401ks.
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That's not a solution.
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You know, we actually need a universal pension system and a robust security system.
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Gilarducci says these market-based tweaks distract from what she sees as a sustainable solution, which is an overhaul of federal retirement policy.
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I have a pathway.
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It's called the Gray New Deal.
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It's a recognition that more of us are going to be aging as the share of the population than ever before.
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And that's a good thing.
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Part of the Gray New Deal is to have the value that every adult who wants to work should have a job.
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So we should make the labor market as welcoming and as protective for older people that is for younger people.
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So we need actually more health and safety requirements, more, actually more workforce development and more enforcement of age discrimination.
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So I'm not saying everybody has to retire.
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If we want to work, we should be able to work.
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That's a value for society.
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Whatever age, government can be the employer of last resort.
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Full employment guaranteed for every worker.
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The idea that everyone is going to have to work to age 70 or something like that, I think think is just an exaggeration.
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In the past, you often had mandatory retirement ages where employers would require people to retire at a given age of 60 or 62.
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That's mostly been ruled illegal.
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And so people can work longer if they want.
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On top of that, there's greater demand for older workers.
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They can be valuable to employers.
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Research does not support the idea that working longer generally takes away jobs from younger generations.
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However, in certain industries with rigid hierarchies or low turnover in senior roles, younger workers may see slower career progression.
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In most places, older workers and younger workers are complementary.
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Younger workers need to be trained.
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They need the wisdom.
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But that's an older worker who wants to be there
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and an older worker who knows that they can have a dignified way to leave.
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That dynamic is very, very complementary and healthy.
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It takes two sides, two groups of people to decide if you work longer longer, the employer group and the worker group.
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And just because the worker group needs to work longer because they don't have enough money, doesn't mean the employer group wants you.
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The labor market always doesn't want you when you want the labor market.
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That employers have the biggest role in the decision about whether
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or not you work and what the quality of your work is.
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It's getting harder to find work in the United States.
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In August, businesses added just 22,000 new jobs.
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That's actually quite a weak number.
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Looking at that in isolation, that would actually be a lot more consistent with the start of a recession historically.
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Gone are the days of 200,000 jobs every month.
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We're likely to be in an environment where job growth is hovering around zero, essentially.
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The U.S labor market is worse than previously thought.
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Less than half of the people polled by the New York Fed say they could find a new job
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if they lost their current one.
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Downside risks to employment are rising.
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And if those risks materialize, they can do so quickly in the form of sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment.
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The Federal Reserve can give businesses more confidence to hire workers by adjusting the federal funds rate.
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The Fed is lowering this key interest rate as companies navigate changes on trade, immigration and inflation.
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are holding back because they're both trying to see what the tariffs will be, what the effect of the tariffs will be.
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And inside of that is what happens to their profit margins.
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They're willing to deal with the uncertainty, but they need to react to that.
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And so part of that is just being very prudent in how they're hiring.
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Why are jobs disappearing?
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And can the Fed do anything to bring them back?
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The slowdown in hiring is most potent for younger workers.
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We're seeing a lot of pressure on the younger generation when it comes to this labor market.
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We're seeing many firms facing higher imported costs
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and they are in many cases struggling with the cost of talent in a high interest rate environment.
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The tech space, the finance space, the professional and business services space are sectors that are under more pressure
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and they are are the ones that generally are big hirers of younger cohorts.
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Recent college graduates typically have better job prospects than the overall labor force.
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Historically, they have lower unemployment levels, too.
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That trend reversed starting in 2022.
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The United States has been suffering from a series of rolling recessions, pockets of industries or industries themselves that have gone through their own downturns,
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whether it was manufacturing or consumer goods, just hasn't bubbled up to the broader economy.
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I would put the youth employment situation squarely in that category right now.
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The high paying information sector is flashing warning signs to software
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developer roles for workers in their 20s are down sharply since 2022.
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Young marketing and sales managers are having trouble getting hired as well.
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That said, younger workers are finding jobs in the health and retail sectors at a relatively fast pace.
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We know that companies are turning to technology and AI to figure out
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if they can maybe stomach some of those costs or bring some of those costs down without having to hire somebody, at least initially.
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AI is very new.
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The capabilities of it are not very well known.
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Well, to the extent that it can replace jobs, the first jobs it should be replacing are those new entry-level simpler jobs.
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A small collection of industries are still adding workers.
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You're still seeing resilience in the healthcare space and in the leisure and hospitality space.
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Those two sectors are upholding the labor market, but there is increased evidence that over the next six months,
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there might be more weakness out of these two sectors as well.
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less than half of the private sector is adding jobs.
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And manufacturing would be one of the key industries.
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But we're also seeing increased softness in construction activity, a telltale sign that housing activity is experiencing a slowdown.
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We're seeing businesses being more cautious with who they hire, how much they hire, and also in some cases proceeding with strategic layoffs.
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The Fed's interest rate policies also contribute to today's labor market slowdown.
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These interest rates influence Americans' job prospects and the pace of price increases.
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Lowering them can mean more jobs and more inflation.
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Raising them may mean less inflation and slower economic growth.
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The Fed took interest rates into restrictive territory in the first quarter of 2023.
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Since then, they've held the target for the federal funds rate high relative to the so-called neutral interest rate of around 3%.
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In other words, the Fed's past decisions are restricting today's economic growth.
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Nonetheless, with policy in restrictive territory, the baseline outlook and the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance.
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Historically, it's the case that as the Fed tightens
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and starts to contain inflationary pressures that eventually puts downward pressure on the labor market, it was the case that June actually saw negative payrolls,
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which is the first time that's happened since December of 2020.
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I think the Fed is cutting from a place where it believes it has room to be wrong.
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Fed policy is best designed to address cyclical issues.
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If it's cyclical, the Fed over time should be able to nudge us back onto the path, but it can't change the path.
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Businesses that see lower interest rates could be motivated to hire more workers.
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A lot of it boils down to confidence.
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If I'm going to be facing relatively less restrictive interest rate policy, I can plan for that in the future and say, well, my burden here on the debt side is going to go down a little bit,
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but my business is still relatively strong.
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I can take that extra risk and make that investment in an individual or in some kind of technology.
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Lower interest rates have many other effects, too.
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For example, saving rates on bank deposits may fall.
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Financing costs for a mortgage or car loans could move lower as well, but only if treasury bond yields follow the Fed.
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Long term rates are incorporating a wider array of factors, which include a large budget deficit,
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which include trade policy uncertainty and tariffs, which include higher inflation.
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And as a result, they're not moving as low as the Fed funds rate is likely to move over the course of the next year.
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It's a highly political situation.
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It's totally rigged.
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Smart people know it.
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The slow pace of hiring is political trouble for the president.
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Experts say his policies could be contributing.
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Manufacturing or construction or trade and transportation, those industries have been under the most pressure with hiring.
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Facts like that definitely point to the policy environment having a pretty serious and direct impact on labor.
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So it's not as much a monetary policy issue, but you could also argue that some monetary policy easing and accommodation could help at the margin for sure.
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Then there's immigration.
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Reduced immigration is curbing labor supply and reducing the so-called break-even rate,
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the rate at which the unemployment rate starts to increase.
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You could think that over time, domestic unemployed or native-born unemployed people could take the jobs of immigrants.
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Some of these jobs that are taken by immigrants are jobs
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that historically employers have found are not ones that are taken by native-born people.
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As the labor market deteriorates, prices are still increasing at a faster pace than the Fed's target rate.
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That makes an interest rate cut somewhat risky.
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Despite this, President Trump is pressuring the Fed to prop up the economy with lower interest rates.
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I really worry about the financial integrity of the Fed, much more than the integrity of the BLS.
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If we lose the institutional integrity of the Fed, we're going to step back in a major way in terms of good economic outcomes.
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And let's not forget, we're coming off of an environment where inflation has been very high post pandemic
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and many people are still struggling to make ends meet.
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We also have to look at this in the context of an economy that is more supply shock driven.
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And when you have a more supply shock driven environment, you are just definitionally the Federal Reserve
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or any central bank just has less power in being able to combat inflation
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and also being able to help the labor market.
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If the Fed is wrong here and it's cutting interest rates into an inflationary environment, then the impact could be negative for many people in the sense
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that you would have higher inflation and that would really hurt a lot of people.
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The U.S job market is very dynamic.
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The trouble right now is that tax policy, immigration policy, tariff policy are all in flux and so it makes it very difficult for businesses to adjust.
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Once things settle down, if the government backs out
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and gets out of the way of the free market, U.S companies should create the jobs for those who need them.
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The U.S economy has lost 1.2 million jobs since April 2024, and Americans are feeling the economic downturn.
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The quits rate, a measure of how often workers voluntarily leave their jobs, is now down to about 2% after fluctuating in the years since the pandemic.
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And employers are hiring at the slowest pace since 2013, excluding the pandemic dip and rise.
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I think people just want to stay with what is known and not take any risks right now.
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We use the term job clinging or job hugging to denote that they're staying put rather than moving on.
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I think for workers, that means more stress and less mobility.
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For companies, it looks like retention, but I think it hides disengagement.
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And then for the economy, it slows innovation just because people aren't moving and growing.
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Four out of five employees surveyed said they're not thriving at work.
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Another 58% of U.S professionals surveyed believe they have a wide range of skills that are being underutilized in their current roles.
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This all makes for a labor market that doesn't have a lot of churn in it.
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There's been a lot of anxiety about the direction of both the economy and the labor market.
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That is part of what's keeping people in jobs, and that could be a contributing factor to this, at least, perception of disengagement that is rising.
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Here's why so many Americans feel stuck in their jobs and what it means for the economy.
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Almost one in five job seekers surveyed said they're not confident that they will find a great job that they like.
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We're in a situation where that economic uncertainty is manifesting itself in fewer people quitting as well as fewer organizations hiring.
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There's kind of less movement in the market right now.
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I think wage growth has cooled.
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Job switching premiums have shrunk.
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And a lot of workers worry that their pay won't keep up with rising costs.
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So I think they're clinging to stability in a time of uncertainty.
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A lot of this does have to do with sentiment because companies are unsure about what's going to happen in the future.
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They see economic policies like tariffs.
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They're not quite sure how that's going to impact their bottom line.
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So they're nervous to hire people when they're not sure
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if they're going to have to turn around and then let people go in the near future.
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While layoffs have been steady since the pandemic, many companies are choosing alternatives, such as hiring freezes or letting attrition thin their workforce.
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What we did, though, is a bit different.
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We don't do layoffs.
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We just don't hire.
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And because you have a natural attrition of 20% in a company like ours, it means that every year 20% leaves.
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And if you don't recruit, you just shrink, right?
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But what we've done is we promised all our employees some of those savings we are going to accelerate their compensation with.
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So they have seen an increasing acceleration in their compensation due to all of the AI that we've done.
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The organizations are a little bit flatter now.
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So I think there's a kind of middle management layer that's going away.
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And so employees stay put, but they're a little bit disconnected from senior leadership sometimes so they feel a little more directionless.
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I think that creates stress.
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Staying put may feel like the safer option, but it can come with risks for both workers and employers.
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If you cling to your job and you get a little bit too complacent, that's not good either
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because then your employer can look at you as sort of low-hanging fruit for layoffs in the event
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that they eventually need to do that.
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Career coaches recommend that you focus on career growth.
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Even if you're not able to find a new job, You focus on opportunities to improve your skills,
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do things within your organization to boost your career growth
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and your opportunities in the event that a new job comes along later.
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There's some data also that points to wage growth for job hoppers has slowed down quite a bit.
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Economists still say that job hopping is probably the best way to raise your wages.
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A February 2025 study estimated that for a typical 1,000 person company,
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employee disengagement adds up to about $5 million a year in lost productivity.
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The average disengaged worker could cost the company $4,000 over the course of a year, while an executive could cost $20,000.
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If they are less engaged, there's a risk to the overall productivity of that employee.
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So that's kind of that individual risk.
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But I think in many ways, the bigger risk is the network effect that that will have, is that if you have someone who is disengaged,
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not putting forth the same amount of effort, but is putting forth enough just to stay under the radar, that work still needs to get done.
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And so that ends up falling on teammates and other people across the organization.
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So it can cause some additional stress, even if people are engaged and people are putting forth their extra effort.
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They might have to go even above and beyond to make up for some of the teammates who are disengaged.
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Low turnover looks like stability for employers, but it can mask what I would describe as quiet quitting.
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40% of workers in a recent survey feel directionless with fewer managers in place.
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Therefore, they maybe spin their will.
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So I think that has impact on productivity.
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I think it has impact on employee satisfaction.
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ultimately can have impact on a company's ability to grow,
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innovate, and that translates into a cautious workforce, slows labor mobility.
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And labor mobility historically has been a sign of productivity and innovation.
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A disengaged workforce that's clinging to their job can have implications for the broader economy and labor market.
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Globally, low employee engagement is estimated to cost $9.6 trillion annually, or around 9% of global GDP.
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Labor mobility historically has been a sign of productivity and innovation.
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With fewer workers chasing new roles, wage growth flattens, and it just kind of reinforces a cycle of caution.
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And this can dampen consumer confidence.
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It can dampen the agility of organizations and their ability to innovate and be productive.
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Career coaches, economists, they all say that the labor market is very frozen right now.
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If you have a frozen labor market, there's not a lot of new opportunity being created.
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That ends up hurting people who would otherwise be finding new opportunity in the market.
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Where you might start to see those types of dips is
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if we have a prolonged period where the labor market is challenging,
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a prolonged period where organizations aren't taking advantage of internal labor market movement to re-engage their employees,
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that's when you may expect to see a bigger hit to productivity as well.
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This trend of workers staying put has also degraded job seekers' bargaining power, which can lead to flattened wages.
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Employers have more power in the labor market.
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We've had labor standards erode in this country for decades.
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Things like the minimum wage has been sitting at the same level since 2009.
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Unionization rates in this country have declined dramatically over the last few decades.
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So when you think about the levers that workers have, it's pretty limited.
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Workers have lost a bit of their bargaining power in the current environment.
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They, just a couple of years ago, were able to quit their jobs easily and find a much higher paying gig.
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Now hiring has slowed down, job openings have come way down, workers aren't quitting their jobs nearly as readily,
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and we see that wage growth has come down too in this environment.
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So workers can't command raises like they used to.
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In the three decades following World War II, we actually saw wages and productivity move in tandem.
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When you think about compensation for typical workers, they moved as productivity increased.
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What we've seen largely for the last three to four decades or so is that has diverged.
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And so as productivity has continued to increase, albeit at a little bit slower pace, I would say overall, workers' wages have not kept up with those kinds of gains.
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New graduates and early career workers may struggle to find entry-level jobs in the current market.
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Think about recent college graduates, for example.
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They're not finding that it's as easy to get a new job straight out of college,
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an entry-level role, especially because these are roles in which there's fear that AI is disrupting those jobs especially.
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Think about these are entry-level jobs, kind of a stepping stone to more skilled positions down the road road,
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it's also low hanging fruit for AI to come in and disrupt and take those jobs away from entry level workers.
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But this could also be an opportunity for innovative companies to pivot.
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If you think about the Gen Z workforce or entry level workforce, they're much more moldable, teachable.
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You know, you can reorient their skill sets.
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They're bright, they're sharp.
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I think they're street smart.
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They know how to use technology.
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That gives me a lot of hope.
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And so I think it isn't all doom and gloom.
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I think it's leaders need to think about how do I repurpose the workforce?
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And then how do I get new entry or newer professionals?
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How do I retool their skill sets?
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How do I help them use AI to make better decisions, to be more productive, to do more at an earlier time in their careers?
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And so I think those who see it as an opportunity, if you can get the right leadership in place, the right lean workforce, leveraging technology and innovation,
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you can certainly grow and scale faster.
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And so I think there are a lot of opportunities, no doubt.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Where Did All The Good Jobs Go?”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: worker, labor, rate. This video has 378 sentences and 5243 words to shadow. The speech runs for 31:39. The speaker talks at a natural 166 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 |
|---|---|---|
| workforce noun | /ˈwɝk.foɹs/ | All the workers employed by a specific organization or state, or on a specific project. |
| productivity noun | /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/ | The state of being productive, fertile, or efficient. |
| inflation noun | /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/ | An act, instance of, or state of expansion or increase in size, especially by injection of a gas or liquid. |
| historically adverb | /hɪˈstɔɹɪkli/ | In a historic manner; with reference to history or the historical record. |
| millennial adjective | /mɪˈlɛn.ɪ.əl/ | Thousand-year-old; also (by extension, loosely) thousands of years old. |
| uncertainty noun | /ʌnˈsɜːtənti/ | Doubt; the condition of being uncertain or without conviction. |
| retire verb | /ɹəˈtaɪɹ/ | To stop working on a permanent basis, usually because of old age or illness. |
| layoff noun | A dismissal of employees from their jobs because of tightened budgetary constraints or work shortage (not due to poor performance or misconduct). | |
| retiree noun | /ɹəˈtaɪ.ə(ɹ)ˌiː/ | Someone who has retired from active working. |
| cling verb | /ˈklɪŋ/ | To hold very tightly, as to not fall off. |
| disengage verb | /ˌdɪsɪŋˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/ | To release or loosen from something that binds, entangles, holds, or interlocks. |
| tariff noun | /ˈtæɹəf/ | A system of government-imposed duties levied on imported or exported goods; a list of such duties, or the duties themselves. |
| economist noun | /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/ | An expert in economics, especially one who studies economic data and extracts higher-level information or proposes theories. |
| mobility noun | /mə(ʊ)ˈbɪlɪti/ | The ability to move; capacity for movement. |
| disengagement noun | /ˌdɪs.ɪŋˈɡeɪd͡ʒ.mənt/ | Release or detachment from a physical situation or other involvement. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| keep up with verb | To manage to remain beside or just behind someone or something that is moving away from one. |
| slow down verb | To decelerate. |
| wipe out verb | To destroy (especially, a large number or complete set of people or things); to obliterate. |
| add up to verb | To have a particular effect in combination. |
| back out verb | To reverse (a vehicle) from a confined space. |
| come along verb | To accompany. |
| come down verb | To descend, fall down, collapse. |
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 suffering · has been sitting |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has cooled · we've ever had · has actually saved |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | have been faced · being marketed · is nested |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who retire · solution, which is · those who need |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 77 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, don't, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, attrition /əˈtɹɪʃən/, cautious /ˈkɔːʃəs/, recession /ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/, sharply /ˈʃɑɹpli/
- Long words — get the stress right: productivity /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/, historically /hɪˈstɔɹɪkli/, millennial /mɪˈlɛn.ɪ.əl/, uncertainty /ʌnˈsɜːtənti/, retiree /ɹəˈtaɪ.ə(ɹ)ˌiː/
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 workforce, productivity, inflation.
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.