Shadowing Practice: Why is everything getting so expensive? - Learn English Speaking with Video

on my way to the grocery store mentally preparing myself for the sticker shock here

we are wish me luck got my diapers

it might be something else for you for me it's diapers is really where

like i notice inflation the most one of the things that's interesting about this particular period of inflation

that we're in is this is a worldwide phenomenon hi folks my question is about inflation.

What is the real cause?

Is it just COVID or we have others to blame?

Thank you.

Diapers in the U .S., food in Ghana, and home prices in India.

What actually caused all this inflation?

And is there something we can do about it?

If you watch cable news in the U .S., you will see one explanation for inflation that gets a lot of attention.

There's still too much money chasing too few goods.

Too much money chasing too few goods.

Say I have a car dealership.

Say we're in a global pandemic.

Factories are shutting down periodically and I'm just not able to keep as many cars on my lot.

My inventory is low.

But at the same time, I have customers willing to spend money on my cars.

My inventory starts to dwindle and now there's more customers than there are cars.

So I can just increase the price.

Too much money chasing too few goods.

Economists like this guy, Larry Summers, he's been sounding the alarm bell about this kind of inflation from the beginning.

I am much more worried that we'll have inflation.

This is the least responsible macroeconomic policies we've had in the last 40 years.

He is talking about those pandemic relief checks.

Before we can figure out if Larry Summers is right,

We need to take a closer look at exactly how inflation is measured in the first place.

Once a month, the U .S.

Bureau of Labor Statistics puts together what it calls a market basket.

These data are specific to the U .S., but you can find similar numbers around the world.

The BLS looks at the prices for different goods and services like housing, electricity, apparel, prescription drugs, bakery products, dairy.

They look at the price we're paying this month

and then compare it to the price for same good or service last month or last year.

Then they calculate a single percentage that captures all of that change.

And that's the Consumer Price Index, or CPI.

And it's true, the Consumer Price Index has been rising steadily for the past couple of years.

Here's when those stimulus checks went out.

But now let's take a closer look at some of the specific goods and services that make up the CPI.

Some things are way more expensive than this time last year.

Like fuel oil, airline fares, gas, baked goods, dairy products.

But there is some stuff that's held fairly steady.

In a normal healthy economy, the Federal Reserve expects for inflation to be about 2 % a year.

And for stuff like clothing, prescription drugs, and education, prices are only slightly above that 2 % mark.

For used cars and trucks, gasoline and communication, that's your phone plan, internet, streaming, prices are actually lower than this time last year.

It seems a bit more complicated than simply people have too much money.

If that were the only problem, wouldn't everything be more expensive?

So unfortunately for me, the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't actually track the price of diapers as part of the CPI.

But I did find a private research firm, Nielsen IQ, that does.

So Nielsen looks at something called the unit price.

Basically they take the box of diapers, divide it by how many diapers are in the box, and that gives you the unit price.

They get a bunch of different brands and then come up with this average.

So in 2019, the average unit price for diapers was 16 .1 cents.

If prices had gone up at that expected 2 % annual inflation rate, January of 2023 would have seen me paying 17 .4 cents per diaper.

But of course, that's not what the last few years have looked like.

If the price of diapers had increased at the same rate as the CPI, I would be paying 19 cents per diaper in January of 2023.

But no, no, no, no, I am currently paying 21 cents per diaper, an increase of over 30%.

So why is it that the price of diapers is rising so much faster than the price of all these other goods?

You can think of the cost of a business in a couple of ways, right?

There's the wages that you pay for workers.

There are investments in capital, in the machinery itself.

And all of that adds up to the cost of production.

And then there's the cost that you actually sell the good at.

And the difference between those two costs are called a markup.

One of the things that makes it difficult to report on inflation is that reporters and consumers,

we don't know how much it costs companies to pay their workers.

We don't know how much it costs them to import the materials that they need.

But we can guess.

Take labor costs, for example.

We know that from 2019 to 2023, the average hourly wage for someone working in manufacturing rose by about 17%.

Now, that is faster than what you would expect under normal 2 % annual inflation.

But when you consider the fact that corporations have successfully kept wages

so low in the years leading up to that point that they were actually declining relative to inflation,

this recent bump starts to look more like a kind of return to normalcy.

Okay, but what about the cost of materials?

I went to the Pampers website and looked at what goes into making a diaper.

It turns out this stuff is made out of wood

and these are all plastics which are made by refining petroleum in slightly different ways.

According to the Federal Reserve's producer price index, the average price for both of these materials, wood pulp and plastic products,

has risen significantly over the past five years, but both of these rising input costs still don't completely explain the price hike in diapers.

One of the reasons I really wanted to talk to Rakeen is

that she and her colleagues have listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of earnings calls.

What we found is big corporations who are jacking up prices beyond what their production costs would justify.

These are some transcripts of those earnings calls that Rakeen and her colleagues have been listening to.

The CEO of Hostess Brands, for example, says of these price hikes, consumers get used to it.

When all prices go up, it helps.

A Tyson Foods executive claimed that price increases for beef more than offset the higher costs.

Visa's CEO says that, historically, inflation has been a positive for us.

All three of these corporations experienced record profits over the past three years.

But what they did with those profits is instructive.

They paid that money out to their shareholders and raised prices for the rest of us.

So we have our three theories for this current moment of inflation.

Too much money floating around, supply shocks, and massive markups.

Unfortunately, it's probably going to be months

or maybe even years before we have all of the data necessary to figure out

which one of these three explanations holds the most weight.

But there are still things we can do to help bring prices down.

When we think of inflation in a really singular way,

I think that really limits the vast panoply of tools that we actually have to fight this problem.

100

Let's start with a tool that the Federal Reserve has already busted out, raising interest rates.

101

The way that works is it makes it more expensive for companies to borrow money,

102

which makes it harder for them to invest in new projects and hire new people.

103

So far, the Fed has raised interest rates eight times, and the unemployment rate has stayed pretty low.

104

But that could change if the Fed keeps raising rates.

105

The last time inflation got super high, back in the early 80s, the Fed did huge interest rate hikes, and inflation did go down.

106

But look what happened to unemployment.

107

It shot way up.

108

By 1982, 1 in 10 people were out of work.

109

In the last month of 2022, prices were starting to come down in some key areas.

110

Dairy, fruits and veggies, airline fares.

111

Prices for these two items, gasoline and fuel oil, are way down.

112

And the reason likely has very little to do with raising interest rates.

113

Over the past 12 months, President Biden released millions of barrels of oil from the U .S.

114

emergency stockpile, which increased global supply and drove down the price.

115

There's precedent for doing this in other areas of the economy.

116

In 1939, U .S.

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President Franklin Roosevelt asked

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Congress for nearly $900 million to help the airline industry quadruple their output.

119

Ships, planes, tanks, guns.

120

That is our purpose and our pledge.

121

Something Rakeen told me about diapers got me thinking about a third way we might start bringing prices down.

122

Turns out that somewhere between 70 % and 80 % of all the diapers produced in the U .S.

123

are made by two companies.

124

This honestly threw me a little bit, but then I went back and looked at some of that footage that I shot in the grocery store.

125

Loves, Pampers, Ninjamas — those are all made by Procter & Gamble.

126

Huggies, Pull -Ups, Good Nights — all made by Kimberly Clark.

127

So while it looks like parents have a lot of choices in the diaper aisle, we actually don't.

128

Policymakers have allowed really rampant deregulation that has facilitated these companies having

129

so much power in a way that they can jack up prices without any cost to them.

130

That supply dial and that corporate power dial, we've let them get dusty.

131

We do not, and we never did, have to throw workers under the bus in order to bring down prices.

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I'll see you next time.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Why is everything getting so expensive?”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: price, inflation, diaper, cost, rate. This video has 124 sentences and 1663 words to shadow. The speech runs for 9:33. The speaker talks at a natural 174 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 84% 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
inflation noun	/ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/	An act, instance of, or state of expansion or increase in size, especially by injection of a gas or liquid.
chase verb	/t͡ʃeɪs/	To follow at speed.
wage noun	/weɪd͡ʒ/	An amount of money paid to a worker for a specified quantity of work, usually calculated on an hourly basis and expressed in an amount of money per hour.
worker noun	/ˈwɝ.kɚ/	One who works: a person who performs labor for a living; traditionally, especially, manual labor.
dairy noun	/ˈdɛə.ɹi/	(also dairy products or dairy produce) Products produced from milk.
airline noun	/ˈɛɹˌlaɪn/	A company that flies airplanes to transport people and goods.
hike noun	/haɪk/	A long walk, usually for pleasure or exercise.
shock noun	/ʃɔk/	A sudden, heavy impact.
explanation noun	/ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/	The act or process of explaining.
earnings noun		Wages, money earned, income.
unemployment noun	/ʌn.ɪmˈplɔɪ.mənt/	The state of having no job; joblessness.
inventory noun	/ˈɪn.vən.tɹi/	The stock of an item on hand at a particular location or business.
grocery noun	/ˈɡɹəʊ.s(ə.)ɹi/	Retail foodstuffs and other household supplies.
prescription noun	/pɹəˈskɹɪp.ʃən/	A written order from an authorized medical practitioner for provision of a medicine or other treatment, such as (ophthalmology) the specific lenses needed for…
colleague noun	/ˈkɒliːɡ/	A fellow member of a profession, staff, academic faculty or other organization; an associate, a workmate.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
turn out verb	To end up; to result.
add up to verb	To have a particular effect in combination.
bring down verb	To make (a ruler or government) lose their position of power.
come up with verb	To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it.
drive down verb	To cause or force a price, quantity, rate, etc. to decrease.
go back verb	To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time.
go down verb	To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one.

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	he's been sounding · has been rising · have been listening
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	we've had · have looked · has risen
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is measured · are called · is made

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 13 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, we're, we've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, shock /ʃɔk/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, prescription /pɹəˈskɹɪp.ʃən/, capture /ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/
Long words — get the stress right: explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, unemployment /ʌn.ɪmˈplɔɪ.mənt/, complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/, successfully /səkˈsɛs.fə.li/, electricity /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/

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 inflation, chase, wage.

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.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?