[WEEKLY SHORT STORIES] Up up up When you learn English, you learn about phrasal verbs. What are phrasal verbs? They are verbs which are formed, not of one word, but of two or more words. For instance, if I come home from work and want to watch a TV programme, I go into my sitting room and I switch the TV on. “Switch on “ is a phrasal verb. And when I have finished watching the programme, I switch the TV off, or I turn the TV off – “to switch off” and “to turn off” are both phrasal verbs. We have thousands of phrasal verbs in English. However today, we are going to have a podcast containing lots of phrasal verbs with the word “up”. You know what “up” means, of course. “Up” is the opposite of “down”. You can climb up the stairs, and you can climb down the stairs again. However, lots of phrases and expressions containing the word “up” have nothing to do with “up” in the sense of “not down”, and this is very confusing. I am sure that you already know several phrasal verbs containing “up”. In the morning, you wake up. Then you get up. After that, perhaps you have some breakfast. When you have finished eating breakfast, you stand up, and clear the table, and wash up the dishes. And then perhaps you notice that your room is in a terrible mess – there are clothes and books and CDs on the floor. So you tidy up your room. Yesterday you spilled some coffee on the table. Now you clean it up, and you sweep up some cake crumbs that are on the floor. Then you set off for school. Today there are some roadworks near your house – some workmen are digging up the road, to repair a broken water pipe. The roadworks hold the traffic up, and you are nearly late for school. In your English lesson,your teacher asks the class to make up a story about a family going on holiday. First you make some notes about words and phrases which you might use. Then you start to write up your story. You have to look up some of the words in the dictionary. At the end of the lesson, your teacher says, “The time is up – please give me your stories and clear up your things before you leave.” It is time for lunch. Your friend calls out to you, but there are so many people making so much noise that you cannot hear what he says. “Speak up,” you shout, “I can’t hear you”. “Hurry up”, he says, “I don’t want to be late.” You are hungry, and you eat up all your lunch. After school, you have just got home when your cousin turns up. She has recently broken up with her boyfriend. You never liked her boyfriend – in your opinion he was silly and immature and needed to grow up. You don’t understand why she put up with him for so long. You try to cheer your cousin up by telling her all this, but it just makes your cousin more upset. You decide to shut up and change the subject. You suggest a trip to the cinema together. But your cousin says she is hard up and can’t afford to go. So you end up offering to pay for her cinema ticket. And now I am fed up with finding phrases containing the word “up”. I am sure there are many, many more of them. ***Grammar and vocabulary note* “Wash up” – in English, we wash ourselves, and we wash the clothes, but we wash up dirty dishes and cutlery. “Hold up” means to delay. “The roadworks held the traffic up”. ““I was held up by a crisis at work.” “To make up” here means to invent. There is a whole podcast about “make up” here. “The time is up” – the time e.g. for an exam has finished. “To turn up” means to arrive, generally to arrive unexpectedly. So, you had not invited your cousin to come and see you, she just “turned up”. “To break something up” means to break it into pieces. If we say that a party is breaking up, we mean that people have started to leave and go home. If a meeting breaks up, it means that people have started to leave. A special use is when we say that a school breaks up – it means that it is the end of term and the pupils are going home for the holidays. And when two people break up, it means that they have had a row and don’t want to be in a relationship any longer. “To put up with someone or something” – to tolerate someone or something. “If you are “hard up”, it means that you do not have much money. “You end up paying for her ticket” – eventually, perhaps at the end of a long discussion, you pay for her ticket. (Source: listen-to-english)
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 01:18:53 +0000
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