What goes up must come down! Things are always changing in today’s world, and that’s why we decided to make an episode about things going up and going down. Especially in the news, we often hear about increases and decreases, and they use lots of different expressions to talk about this. This time, we’re talking about numbers, such as prices, statistics, and other amounts. Listen to this episode and we’ll see if our numbers start to soar!
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Expressions included in the learning materials
- A cottage
- The great outdoors
- To skyrocket
- To soar
- A homonym
- To be liking – Is this correct?
- What does up must come down
- To nosedive
- Back to the subject
- At any rate
- To hold off
- To jump at the chance
- To sink
- A start-up
Sample transcript
Harp: Today we’re looking at expressions that talk about something going up and increasing or going down and decreasing.
Maura: That’s right. Now, these expressions are often used in business, especially talking about money or amounts of things. To be honest, when I got the idea for this episode, Harp, I was listening to the news. And I heard a bunch of these expressions used on the news, and that’s what inspired this episode.
Harp: Oh, I like it. Yeah, you’re right. They use it a lot in the news to talk about things like the price of stocks are going up or going down.
Maura: Right. They might use it to talk about statistics, like “35% of people believe this.” So that’s the kind of stuff that you hear on the news.
Harp: Yeah. These expressions are always about an amount.
Maura: All right. Let’s get to the first expression. The first expression is to skyrocket.
Harp: To skyrocket.
Maura: To skyrocket. Now if you know what a rocket is—it is kind of like an airplane but it goes way higher and way faster. It shoots up into outer space and if we’re lucky, it might get to Mars or the moon or something.
Harp: Yeah. It’s super-fast and it just shoots up into the air.
Maura: That’s right. And so, when we talk about something and say that it skyrocketed, that means that it went up very, very fast; just like a rocket does when it goes into the sky.
Harp: Yeah. So if we think about the stock market or a stock, if it goes up really quickly in value, it skyrockets.
Podcast/Learning Materials: Culips English Podcast