Shadowing Practice: Yorkshire Is Hiding Something Nobody Talks About - Learn English Speaking with Video
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This quiet, boggy field in North Yorkshire doesn't look like anything.
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But 11 ,000 years ago, people lived here, and they left behind the oldest house ever found in Britain,
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and headdresses made from the skulls of deer.
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This is older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids.
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It was already ancient, by thousands of years, before a single
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Viking ever set foot in England.
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You came for the Vikings.
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On this ground, the Vikings are the newcomers.
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Yorkshire is the one place everyone thinks they know, the Moors, the Flatcaps, the Viking City.
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You don't know the half of it, and the half you don't know is the half nobody talks about.
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The man who made Europe Christian was crowned emperor here, not in Rome.
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There's a stream so quiet you could step across it that has, by reputation, never given a body back.
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And the first moving picture in human history was shot in
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a Yorkshire back garden by a man who then vanished off the face of the earth.
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Every one of these is on the record.
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This is Yorkshire, England's biggest county, so proud it flies its own flag and keeps its own holiday.
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And these are the 15 things it quietly handed the rest of the world.
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We're counting down to the one that fixed the deadliest problem in the history of the sea.
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Let's start where
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Britain itself started.
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Number 15.
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The site is called Starcar, near Scarborough, and it is one of the most important stone age sites
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in all of europe people settled here around 9 000 years
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before christ hunter gatherers living at the edge of a long
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vanished lake just as the last ice age loosened its grip
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they left behind the earliest known house in britain
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and the oldest worked timber carpentry found anywhere in europe
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and they left something stranger more than 20 headdresses made from red deer skulls, antlers still attached, the bone hollowed out to be worn.
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Nobody is certain whether they were for hunting or for ritual.
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11 ,000 years on, a field most people would drive past without a glance holds the oldest front door in the country.
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Number 14.
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Long before the Norse, Yorkshire was already old.
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Outside Boroughbridge stand the Devil's Arrows.
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Three gritstone giants hauled upright in the Bronze Age, the tallest well over 20 feet.
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In the churchyard at Rudston stands the tallest standing stone in the whole
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United Kingdom, a Neolithic monolith that was raised on that spot thousands of years before the church was ever built beside it.
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And near Rippon lie the Thornborough Hengis, three enormous aligned earthworks so impressive they're called the Stonehenge of the North,
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once coated in white gypsum so they'd shine across the plain.
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This was sacred ground when the Vikings everyone pictures were still 3 ,000 years in the future.
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Number 13 Long before the chocolate and the railways, the city of York was one of the most important places in the entire Roman Empire,
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a northern capital the Romans called Iboricum.
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For stretches of time, the empire was effectively run from here, and in the year 306, something happened in York that bent the course of history.
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The Emperor Constantius died here while on campaign, and his soldiers, on the spot, declared his son the new emperor.
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That son was Constantine, who would end the persecution of Christians, set that religion on the road to conquering Europe,
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and build a new capital in the east we now call Istanbul.
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One of the hinge moments of the last 2 ,000 years happened on a patch of ground in North Yorkshire.
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Number 12.
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When the Vikings swept into England in the 9th century, they didn't just raid Yorkshire, they conquered it and stayed to rule.
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York became Jorvik, the capital of a Norse kingdom that ran much of the north for the better part of a century.
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That century is still printed on the map.
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The word riding, the name for each of Yorkshire's three historic divisions, comes from an Old Norse word meaning a third.
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Hundreds of town names and a great deal of the old Yorkshire dialect are Scandinavian at the root, not English.
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So when people say Yorkshire feels like its own country with its own way of speaking, they're not imagining it.
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For a real chapter of history, it genuinely was a separate kingdom, ruled from a Viking city in a Viking tongue.
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Number 11.
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On the slopes of a mountain called Ingleborough, in the Dales, there's a hole in the ground you could walk straight past.
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It's called Gaping Gill, and it's one of the largest underground chambers in Britain.
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The main hall is so vast you could fit
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York Minster, the enormous medieval cathedral, inside it, with room to spare.
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A stream pours over the lip and drops around 320 feet to the cavern floor.
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making it the tallest unbroken waterfall in England hidden entirely beneath a field.
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For most of the year it belongs to expert cavers.
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But twice a year, local clubs rig up a winch,
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and ordinary people are lowered on a rope through the waterfall's spray into a cathedral of stone
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that almost nobody walking the fell above knows is there.
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Quick pause, four facts in.
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And if you're enjoying this, the like button genuinely helps.
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Back to it.
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Number 10.
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Near Bolton Abbey, the broad river wharf suddenly squeezes into a gap barely wide enough to step across.
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It looks harmless, a stream a child could jump.
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It's called the strid, and it is one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world.
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What the surface hides is the river turned on its side.
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The channel is far deeper than it is wide.
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The banks undercut into drowned caverns, the current of vertical chaos beneath a calm -looking top.
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The grim local saying is that the strid has never given back anyone who fell in.
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It's a reminder that in Yorkshire, the quiet -looking things are exactly the ones to respect.
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Number 9.
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In a wooded valley near Ripon stand the remains of Fountain's Abbey, the largest monastic ruin in Britain.
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It was founded in 1132 by 13 monks who broke away from a wealthier abbey in York, wanting a simpler life.
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What they built became one of the richest religious houses in the country, its fortune pouring in from vast flocks of sheep.
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Then, in the 1530s, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, and England's abbeys were stripped and abandoned in a few short years.
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Fountains fell silent.
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But what survives is startling.
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The Abbey Church still standing, almost to its full height, roofless and open to the sky, its nave the length of a football pitch.
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A World Heritage Site and one of the most atmospheric places in the country, sitting quietly out of sight of the road.
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Number 8.
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Whitby is a cluster of red roofs and fishing boats huddled under a ruined abbey on the North Yorkshire coast.
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In 1890, an Irish theatre manager called Bram Stoker took a holiday there, climbed the 199 steps to the clifftop churchyard,
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heard sailors talk of a foreign ship wrecked on the beach with its crew mysteriously dead,
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and found the name Dracula in a book in the town library.
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Whitby is where his vampire first sets foot in England.
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A century earlier, the same harbour shaped a very different story.
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A young James Cook learned to handle a ship in this port, and the vessel he later sailed to Australia and New Zealand,
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the Endeavour, was built right here in Whitby as a humble coal carrier.
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Dracula and the man who mapped the Pacific from one small fishing town.
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Number 7.
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Between the towns of Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell sits an area barely nine miles across, known as the Rhubarb Triangle.
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At its peak it grew around 90 % of the entire world's forced rhubarb, and the way it's grown is genuinely strange.
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The plants are left out in the cold fields for two winters, then the roots are moved into pitch -black heated sheds.
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Starved of light, the rhubarb hunts for it, shooting upwards so fast that in the silence of the shed,
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you can hear it creak and pop as it grows.
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It has to be picked by hand, by candlelight, because a single burst of daylight would toughen the delicate pink stems.
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The result is prized enough that Yorkshire, forced rhubarb, now carries the same protected status as champagne.
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Football feels like it belongs to everyone now, so it's easy to forget someone had to invent the modern game,
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and a lot of that happened in Sheffield.
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In 1857, a group of local cricketers wanting something to do over winter founded Sheffield Football Club.
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FIFA recognises it as the oldest football club in the world still playing today, and they did far more than kick a ball about.
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To settle how the game should actually work, they wrote the Sheffield Rules, and those rules gave us things we now treat as obvious.
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Corners, free kicks and heading the ball.
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When the National Football Association drew up its own laws a few years later, it borrowed heavily from Sheffield.
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So the next time you watch a match anywhere on earth,
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part of what you're watching was drafted by Yorkshiremen who just wanted a kickabout in the cold.
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Number 5.
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Ask who invented cinema and you'll hear Edison or the Lumiere brothers in France.
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The real story starts earlier, and in Yorkshire, in October 1888,
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a French inventor living in Leeds named Louis Le Prince pointed
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a single -lens camera he'd built himself at his family in a round hay garden and filmed them walking in a circle.
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It lasts barely two seconds.
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It is the oldest surviving film in the world, made years before the men usually credited with inventing cinema had shown anything.
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And then it turns strange.
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In 1890, just as Le Prince was about to reveal his work to the world, he boarded a train in France and vanished.
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No body, no luggage, no trace was ever found.
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The man who filmed the first moving images disappeared before he could take the credit.
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Number 4.
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Sheffield had been a city of steel and blades for centuries.
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But in 1913, one of its metallurgists changed the material world by accident.
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Harry Brearley had been handed a dull problem, gun barrels wearing out too fast, and was experimenting with adding chromium to steel.
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One rejected sample was tossed aside in the workshop.
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Weeks later, Brearley noticed that while the other offcuts had gone rusty, that one was still bright and clean.
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He had accidentally made a steel that would not rust.
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Stainless steel went on to remake the modern world.
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It's in your cutlery and your kitchen sink, in surgical instruments, in aircraft, in the shining cladding of skyscrapers.
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Almost every clean, gleaming surface in modern life descends from a sample a Sheffield scientist very nearly threw in the bin.
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Number 3.
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One foggy night in 1933, a man named Percy Shaw was driving home along a dark road near Halifax
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when his headlights caught the eyes of a cat on a fence, glowing back at him.
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It gave him an idea that would go on to save countless lives.
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Shaw built a small reflective stud to sit in the middle of the road,
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glass beads in a rubber housing that catch a car's headlights and bounce the light straight back.
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He called them cat's eyes.
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The clever part was the rubber, when a wheel presses the stud down, it dips and wipes itself clean with rainwater, so it never clouds over.
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He patented it in 1934, and nearly a century on, those glowing studs still guide drivers through the dark all over the world.
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Number 2.
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The story of flight is supposed to begin in America in 1903.
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In truth, most of the hard thinking was done a lifetime earlier, on an estate near Scarborough.
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Sir George Cayley, around the year 1800, was the first to correctly identify the four forces acting on any flying machine – lift,
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weight, thrust and drag.
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He understood that flapping like a bird was a dead end and that a fixed wing was the answer, the basic idea behind every aeroplane since.
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And he didn't stop at theory. In 1853, Cayley built a full -size glider
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and sent his own reluctant coachman soaring across a yorkshire valley
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the first time in history a person flew in a heavier than air machine the coachman survived
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and promptly resigned the blueprint for flight was drawn in yorkshire half a century early number one
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we started with an emperor made in york
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we end with a carpenter's son who saved the world's sailors for centuries ships could find their latitude but never their longitude,
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how far east or west they were.
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It killed sailors by the thousand, wrecking ships on rocks they thought were miles away.
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The finest minds in Europe, Newton among them, were sure the answer lay in the stars.
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The man who cracked it was a self -taught clockmaker born near Wakefield, John Harrison.
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He realized that if you carried your home port's exact time across the ocean and compared it to the local time, you could fix your position.
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The trouble was that no clock could keep true time on a heaving,
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salt -soaked ship, so Harrison gave most of his life to building one that could,
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until it lost barely a few seconds on a voyage of weeks.
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Sit with what this one county gave the world, the oldest home in Britain, the emperor who remade belief,
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a Viking kingdom, the first film ever shot, the metal your kitchen is made of, flight, sketched half a century early,
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and a Yorkshire clock that finally told sailors where on earth they stood, the same job every satellite guiding your phone home tonight still does.
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You've used Yorkshire today, you just never knew whose county you had to thank, So out of all 15, which one genuinely got you?
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And if you want the next county taken apart like this one, subscribe and stick around.
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I'll see you there.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Yorkshire Is Hiding Something Nobody Talks About”. This video has 169 sentences and 2334 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:20. The speaker talks at a natural 163 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 77% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| emperor noun | /ˈɛmp(ə)ɹə/ | The male monarch or ruler of an empire. |
| abbey noun | /ˈæbi/ | The office or dominion of an abbot or abbess. |
| genuinely adverb | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/ | In a genuine manner; truthfully, truly. |
| sailor noun | /ˈseɪ.lɚ/ | A person who sails; one whose occupation is sailing or navigating ships or other waterborne craft. |
| vast adjective | /væst/ | Very large or wide (literally or figuratively). |
| clock noun | /klɑk/ | A chronometer, an instrument that measures time, particularly the time of day. |
| pitch noun | /pɪt͡ʃ/ | A throw; a toss; a cast, as of something from the hand. |
| belong verb | /bɪˈlɒŋ/ | To have its proper place. |
| settle verb | /ˈsɛtəl/ | To determine (something which was exposed to doubt or question); to resolve conclusively; to set or fix (a time, an order of succession, etc). |
| stretch verb | /stɹɛt͡ʃ/ | To lengthen by pulling. |
| ruin noun | /ˈɹuː.ɪn/ | The remains of a destroyed or dilapidated construction, such as a house or castle. |
| enormous adjective | /ɪˈnɔː.məs/ | Extremely large; greatly exceeding the common size, extent, etc. |
| beneath | /bɪˈniːθ/ | Below. |
| rubber noun | /ˈɹʌbɚ/ | Pliable material derived from the sap of the rubber tree; a hydrocarbon biopolymer of isoprene. |
| cinema noun | /ˈsɪn.ə.mə/ | A movie theatre, a movie house. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| leave behind verb | To abandon. | |
| do over verb | /ˈduˌoʊvɚ/ | To cover with; to smear or spread on to. |
| draw up verb | To compose (a document), especially following a standard form; prepare a plan. | |
| give back verb | To return, restore (a thing to its original owner or location etc.). | |
| stick around verb | To stay; to linger; to remain. | |
| take apart verb | To dismantle something into its component pieces. | |
| wear out verb | To cause (something) to become damaged, useless, or ineffective through continued use, especially hard, heavy, or careless use. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was crowned · was shot · is called |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | man who made · man who then · anyone who fell |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 15 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, don't, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: beneath /bɪˈniːθ/, cathedral /kəˈθiːdɹəl/, thrust /θɹʌst/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: shine /ʃaɪn/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, sheep /ˈʃiːp/, workshop /ˈwɝk.ʃɑp/, champagne /ʃæmˈpeɪn/
- Long words — get the stress right: genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, accidentally /ˌæk.sɪˈdɛnt(ə)li/
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 emperor, abbey, genuinely.
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.