Shadowing Practice: Why Does the OCEAN Get Creepier the Deeper You Go? - Learn English Speaking with Video
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The ocean covers 71% of the planet.
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Fewer people have stood at the bottom of the ocean than have walked on the moon.
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We've mapped Mars in higher resolution than the ocean floor.
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And the reason isn't budget or interest.
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It's that space is genuinely easier to reach.
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The pressure at the bottom would crush a submarine like a tin can.
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The darkness is total.
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The cold is near freezing.
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And the things living there look like nothing that should exist on Earth.
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The ocean has five layers.
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The deeper you go, the less it resembles a place life should survive.
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The top 200 meters is the sunlight zone.
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This is the ocean you know.
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Coral reefs, dolphins, tuna, sea turtles.
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Phytoplankton here produce roughly half of all the oxygen on Earth.
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Every second breath you take came from this layer.
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Almost all marine life lives here.
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Below 200 meters, sunlight stops.
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And so does everything familiar.
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From 200 to 1000 meters is the twilight zone.
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1% of surface light reaches this depth, enough to see shapes and shadows.
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Not enough for plants.
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Pressure climbs to around 100 atmospheres and creatures start getting strange.
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This is where the Barrelife fish lives.
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Its head is completely transparent, a dome of clear fluid you can see straight through.
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Inside, two barrel-shaped eyes rotate inside its own skull, pointing upward through its forehead to spot prey silhouetted against the faint light above.
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When scientists first caught specimens in nets, they assumed the transparent heads had been damaged.
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In 2004, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute filmed one alive and confirmed the transparency was completely natural.
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This zone also hosts the largest daily animal migration on Earth.
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Billions of creatures, fish, squid, jellyfish, rise toward the surface every night to feed, then descend at dawn.
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Every ocean, every night, simultaneously, invisible to almost everyone alive.
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At around 900 meters, the vampire squid waits.
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Despite the name, it doesn't drink blood.
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It has the largest eyes relative to body size of any animal on Earth.
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It survives in oxygen levels as low as 3% of surface concentrations, conditions lethal to almost anything else.
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When threatened, it turns itself inside out, wrapping webbed arms around its body like a cloak,
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and fires bioluminescent mucus from its arm tips as glowing decoys into the darkness.
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Below 1000 meters is the midnight zone, down to 4000 meters.
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No sunlight.
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Complete darkness.
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Pressure between 100 and 400 atmospheres.
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Temperature near freezing.
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No plants.
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The only food is marine snow.
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Dead organisms drifting down from above.
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The only consistent food source for an enormous amount of life.
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Nearly 90% of creatures here produce their own light.
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The dragonfish has a jet black body making it invisible.
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But it produces and detects red light.
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A wavelength almost nothing at this depth can see.
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Deep Sea biologist Edith Witter, who received a MacArthur Fellowship for her bioluminescence research, described it as one of the most sophisticated stealth systems in the animal kingdom.
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It hunts using a beam its prey cannot perceive.
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The goblin shark has been here unchanged for 125 million years.
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It detects electrical fields from other animals through sensors covering its snout.
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When prey is close, its jaw fires forward like a slingshot, extending 9% of its body length in milliseconds.
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It doesn't need speed, just proximity.
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Then there is the anglerfish.
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The female hangs a bioluminescent lure from her forehead in complete darkness.
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A small fish approaches, the jaws close, her body expands to swallow prey twice her size, but the mating is what stops people.
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The male bites into her skin and never lets go.
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His body fuses to hers, his organs dissolve.
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He loses his eyes, his fins, his independence, becoming a permanent reproductive attachment.
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Evolutionary biologist Theodore Peach, at the University of Washington, documented females with six fused males attached simultaneously.
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What started as a creature becomes part of another one.
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From 4,000 to 6,000 meters is the abyssal zone.
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83% of the ocean floor, the largest habitat on Earth, almost entirely unknown.
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At around 4,000 meters, the water crosses the carbonate compensation depth depth.
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Below this line, calcium carbonate dissolves so aggressively that shelled creatures virtually vanish.
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The water literally dissolves their protective armor.
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The few exceptions use specialized organic coatings or aluminium in their exoskeletons just to hold together.
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Everything else is soft, gelatinous, built from water, the only structure that survives.
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Giant isopods roam here, resembling wood lice the size of footballs.
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They endure years without food, waiting until a whale carcass sinks from above.
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They strip it to nothing, then return to stillness.
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Hydrothermal vents split open where tectonic plates pull apart, releasing water above 400 degrees Celsius.
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Around them, entire ecosystems exist with no sunlight at all.
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Tube worms two meters long.
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Ghost white crabs.
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Shrimp detecting infrared from the vents.
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These organisms convert chemicals rather than light into energy.
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Life without a sun, which quietly changes the question of where else in the universe life might exist.
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In 2024, the Ocean Census, a global initiative to catalog new deep-sea species, sent expeditions to remote Pacific ridges and trenches near New Zealand.
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What came back included a creature resembling a glowing red sea tomato with no identifiable relatives, and a new species of coral that feeds on flesh.
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These weren't found in unexplored abyss.
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They were found on the edges of the already mapped territory, which raises an obvious question about everything beyond it.
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The deeper we explore the oceans, the stranger life becomes.
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But here's the thing.
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Some of the most fascinating ecosystems on Earth are also among the most vulnerable.
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But it can feel impossible to make a difference when it comes to protecting oceans and the life inside them.
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The scale of the problem is overwhelming, and there's only so much you can do as an individual.
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But as a group, as a community, we can make a tremendous difference.
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That's one reason I like what Planet Wild is doing.
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PlantWild is a community of more than 25,000 people, including myself, funding real conservation missions around the world,
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from protecting endangered species to restoring ecosystems and safeguarding marine environments.
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Think of it like crowdfunding for nature.
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What I like is that you don't just donate and forget about it.
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Every month, members receive video updates right here on YouTube showing exactly what's happening on the ground.
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So instead of wondering whether your contribution made any difference, you actually get to see the results.
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For example, in one of their latest missions, they used a simple yet effective solution to help fight ocean plastic at the source.
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I've always been fascinated by the natural world, and the more I learn about it, the more I realize how much there is worth protecting.
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If you'd like to support real conservation work and help protect the natural world, including the oceans we're talking about today, you can give whatever amount feels right to you.
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The first 100 people using my code AXEN6 will get their first month paid for by me.
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Just scan this QR code or click the link in the description.
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After that, you can cancel any time.
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If you want to see them in action first, check out their mission video Fighting Ocean Plastic linked below.
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And now, let's go even deeper.
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Below 6,000 meters is the Hadal Zone, named after Hades, god of the underworld.
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It exists only in ocean trenches.
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The Mariana Trench reaches 10,935 meters at Challenger Deep.
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Pressure there is 1,086 bar, 8 tons per square inch.
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People assume the deep ocean is silent.
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It isn't.
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Hydrophones dropped into the Mariana Trench recorded a constant eerie acoustic environment.
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The low rumble of distant earthquakes, whale calls moaning down from miles above, the screech of shifting tectonic plates amplified by the trench walls.
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Researchers who first listened described it as sounding like a haunted house.
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The deepest place on Earth is not quiet.
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The Hadal snailfish is the deepest fish ever filmed.
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captured at 8,336 meters in a 2023 expedition led by marine biologist Alan Jameson at the University of Western Australia.
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Translucent.
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Organs visible through its skin.
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Cartilage skeleton because bone becomes brittle under this pressure.
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The apex predator of the Hadal food web.
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It looks like something biology was not supposed to produce.
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Below where snailfish survive, amphipods swarm, tiny shrimp-like creatures consuming whatever falls from the world above.
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Scientists found microplastics in their tissue.
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Even here, at nearly 11 kilometers below the surface, in the most remote place on Earth, we have already arrived.
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Researchers also found xenophiophores in Challenger Deep, single-celled organisms growing to the size of a dinner plate.
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One cell, plate-sized, in total darkness under eight tons of pressure.
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We have mapped roughly 25% of the ocean floor according to the Seabed 2030 Initiative.
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The remaining 75% is completely unmapped dark territory.
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We know more about the surface of the moon.
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And based on what the explored 25% contains, glowing creatures with no known relatives, fish that fuse their bodies together, coral that eats flesh.
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The remaining 75% has no obligation to be less strange.
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Before you go, if you enjoyed learning about the hidden world beneath the ocean, consider checking out Planet Wild.
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See them in action with their mission-fighting ocean plastic right here.
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Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Does the OCEAN Get Creepier the Deeper You Go?”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: ocean, meters, creature, Earth, below. This video has 136 sentences and 1538 words to shadow. The speech runs for 9:47. The speaker talks at a natural 157 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 74% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| meter noun | /ˈmitəɹ/ | A device that measures things. |
| trench noun | /ˈtɹɛnt͡ʃ/ | A long, narrow ditch or hole in the ground; either manmade, or formed naturally through erosion or tectonic plate movement. |
| sunlight noun | /ˈsʌnˌlaɪt/ | All the electromagnetic radiation given off by the Sun; especially, that in the visible spectrum and that bathes the Earth. |
| prey noun | /pɹeɪ/ | That which is or may be seized by animals to be devoured. |
| biologist noun | /baɪˈɒləd͡ʒɪst/ | A student or professor of biology; one versed in the science of biology. |
| organism noun | /ˈɔɹ.ɡəˌnɪz.əm/ | A discrete and complete living thing, such as animal, plant, fungus or microorganism. |
| resemble verb | /ɹɪˈzɛmbəl/ | To be like or similar to (something); to represent as similar. |
| ecosystem noun | /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/ | A system formed by an ecological community and its environment that functions as a unit. |
| coral noun | /ˈkɔɹəl/ | Any of many species of marine invertebrates in the class Anthozoa, most of which build hard calcium carbonate skeletons and form colonies, or a colony… |
| glow verb | /ɡloʊ/ | To emit heat and light without a flame. |
| researcher noun | /ˈɹiˌsɝ.t͡ʃɚ/ | One who researches. |
| detect verb | /dɪˈtɛkt/ | To discover or find by careful search, examination, or probing. |
| bioluminescent adjective | Exhibiting bioluminescence. | |
| carbonate noun | /ˈkɑɹbəneɪt/ | Any salt or ester of carbonic acid. |
| dissolve verb | /dɪˈzɑlv/ | To terminate a union of multiple members actively, as by disbanding. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). |
| come back verb | To return to a place. |
| hold together verb | To cause to stay together. |
| pull apart verb | To become separated as a result of pulling. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have stood · We've mapped · has been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | had been damaged · weren't found · were found |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 11 contractions and reduced forms, such as doesn't, isn't, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: stealth /stɛlθ/, lethal /ˈliː.θəl/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: shrimp /ʃɹɪmp/, flesh /flɛʃ/, anglerfish /ˈæŋɡlɚˌfɪʃ/, specialize /ˈspɛʃəˌlaɪz/, evolutionary /ˌiː.vəˈluː.ʃən.ɛɹ.i/
- Long words — get the stress right: biologist /baɪˈɒləd͡ʒɪst/, organism /ˈɔɹ.ɡəˌnɪz.əm/, ecosystem /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/, invisible /ɪnˈvɪzəb(ə)l/, simultaneously /ˌsaɪmlˈteɪnɪəsli/
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 meter, trench, sunlight.
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.