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Hello, everyone!  My name is Pilar and I work as an English teacher in EOI Ribera d'Ebre.

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Hello, everyone!  My name is Pilar and I work as an English teacher in EOI Ribera d'Ebre.

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I hope you enjoy the Podcast I have chosen by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists.

After listening to the Podcast, please complete a task on the vocabulary included in the talk by clicking on the following link.

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Listen to this episode from TEDx SHORTS on Spotify. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie examines the limitations of gender roles and asks us to imagine a world beyond these restrictive definitions. This talk was filmed at TEDxEuston. All TEDx events are organized independently by volunteers in the spirit of TED's mission of ideas worth spreading.

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Hi, guys!! I'm Javi Agüera and I teach English at EOI Montoro. 

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Hi, guys!! I'm Javi Agüera and I teach English at EOI Montoro. 

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I've got this podcast for you on consent and sex education. You can watch a video of this talk on this link, where you can have the subtitles on for better understanding.
You can also try this vocabulary quiz with words from the talk.
Hope you like it, enjoy!!

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‎TED Talks Daily: Sex education should start with consent | Kaz on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show TED Talks Daily, Ep Sex education should start with consent | Kaz - Feb 1, 2022

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Do you know any tongue twister in English? Try these from the podcast and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Check them out on this page, too.

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Espresso English Podcast - Can YOU say these 10 tongue twisters?

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Today’s lesson is going to be a challenge even for me... We’re working on 10 tongue twisters - short phrases that are very difficult to pronounce, even for native English speakers! I like tongue twisters because they’re a fun way to train ourselves to develop very precise pronunciation, and if you…

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Hi there! I'm Isabel and I'm also an English teacher at EOI Montoro.
I enjoy learning new things, and that's why I love listening to "Stuff You Should Know". Today I've chosen a short episode (as they call them, a "Short Stuff") about Traffic Signals. After listening to it here, you can try this vocabulary activity to review some words.
I hope you enjoy it!

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Hello everyone, hope you enjoy the video and the quiz

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Hello everyone, hope you enjoy the video and the quiz

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Attached you will find the quiz:

https://www.educaplay.com/learning-resources/11506727-the_problem_of_the_evil_quiz.html

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The Problem of Evil: Crash Course Philosophy #13

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The Problem of Evil: Crash Course Philosophy #13

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Material or materiel? that´s the question

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Material or materiel? that´s the question

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I hope you enjoy the podcast of Grammar Girl. I find it interesting. Try that when you listen
what is the language origin of the word "materiel" and since when is it accepted in English?

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Kansas City Star, "Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty Helps America Speak and Write Better" September, 2007

"Helpful. Smart. Funny. Fans find Grammar Girl to be all those things."

Chicago Tribune, Don't Get Carried Away on National Grammar Day, February 2008

"A more level-headed grammatical authority is Mignon Fogarty -- known to her Web visitors and podcast listeners as Grammar Girl."

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Grammar Girl provides short, friendly tips to improve your writing and feed your love of the English language.

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Hi everybody! I am Isaac and I would like to share with you the great podcast of TED talks daily where every day you can listen to a new podcast. Also, if you are interested in leadership I love to listen to John Maxwell's podcast. Both are easy to understand so you could improve your English with them.

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Hi everybody! I am Isaac and I would like to share with you the great podcast of TED talks daily where every day you can listen to a new podcast. Also, if you are interested in leadership I love to listen to John Maxwell's podcast. Both are easy to understand so you could improve your English with them.

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Ted Talks daily
John Maxwell

I have prepared an activity about this chapter:
"What you can do to prevent Alheizmer's".
https://quizlet.com/_b7xifs?x=1qqt&i=35u56d
Enjoy!

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Hello everybody! My name is Roger and I’m a student in EOI Ribera d’Ebre. I would like to introduce to you the following podcast:This is a podcast from the BBC Earth Podcast and talks about  the nature and about the caves. The podcasts last 32 minutes, but the part I like the most is until minute 12:15.

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Hello everybody! My name is Roger and I’m a student in EOI Ribera d’Ebre. I would like to introduce to you the following podcast:This is a podcast from the BBC Earth Podcast and talks about  the nature and about the caves. The podcasts last 32 minutes, but the part I like the most is until minute 12:15.

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While nature is full of beauty and wonder, it also has a deadly side. In this episode, we’re getting a brush with death and exploring how nature can be both a source of comfort and a source of danger.Prosanta Chakrabarty spends his time studying different species of fish in some of the world’s most…

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Hello! My name is Silvia and I am a student of the EOI Montoro. I find this podcast really interesting and would like to share it with you. It's a bit long, the podcast last 19 minutes, but it's worth listening to. Enjoy it!!

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[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.

[00:00:10] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.

[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge and today we are going to be talking about Superstitions, the belief that things are lucky or unlucky.

[00:00:31] From the psychological reasons why we believe in superstitions and the religious implications of believing in superstitions to the origins of 5 different superstitions, I think it's going to be quite a fun one.

[00:00:45] If you're listening to this episode on the day it comes out, you might have noticed that it's Friday the 13th, which is considered unlucky in lots of different countries, and don't worry, we'll be talking about that as well, and why it's not really that unlucky at all.

[00:01:02] Before we get right into that though, let me quickly remind you that you can get all of the bonus episodes, plus the subtitles, the transcript, and the key vocabulary for this episode and all of our other ones over on the website, which is leonardoenglish.com.

[00:01:18] This is also where you can also check out becoming a member of Leonardo English, and join a community of curious minds from all over the world, doing meetups, exchanging ideas, and generally, improving their English in a more interesting way.

[00:01:33] So if that's of interest, and I certainly hope it is, then the place to go to is leonardoenglish.com.

[00:01:40] And final point, thank you to Jachym, an awesome member of Leonardo English from the Czech Republic who requested this episode. I hope you enjoy it.

[00:01:51] OK then, let's get started.

[00:01:54] Superstitions are all around us, and no matter what country you're from you've probably been culturally exposed to superstitions all of your life, even if they might not have immediately seemed to you like superstitions.

[00:02:11] If you look in the dictionary, it will define superstition as something like:

[00:02:17] "a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation "

[00:02:26] Or

[00:02:28] "belief that is not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, but is connected with old ideas about magic"

[00:02:35] Essentially it's a belief in something that doesn't make sense and is related to magic.

[00:02:41] Superstitions go back millennia, they go back thousands of years, yet they are still believed by billions of people.

[00:02:50] Indeed, 50% of Americans say that they're superstitious, and three quarters of people in the UK say that they knock on wood, they do this 'knock knock', to avoid bad luck.

[00:03:03] So if the dictionary basically says 'it's something that people do because they are ignorant ', why is half the world doing it?

[00:03:13] We'll get to some of the psychological reasons for it in a minute, but before that it's good to understand a bit about the origins of superstitions, because this will help us understand why they are so embedded in our culture.

[00:03:29] The word superstition is thought to come from Latin, super-stare, to stand over, or to stand upon. Now, how that actually translates to the meaning of the word that we have now is a little unclear, but it's thought to have come from the idea of standing over something and being amazed at it.

[00:03:53] Back in Ancient Rome, being superstitious was used to describe people who were too afraid of the Gods, and believed that there were certain things that they could do over and above the normal things that people were supposed to do that would influence the future.

[00:04:12] The word 'superstitio' was to be contrasted with 'religio', which was the normal, appropriate fear and belief in Gods.

[00:05:02] Indeed, the Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful.

[00:05:08] If you believe that you can change your fate just by throwing salt over your shoulder or by not seeing a black cat, then logically it's quite hard to reconcile that with believing that there is an all-powerful God who controls your life.

[00:05:26] Superstition is actually right there in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, just above worshiping false gods, and is called a ' perverse excess of religion'.

[00:05:39] So you can understand, theologically at least, why superstition is problematic.

[00:05:45] It's at odds with the scriptures; logically both can't exist at the same time and be true.

[00:05:52] In terms of where different superstitions come from, this is normally up for debate.

[00:05:59] There are lots of possible explanations about where they come from, with some being more probable than others.

[00:06:07] With all of them, they likely came from a time that something happened just before something good or something bad, and culturally people started associating the thing that happened before to the thing that happened after, believing that the first event impacted the second one.

[00:06:24] Interestingly, most superstitions predict that something bad is going to happen.

[00:06:30] There are of course a few that are linked to good luck, for example finding a four-leaved clover, a four-leafed little plant, or carrying a rabbit's foot, but most are negative.

[00:06:44] It's interesting to think why this is.

[00:06:48] There's an idea in psychology called Negativity Bias, which is the idea that we are more affected by negative events than positive events.

[00:06:58] If there are two events of equal intensity, of equal strength, one good and the other bad, then we feel the negative one more strongly than the positive one.

[00:07:11] So bringing this back to superstitions, if something good happens we might just think, well that's good, whereas if something negative happens it might have a greater impact on us, we remember it more strongly, try to put a reason on why it happened, and start engaging in behaviour that we believe might stop it happening in the future.

[00:07:36] OK, so that's a little explanation about some of the psychological reasons that people believe superstitions exist.

[00:07:44] Let's get into some of the stories behind superstitions.

[00:07:48] We're going to start with one that has a story I quite like, and that's to do with umbrellas.

[00:07:54] Now, you've probably heard that you shouldn't open an umbrella inside. Maybe you've just heard that you shouldn't do it, but it's also considered 'bad luck' in many countries.

[00:08:06] Why, you might ask?

[00:08:08] There is a theory that it was to do with the ancient Egyptians and their sunshades, but this isn't really believed by many.

[00:08:17] The real reason is thought to have actually come from much more recently, from Victorian England.

[00:08:25] England, as those of you who have visited the country will know, is a place where an umbrella comes in pretty handy.

[00:08:49] So presumably, when it was raining outside, people used to open their umbrellas inside, but children, family members and pets got hurt by these things opening quickly and dangerously, and so it became bad luck to open them inside.

[00:09:07] So there you go, the reason why you shouldn't open an umbrella inside seems to actually be quite sensible.

[00:09:15] Our second superstition is to do with salt - when it's unlucky, and when it's lucky.

[00:09:22] Salt, as you may know, was a precious commodity throughout history.

[00:09:28] Linguistically its importance has left a mark, with the expression 'not worth its salt' meaning 'not worth its cost', and the word 'salary', the money you get from a job, coming from the term for money Roman soldiers were given to buy salt.

[00:10:55] It's not clear whether you need to sweep it up after you've thrown it down though. I guess in the Renaissance, or in 3,500 BC sweeping the floors wasn't quite so important.

[00:11:08] Our third superstition is one of the most popular superstitions, and that is something that three quarters of people in the UK say that they do, and that's to knock on, our touch, wood, 'knock knock'.

[00:11:22] Now, I guess you know how this one works, you've probably seen people doing it, and you might even do it yourself. After saying something you touch wood either as a way of hoping that something you want to happen will happen, or of preventing something you don't want to happen from happening.

[00:11:41] Where this comes from, though, is debated by historians.

[00:11:45] Some think it comes from when you would need to swear over a crucifix to promise something was true. If you were a true Christian you would never tempt fate by lying when touching the cross, and so tapping wood was a connection to this idea.

[00:12:04] There's another idea that peasants in Europe would knock loudly on their wooden doors to keep away evil spirits, and so the wood is to represent a door.

[00:12:17] There's also the idea that both good and bad spirits live in trees, and so by tapping on a tree you could either get a good spirit to come out and help you or you could keep a bad spirit in, to stop something bad happening to you.

[00:12:34] There's another theory that it actually came from a British children's game where children would chase each other and could avoid being caught by touching a piece of wood.

[00:12:47] For this one it's pretty unclear where it actually comes from - perhaps that's one of the reasons that it is one of the most popular superstitions, that it just exists in popular culture for no clear reason, or at least, for disputed reasons.

[00:13:21] Our next superstition, our fourth superstition is a linguistic one, and it's the reason that in English we say 'bless you' after someone sneezes, after they do ah-choo.

[00:13:34] This is thought to date back to the sixth century AD, and to have come from when there was a Great Plague raging through Europe.

[00:14:23] Another theory is that when you sneeze your soul is separated from your body and so by saying 'God bless you' it's a way of stopping the devil from jumping in and stealing your soul.

[00:14:37] In your language I imagine you say a similar thing after someone sneezes because, well, sneezing normally comes when you have a cold, a flu, or something like that, and you're not in great health.

[00:14:49] So on one level it's just a perfectly nice and reasonable thing to wish someone good health if they have just done something that indicates that they're not in particularly great health right now.

[00:15:02] And our fifth and final superstition is two superstitions rolled into one, and it's to do with Friday the 13th, or 'today' if you're listening to this episode on the day it's released.

[00:15:16] Before we go into this explanation, I should say that I hope you're having a fantastic day, a better than normal day even, just to disprove all of the superstitions about Friday the 13th being an unlucky day.

[00:15:31] Ok then, I've got that out of the way.

[00:15:34] So, there are a few theories about why the number 13 is considered so unlucky.

[00:15:41] The first centres around the idea of 12 being a complete number - there are 12 months of the year, 12 hours on a clock, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 signs of the zodiac, and so on.

[00:15:57] 13 is an outsider, a number that detracts from the completeness of 12.

[00:16:04] There were, of course, also 13 people to sit at the table for the Last Supper, with Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, thought to be number 13.

[00:16:39] There's even a word for fear of the number 13, it's "triskaidekaphobia". I guess you probably won't need to use this one very much, but there you go.

[00:16:51] Triskaidekaphobia is a real problem though. Many buildings don't have a thirteenth floor, most aeroplanes don't have a 13th row, and it's estimated that 10% of the US population, so that's 30 million people, are afraid of the number 13.

[00:17:10] But why Friday, you might ask?

[00:17:12] Well, Friday isn't a great day in the Bible. It was thought to be the day on which Eve offered Adam the forbidden fruit, eventually causing man's fall from Eden. It was also the day that Jesus was crucified.

[00:17:28] So when you combine the bad luck of the number 13 with the bad luck of Friday you are really getting into unlucky territory, so the superstition goes.

[00:17:38] But it wasn't really until the horror film Friday 13th, in 1980, that there was this real widespread idea that Friday 13th was a date where all sorts of terrible things happen.

[00:17:51] So is it actually that terrible, and should you keep a lookout tonight for all sorts of unlucky things?

[00:18:00] Well, no.

[00:18:01] Indeed, there was a Dutch study from 2008 that suggested that there are fewer car accidents, fewer fires, and fewer bad things that happen on Friday 13 than on a normal day, presumably because people are careful, or they just avoid activities that could be considered dangerous in any way.

[00:18:24] So, if you are listening to this episode on Friday the 13th, I hope you're having a marvelous day, full of good luck and joy.

[00:18:33] And if you're listening to this episode and Friday the 13th has been and gone without you noticing any bad luck, congratulations, you've survived, and at least you now know a little bit more about where this superstition, and superstitions in general, come from.

[00:18:51] OK then, that is it for today's episode on superstitions, how they work, where they come from, and why people believe them.

[00:19:00] I hope it's shed some light on a few superstitions that you might believe, might observe, or perhaps you think it's all a load of rubbish.

[00:19:09] As always, either way I'd love to know what you thought of the episode. You can head right in to our community forum, which is community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.

[00:19:21] And as a final reminder, if you are looking to improve your English in a more interesting way, to join a community of curious minds from all over the world, and to unlock the transcripts, subtitles, and key vocabulary, and to be a cool cat like Jachym and request episodes then the place to go to is leonardoenglish.com

[00:19:42] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English

[00:19:47] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.

[END OF PODCAST]

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Episode 106 - Superstitions | English Learning for Curious Minds

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00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English. [00:00:10] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.

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“Like Riding a Bike,” Paradoxes, That Fresh Rain Smell

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“Like Riding a Bike,” Paradoxes, That Fresh Rain Smell

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Hello, everyone! My name is Carles and I'm an EOI Ribera d'Ebre' student.
I want to show you this podcast where you can learn about the special way riding a bike is stored in your memory; the crocodile paradox; and the smell of fresh rain. Enjoy it!

After listening to the podcast, you can try this vocabulary activity. Good luck!

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Curiosity Daily - “Like Riding a Bike,” Paradoxes, That Fresh Rain Smell

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Learn about the special way riding a bike is stored in your memory; the crocodile paradox; and the smell of fresh rain. The stories in this episode originally aired on these dates: * December 21, 2018 https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/the-most-influential-film-ever-your-memory-on-ridi * De…