Learn 20 high-frequency expressions, including words for alcoholic drinks and illnesses
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| In this video, you'll learn 20 of the most common words and phrases in English. |
| Hi everybody, my name is Alisha. |
| Welcome to The 800 Core English Words and Phrases video series! |
| This series will teach you the eight hundred most common words and phrases in English. |
| Ok! Let's get started! First is… |
| 1. "illness" |
| So illness refers to a type of disease or like a type of sickness. We don't really say i have an illness, it sounds a little bit too formal, but we use illness to describe the level of seriousness of something. For example, |
| "He has a cold. It's only a minor illness." |
| 2. "cold" |
| So this use of cold looks at the use that we have to describe a very very minor sickness. So yes, we can use cold as an adjective to describe low temperatures, but when you see cold used to talk about sickness, it refers to usually something like a runny nose or a sore throat or feeling tired. |
| "I think I caught a cold." |
| 3. "injury" |
| Injury is a noun and it's different from illness or from cold because an injury is something that happens to the body. For example, you have an accident playing sports, that is an injury; an illness refers to some small germs that get into the body and that cause us to be sick. So an injury is something that happens outside you. |
| "He suffered a knee injury." |
| 4. "medicine" |
| Medicine is what we take to improve our condition. We can use medicine to kill bad germs or to help our body fight bad germs, we can also use medicine to reduce pain in the body. |
| "He was given a lot of medicine." |
| 5. "pain" |
| So pain is a noun. Pain refers to the uncomfortable, the unpleasant feeling in the body we have after an injury. Please keep in mind, pain and hurt are very very different. Pain is a noun, hurt is a verb, so when you want to talk about your body feeling uncomfortable, you can say "I have pain" or "it hurts." |
| "This pain is unbearable." |
| 6. "fever" |
| Fever is a noun and it refers to the body temperature being higher than normal. So most people have a body temperature that's around 98.6 degrees, if we use Fahrenheit or maybe about 37 degrees or so in Celsius. A fever refers to body temperature that's higher than that and this is used to indicate whether we are sick or not. |
| "She's in bed with a fever." |
| 7. "window" |
| So a window is a fixture, a feature in a building. It's usually made of glass, though sometimes it's just open and it allows us to look out beyond the building. |
| "Open the window, please." |
| 8. "alcohol" |
| Alcohol in everyday conversation usually refers to something that we drink for fun, or maybe because we feel sad in some cases. So it's usually in many countries and adults-only drink; we can also use alcohol to talk about an ingredient in cleaning products though, like we might use an alcohol sanitizing solution to clean our hands. |
| "Whiskey is an alcohol." |
| 9. "meal" |
| So meal refers to the type of food that we eat at the beginning, middle, and end of the day; we call those times when we eat meals. |
| "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day." |
| 10. "fog" |
| Fog is a noun, though you may also hear the word "foggy," adjective, used to talk about this weather condition. You can imagine fog as like a lot of clouds, very very low to the ground. |
| "The city is covered in fog." |
| 11. "hail" |
| So "hail," when used to talk about weather conditions, refers to tiny or sometimes large balls of ice that fall from the sky, it can be quite dangerous. |
| "Hail is dangerous." |
| 12. "thunderstorm" |
| A thunderstorm refers to a type of storm that's not just rain and clouds, it's those things plus the sound of thunder. Please keep in mind when we talk about thunder and lightning in a storm, thunder is the sound and lightning is the cracks of light. |
| "A thunderstorm is approaching." |
| 13. "aquarium" |
| An aquarium keeps fish and other things that like to live in water. So you can have a small aquarium in your house or you can visit a larger aquarium that keeps big fish and other exotic creatures; you might have an aquarium in your city. |
| "When are we going to the aquarium?" |
| 14. "soccer" |
| Soccer is the word that we use in American English to talk about the sport that many other countries call "football." |
| "It's fun to play soccer." |
| 15. "zoo" |
| A zoo is a park for exotic animals, so many big cities have zoos. You can go there to look at the animals, learn something about them. And in some places, you can actually touch some of the animals. |
| "Tomorrow, we're going to the zoo." |
| 16. "fare" |
| So "fare," when used to talk about transportation, refers to how much it costs to take a mode of transportation or how much it costs to go from one place to another. |
| "How much is the bus fare?" |
| 17. "bus stop" |
| A bus stop is a place along the route of a bus. So there are typically many bus stops on a bus route, it's a location where you can get on the bus or get off the bus. |
| "Let's meet at the bus stop." |
| 18. "gram" |
| A gram is a unit of measurement. You may not hear this word used so much to talk about weights in American English, you might hear this more commonly used in British English, where the metric system is used. |
| "When he was born he weighed 3 kilos and 200 grams." |
| 19. "meter" |
| So like the previous vocabulary word, "meter" tends to be used more often in countries that use the metric system for measurement. A meter is often used to talk about distances between locations usually within walking distance. |
| "There are 100 centimeters in a meter." |
| 20. "kilometer" |
| A kilometer is another unit of distance, again, like the previous two vocabulary words. This is more commonly used in countries that have the metric system or they use the metric system. We use kilometers to measure usually distances between cities. |
| "He walked 10 kilometers." |
| Well done! In this lesson, you expanded your vocabulary and learned 20 new useful words. |
| See you next time! Bye-bye! |
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