Learn how to use the verb "Carry"
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| Hi, everybody! My name is Alisha. |
| Welcome back to Know Your Verbs. In this lesson, we're going to talk about the verb "carry." Let's get started. |
| Let's begin with the basic definition of this verb. |
| The basic definition of "carry" is "to move while holding or supporting something." |
| Examples… |
| "Can you carry this bag?" |
| "I always carry a pen." |
| Okay, let's look at the conjugations of this verb. |
| Present: carry, carries |
| Past: carried |
| Past participle: carried |
| Progressive: carrying |
| Now, let's talk about some additional meanings for this verb. |
| The first additional meaning is to move a person or an object from one place to another. |
| Examples… |
| "Veins carry blood throughout the body!" |
| "The bus carried the children to school." |
| So here, we see objects and people being moved from one place to another through or via or by something else and we use the verb carry to describe that. In the first example sentence, "Veins carry blood throughout the body," veins are the, like, you can see them on your arm, usually blue colored. They're the kind of like pipes, I guess you could say, like imagine them as pipes that carry blood. So blood travels through the body through these veins, so we can say veins carry blood through the body. So, veins are the method through which blood moves throughout the body, so veins are carrying the blood, we kind of can imagine them in that way. They're carrying, they're responsible for carrying the blood. So we can say that veins are kind of responsible for moving blood around the body. We can use the verb "carry" to explain that. |
| In the second example sentence, the bus carried the kids to school, the bus is the method of transport for the kids, so the kids are moving from one place to another place. The bus is the method of movement, so the bus carried the kids to school. We can use "carry" to talk about this transportation. |
| The second additional meaning is "to have a gene or illness." |
| Examples… |
| "Rodents are known to carry rabies." |
| "Some people carry diseases they don't know about." |
| In the first example sentence, we see, "Rodents are known to carry rabies." So rodents are like small, like rats or mice, those kind of dirty sort of creatures, wild creatures. Rabies is a disease, a serious illness that like causes you to behave strangely and your body has really strange problems too and I won't talk about rabies that much, not so important here. But, rodents are known to carry rabies, so the… the small, like the biological parts, the things that cause rabies, they carry that illness. Rodents are known to carry. So it doesn't mean carry like a backpack really, but carry a gene or carry an illness, carry a sickness inside the body. In this case, rodents are known to carry the sickness that is rabies inside their bodies. |
| In the second example sentence, "Some people carry diseases they don't know about," it means some people have diseases in their body, but they don't know about the disease. So you can imagine like we carry the disease, we hold it in our body when we move around, but we don't know about it. We use the verb carry to talk about this. |
| Let's move on to the third meaning. |
| The third additional meaning is "to make something a success." |
| Examples… |
| "His leadership carried the team through a difficult time." |
| "Her performance carries the show." |
| So in both of these examples, we see that someone carried something, so someone caused something to be successful because of their actions or because of their leadership as we see in the first example sentence. So, his leadership carried the team through a difficult time means the team was successful in a difficult time because of his leadership, but we use the verb carry to mean that. |
| So, we can kind of imagine that this one person, in this case, his leadership, his leadership and his abilities to be a good leader, in other words, were kind of the thing that carried the team. So we can imagine the whole team is on top of this one guy's leadership's skills, so he is responsible for making the team a success in a difficult time, so we use carry to explain that. |
| In the second example sentence, "Her performance carried the show," it means, her performance was so good, it was so important that the show was a success because of it. So without her performance, maybe the show would not have been successful, but her performance was really, really good. Her performance made the show a success. Her performance carried the show. |
| The fourth meaning of this verb is "to reach a distance." |
| This could be like sound or it can be something physical. |
| Some examples of this… |
| "The sound of the thunder carried 20 km!" |
| "Ash from the volcano carried into the air." |
| So here, we're not actually carrying a physical object. In the first example sentence, it's sound travelling, so the sound of thunder carried 20 km. It means, we were able to hear the sound of thunder 20 km away from the source, so the sound carried, in other words. We use "carry" to refer to sound travelling a distance. |
| In the second example sentence, ash from the volcano carried into the air. It means the ash from the volcano moved into the air. We could even say like the ash from the volcano carried into the next city, for example, so it travelled into the next city, it travelled some distance, but we can use "carry" to talk about that as well. |
| Let's move on to some variations for this verb. |
| So the first variation is "to get carried away." |
| This means to get too excited or too involved in something. Usually, it has, like a positive meaning.We get carried away because we're excited about something, but let's look at some examples first. |
| "I got a little carried away baking last night." |
| "He got carried away listening to music. |
| Both of these examples are pretty innocent. In the first example sentence, we see, "I got a little carried away baking last night." It's like I baked too much last night. The idea is that I was too excited about my baking and I did too much or maybe I stayed up too late baking something. I got carried away with it. I did too much of it because I was so interested in this thing. |
| In the second example sentence, "He got carried away listening to music." It maybe means, he's spent too much time listening to music. Maybe, he forgot to do his homework or he forgot to go to work or he was late for work or something because he was carried away. He was so interested in listening to music, he forgot something or he did too much of it, in other words. So, this generally just means that you're too excited about something or too involved in something. So, it can have a positive meaning. |
| The next variation is "to carry over." |
| "To carry over" means to continue into the next period. |
| Examples… |
| "Unused data will carry over into the next month." |
| "My airline miles carried over into this year." |
| So these two expressions both use like points or miles or some kind of data. In the first example sentence, it's like a mobile phone contract. Unused data will carry over into the next month. If, for example, I have 1 gig of data available on my mobile phone every month, but I only use 500 megabytes, I have 500 megabytes remaining. That's my unused data. That amount carries over to the next month. That means I have 1 gigabyte plus 500 megabytes of data to use in the next month. So "carry over" means that amount continues to the next period. |
| We see the same thing in the second example sentence. My airline miles carried over into this year, meaning my airline miles from the previous year carried over or continued into this year. So maybe, I didn't use those miles last year, but they continued into this year and I can still use them. So "carrying over" means continuing something. We see it a lot in like credit card contracts or like mileage plans or data plans. Anything with data points, numbers, we might see that sort of thing. |
| All right, so, those are a few different ways to use the verb "carry." I hope that you found a new way to use it. Of course, if you have any questions or comments, want to try to make an example sentence or know some different ways of using the verb "carry," please feel free to discuss and check in in the comment section. Thanks very much for watching this episode of Know Your Verbs and we'll see you again soon. Bye-bye! |
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