Luyện nói tiếng Anh bằng Shadowing qua video: What's The Most Expensive Thing Ever?
Đang tạo bài học...
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If you saved a billion dollars every single day for your entire life,
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you still wouldn't come close to affording the most expensive thing ever.
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But to find out what that is, we'll be going on a journey through the most valuable things in existence, all starting with you.
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The raw ingredients needed to make a human cost only $152,000, but if that's out of budget you could just boil down a pig,
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because chemically you're pretty much the same, they're just slightly tastier.
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Since you're already fully assembled, the government officially values you at 14.2 million.
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And they're lowballing you, because if someone hypothetically harvested all your organs, they could make 45 million.
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You're pretty expensive.
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But to find the most expensive thing ever, we need to look at much costlier items, with the next being a well-known painting that became famous for all the wrong reasons.
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It's 1503 in Italy.
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A rich silk merchant goes up to a painter and says, Could you make me a painting of my wife?
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Sure.
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Give me like, uh, like two weeks.
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Leonardo da Vinci never fully finished that painting, but he actually sold it right before he died to the king of France.
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And it stayed in the bedrooms of powerful guys until ending up at a museum where no one cared.
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Until it got stolen, then found, then taken on a PR campaign, and now this 30-inch plank of wood smeared with colored oil is valued at $1 billion.
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But nature's greatest work of art was found by complete accident.
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Sir Thomas Major Cullinan dug a hole in the ground and filled it with Africans to mine rocks for him.
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And in 1905, a diamond was found.
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And it happened to be the biggest diamond ever.
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colorless, zero imperfections, the most chemically perfect rock produced by the planet.
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And the guy who found it was this guy, the mine's manager.
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He was just going for a stroll
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when he randomly saw it in the wall and he got a nice check for it.
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Then the rock got cut up and shipped in a literal postal box to more white people.
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The total value of this rock is estimated at $2 billion, making it the most expensive luxury item ever thanks to its rarity and prestige.
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But the most expensive land ever is something you would never expect.
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France.
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Owned all this land in 1803, and the United States wanted a little piece of it.
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So they went over to France with 10 million dollars and said, Can we buy a little piece of your land?
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France's leader and conqueror of Europe, Napoleon, was like, How about you pay me 15 million?
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For the whole thing.
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Y-yes?
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The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States at the cost of 4 cents per acre.
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This land today is worth thousands per acre, making it widely considered the single greatest land purchase in history.
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As long as you don't ask the people originally living there.
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But the Louisiana Purchase wasn't the most expensive in history.
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There was a piece of land that cost way more than the entire American Midwest, and it's this.
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This plot of land with a parking lot that cost 3 billion dollars.
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Why did this parking lot cost more than a fifth of the United States?
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Well back then, the Louisiana Purchase was a gamble on an uncharted frontier.
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This modern-day plot of land in the center of one of
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the most valuable financial districts on earth where the government artificially restricts the land supply was just a much safer investment.
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Land is valued for its potential, but the houses we put on top of the land are somehow even more expensive.
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In 2019, a finance guy spent $240 million on a high-altitude hollow brick in New York City that he doesn't even live in.
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All these buildings are half empty
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because the rich people buying them are just treating them as investments
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If they actually needed a place to stay they would just do what the richest guy in India did
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and spend two billion dollars Erecting their own personal monument
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that has a dark secret This is Antilia the most expensive
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private residence in the world valued today at 4.6 billion It
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has a 168 car garage three helipads a snow room
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and the entire thing was built on an orphanage And if you're wondering where the orphans went, the house also has 600 servants.
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There are investments, there are status symbols, but the most expensive house ever is the hardest to truly value.
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Its purchase price?
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21,000 pounds in 1761.
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When King George III bought Buckingham House, it was just a little shack for him to store his wife.
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But after a few hundred years of renovations and millions in state funding, it became a 775 room palace.
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Its value is estimated at 4.9 billion pounds, but this is just a guess based on its prime location and historical significance.
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To find something more valuable than any house, we just need to scale up to the most impressive and disastrous structures in the world.
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Megaprojects The US Interstate Highway System is the most expensive megaproject in history, costing an inflation adjusted $634 billion.
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But it was worth it.
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For every $1 of that cost, it's returned $6 in economic output.
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This project had a clear problem, a clear plan, and a clear result.
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Pretty straightforward.
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In 2021, Saudi Arabia started building a 110-mile line-shaped city made out of Empire State building tall glass mirrors.
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It was supposed to cost $500 billion and be done by 2030.
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But now the date is maybe 2080, and the cost is maybe 8.8 trillion.
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The line will be the most expensive megaproject ever, if it actually gets built. If.
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45 Mount Everest's above all of this is the International Space Station, the most expensive single object ever built by humans.
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But its cost is the least impressive thing about it.
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See legendary megaprojects like the pyramids represent what one civilization could do.
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The ISS represents what every civilization together could do.
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It took hundreds of thousands of experts from all over the world to manufacture parts
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that fit together perfectly when assembled in an empty void that would kill a human in 90 seconds.
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This is the greatest masterpiece ever built by humans, and it shows what can be accomplished when the world comes together.
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But it's way more costly when the world comes apart.
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War is pretty expensive.
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The American Civil War cost so much that to fund it, the government had to invent paper money and the federal income tax.
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God damn it!
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World War I cost so much that Germany was still paying it off until 2010, and World War II was the most expensive conflict in history.
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The full global cost of this war has never been calculated, but it involved every major power devoting a majority of their entire economy to destruction.
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By the end of the war, 70 million were dead, a majority being civilians, and most of the involved countries were in shambles.
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Military spending as a percentage of GDP has never come close to World War 2 level since, and if it ever does, we probably won't be aware.
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War is pretty expensive.
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World War 2 military spending was 25 trillion in today's dollars, but the cost of its destruction is unknown.
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All the things in this video have value for different reasons, but the most expensive thing ever is the most unusual.
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Every single particle has an antiparticle with an opposite charge.
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When they touch, they annihilate and release energy.
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A single gram of antimatter could release more energy than three Hiroshima bombs.
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Bananas.
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Every 75 minutes, an atom in a banana decays, producing one single particle of antimatter.
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But the particle is so small that if you had one banana for every human that has ever existed,
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you would have to wait 97 times the age of the universe to produce one gram of antimatter.
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But that still wouldn't work, because the banana antimatter particles only exist for 125 picoseconds, which is one billionth of a blink.
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The only way to make a meaningful amount of antimatter is
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by firing tiny particles at almost the speed of light into a metal rod, then catching the debris in a vacuum.
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There's currently only one facility that does this, and in its entire existence, it's made less than 10 billionths of a gram of antimatter,
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which would make enough energy to power a light bulb for 4 hours.
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Antimatter could be the most efficient energy source ever, and studying it could answer questions about how the universe was formed.
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But it's so difficult to make that NASA estimates one gram would cost 62.5 trillion.
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But if we ever somehow managed to get a gram of antimatter, wouldn't the most expensive thing be whoever owns the antimatter?
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Which would probably be a country, maybe the United States, which is already worth 180 trillion.
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But then, the Earth is worth 5 quadrillion.
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And now that we're in space, there are asteroids floating around with quintillions worth of gold and platinum, and the sun is made of gas worth 30 no-nillion.
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The universe is filled with an infinite amount of wealth, all of which we got for free.
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Từ vựng và ghi chú luyện nói cho bài học này
Bài luyện nói trình độ B2 này dựa trên video “What's The Most Expensive Thing Ever?”. Những từ được nhắc lại nhiều nhất trong bài: expensive, cost, land, antimatter, billion. Video này có 106 câu và 1526 từ để luyện shadowing. Phần lời nói dài 9:28. Người nói nói với tốc độ tự nhiên, khoảng 161 từ mỗi phút, gần với hội thoại hằng ngày. 84% số từ nằm trong 3.000 từ tiếng Anh thông dụng nhất; phần còn lại nên xem trước khi luyện.
Từ vựng quan trọng trong video
15 từ khó nhất trong video, kèm phiên âm và nghĩa:
| Từ | Phiên âm | Nghĩa |
|---|---|---|
| antimatter danh từ | /ˈæn.tiˌmæt.ɚ/ | phản vật chất |
| gram danh từ | /ˈɡɹæm/ | gam |
| particle danh từ | /ˈpɑɹtək(ə)l/ | hạt |
| banana danh từ | /bəˈnænə/ | (trái) chuối, (quả) chuối |
| assemble động từ | /əˈsɛm.bəl/ | tập hợp |
| acre danh từ | /ˈeɪ.kɚ/ | mẫu Anh, mẫu tây |
| civilization danh từ | /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/ | văn minh |
| orphanage danh từ | /ˈɔː(ɹ)fənɪd͡ʒ/ | trại trẻ mồ côi, cô nhi viện |
| stroll động từ | /stɹoʊl/ | đi dạo, dạo |
| asteroid danh từ | /ˈæst(ə)ɹɔɪd/ | tiểu hành tinh |
| invent động từ | /ɪnˈvɛnt/ | phát minh |
| orphan danh từ | /ˈɔɹfən/ | trẻ mồ côi, cô nhi |
| atom danh từ | /ˈætəm/ | nguyên tử |
| blink động từ | /ˈblɪŋk/ | nhấp nháy |
| ingredient danh từ | /ɪnˈɡɹiːdi.ənt/ | thành phần |
Ngữ pháp trong video
Những cấu trúc người nói dùng nhiều nhất, kèm đúng cụm từ trong video:
| Cấu trúc | Trong video |
|---|---|
| Câu điều kiện if + mệnh đề, will/would + động từ — điều kiện và kết quả | if it ever does, we probably won't be |
| Câu bị động be + quá khứ phân từ — nhấn vào việc xảy ra, không phải người làm | is valued · was found · is estimated |
| Thì hiện tại hoàn thành have/has + quá khứ phân từ — việc đã xảy ra nhưng còn liên quan đến hiện tại | has never been calculated · has never come · has ever existed |
| Mệnh đề quan hệ who / which + mệnh đề — thêm thông tin về người hoặc vật | guy who found · picoseconds, which is · States, which is |
Phát âm cần chú ý
Người nói dùng 15 dạng rút gọn, ví dụ you're, wouldn't, they're. Hãy nói theo dạng ngắn đúng như bạn nghe.
- Âm “sh” và “zh”: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, imperfection /ɪmpɚˈfɛkʃən/, shambles /ˈʃæmbəlz/, renovation /ɹɛnəˈveɪʃən/, accomplish /əˈkɑm.plɪʃ/
- Từ dài — đặt trọng âm cho đúng: antimatter /ˈæn.tiˌmæt.ɚ/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, annihilate /əˈnaɪ.ə.leɪt/, antiparticle /ˈæntiˌpɑ(ɹ)tɪkəl/, imperfection /ɪmpɚˈfɛkʃən/
Những âm người Việt thường gặp khó:
- Cụm phụ âm cuối — đọc đủ từng âm, đừng nuốt âm cuối: billionth /ˈbɪl.i.ənθ/, picosecond /ˈpiː.kəʊˌsɛk.ənd/, shambles /ˈʃæmbəlz/, invent /ɪnˈvɛnt/, bulb /ˈbʌlb/
- Âm /tʃ/, /dʒ/ và /ʒ/ — tiếng Việt không có, đừng đọc thành “ch” hay “gi”: orphanage /ˈɔː(ɹ)fənɪd͡ʒ/, prestige /pɹɛsˈtiːd͡ʒ/, adjust /əˈd͡ʒʌst/, merchant /ˈmɝt͡ʃənt/
- Âm /æ/ — mở miệng rộng hơn âm “e”: antimatter /ˈæn.tiˌmæt.ɚ/, gram /ˈɡɹæm/, banana /bəˈnænə/, antiparticle /ˈæntiˌpɑ(ɹ)tɪkəl/, helipad /ˈhɛ.liˌpæd/
Cách luyện với video này
- Nghe hết video một lần, chưa cần nói, và ghi lại những từ bạn chưa biết.
- Bắt đầu ở tốc độ 0,75×, nói đuổi từng câu, rồi quay lại tốc độ bình thường khi đã quen.
- Ghi âm giọng mình rồi so với bản gốc, chú ý các từ như antimatter, gram, particle.
Phương Pháp Shadowing Là Gì?
Shadowing là kỹ thuật học ngôn ngữ có cơ sở khoa học, ban đầu được phát triển cho chương trình đào tạo phiên dịch viên chuyên nghiệp và được phổ biến rộng rãi bởi nhà đa ngôn ngữ học Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Nguyên lý cốt lõi đơn giản nhưng cực kỳ hiệu quả: bạn nghe tiếng Anh của người bản xứ và lặp lại to ngay lập tức — như một "cái bóng" (shadow) đuổi theo người nói với độ trễ chỉ 1–2 giây. Khác với luyện ngữ pháp hay học từ vựng bị động, Shadowing buộc não bộ và cơ miệng phải đồng thời xử lý và tái tạo ngôn ngữ thực tế. Các nghiên cứu khoa học xác nhận phương pháp này cải thiện đáng kể phát âm, ngữ điệu, nhịp điệu, nối âm, kỹ năng nghe và độ lưu loát khi nói — đặc biệt hiệu quả cho người luyện IELTS Speaking và muốn giao tiếp tiếng Anh tự nhiên như người bản ngữ.