ESL: English Café #78

This episode was so long that it took me a lot of time to finish it. When I was taking the notes from it, there were a couple of times that I really wanted to stop and gave it up, because the speaker seemed nagging all the time. And that made me wonder if it’s worthy to do so. But after I had done this task, I felt to be pleasure of doing this. I really hope that’ll do some help.

Topics:

• Daylight saving time: is popular in some countries, most states in the Unite States or in Europe, but not so popular in many countries in Asia.

Daylight saving time is when we move our clocks forward or backward depending on the time of the year in order to take advantage of or be able to use the amount of sunlight in the day. In northern countries, the day is very long during the summer time and it’s shorter in wintertime. When we say the day is long or short we mean the number of hours that the sun is shining, that there is light outside.

One of the things that happens in the early twentieth century was that some governments including many in the United States decided to change the clock in the spring by moving it forward an hour, so that you would not be sleeping through the time when the sun was out in the summer time.

We have the expression “Spring ahead”. The verb “to spring” means to move forward. So to remind people to change their clocks we have the expression “spring ahead” and “fall back”. Because in the fall we change our clocks back an hour in most states in US. To fall back means to move back. So daylight saving time is a way that helps us save energy and makes us spend less money because you’re up when the sun is out and you’re sleeping when the sun is not out.

There are many people dislike the daylight saving time. First of all, it’s very confusing. Some people forget to change their clocks. Normally the changes takes place in the US, and in the spring we move forward. This year for the first year we’re moving forward on the second Sunday of March. This is two weeks earlier than we used to do it. And we are falling back on the first Sunday in Nov. This is little later than we used to fall back. The US Congress change the law and the terms when the daylight saving time begins and ends. There has been some problems created by this, however, because the computer software was programmed to have daylight saving time in the US on the old days. So this year Microsoft and Macintosh, the two big computer operating systems have to make some changes in their software to adjust the new timing.

I’ve said that most states in the US have this daylight saving time but there are some states that do not follow the daylight saving time schedule. As we talked about before on the Café, although the US has a federal government, the national government, the individual state governments, the 50 states governments, have a lot of power, more power than individual states or provinces in other countries typically. And one of the things that the state can decide whether they want the daylight saving time in their states. Some states such as Arizona or Hawaii don’t have daylight saving time. This cause even more confusion because on some months, during some months of the year, California and Arizona have the same time when it’s 7 in Los angles, it’s 7 in Arizona. In other month there’s an hour difference. So depending on the time of the year you have to know what time it is in different states. They give you even more confusing when I lived in Arizona, I heard this story about one of the native American groups, we would call them tribes, on their lands decided to have daylight saving time, unlike the rest of the state. Native American what we called reservations, their areas and lands that they own have their own governments that is sometimes separate from or can separate powers from the state’s government. They can decide apparently whether they have daylight saving time. And this is a problem because you could be traveling in the same state and depending on the part of the state you are in, you could be in a daylight saving time or not. So be careful when you’re driving through Arizona, you never know what time it is.

• March Madness: is the name informally that we gave to the national basketball tenement, the national college basketball tenement. So these are universities that are playing against each other for the national championship in college basketball. This is extremely popular event every year and millions of people go and watch the games than watch them on television.

These are all amateur players (mean that they are not getting pay for it). You have professional athletes, people who play in professional sport leagues and you have the college leagues, and these are students at different universities.

The organization that runs or organizes the tenement is called the NCAA, which stands for the National Collegiate Athletic Association. (Collegiate means relating to college or university, and the college and university usually the same thing in the US English).

The March Madness is the tenements that begin in March with 65 basketball teams from 65 different universities. That play in a tenement that last precisely 3 weeks and they play in all sorts of different cities, depending on where the team is located. The entire country is breaking up into (means “divided into”) 4 regions. Each region has a part of the tenements. This is what we called a single illumination tenement. the term “single illumination” means that if you lost one game, that’s it, you are out of the tenement. In some tenements you get to play twice. Even if you lose once you can try and continue by play in different team. that would be called the double illumination tenement.

one of the reason that the basketball tenement is popular even with people who don’t like basketball or don’t like to watch basketball is because many people like to bet on the games. Usually this happens at your work place, at your office if you work for a company that has ten or twenty or thousands people. Someone will organize, called office pool. The office pool is where everyone tries to figure out who’s going to be the champagne. So you fill out a piece of paper that has all of the games on it, and you try to guess who’s going to be the champagne. And if you are correct then you win the prize, usually the prize is the totally amount of money that people bet. so let’s say it costs 5 dollars to be the part of the office pool, you pay 5 dollars and ten other people pay 5 dollars. And the one who is the most correct wins the 5o dollars. If you know about the teams or you like to watch the teams you may know what teams are favored to win. The team is favored to win means that people think they are going to win because they have a very good team. They may have won a lot of games already. If that is true, we’ll say that they have a good record or a winning record.

The games have different steps, different stages when they are only 16 teams left. That’s usually called the sweet 16 parts of the tenements. The term sweet refers to a party that a girl use to have when they turned to 16 years old. It’s not as common any more and it’s usually that sth at only very rich families still do for their daughters. But the name refers to when they are just 16 teams left in the tenements.

A tenement has quarterfinals, semifinals and finals. The finals are when there are just two teams left that they have beaten all of their opponents (opponents is the team you are playing). Before the finals you have semifinals. And those games when you have 4 teams left. Team A plays Team B. Team C plays Team D. and the winner of those two games goes into the finals. Before the semifinals you have the quarterfinals. So you have different parts of or different stages of the tenement.

When there is a team that no one expected to win, a team that is doing much better in the tenement than they may have done before the tenement, we sometimes call that a Cinderella team. The Cinderella team is the team that no one expected to win but is very successful in the tenement.

There are some schools that happen very successful for many years. The most successful team in NCAA is right here in Los angles, the university of California at Los angles, or what most people just called UCLA. UCLA has won more championships than any other universities in US. That is something that people often look at when they’re trying to determine who’s going to win. Other teams that have been very successful are the university of Kentucky, Indiana university, university of north Karolina and the private university called duke.

So if you enjoy basketball, this is an exciting time in American Basketball to watch the March Madness that is going on.

• to solve / to resolve:
• to solve sth: means to find the answer of sth, or to figure out the explanation for sth.
  We often use the expression “to solve a puzzle” or to solve a mystery. It means to find the answer.
  We also use this word in mathematics when we get the answers for the problem. You solve the problem. For example, If you have a party for your children, you may have some games, and one of the games maybe a puzzle. The puzzle is sth you ask the children to solve and whoever solves the puzzle wins the prize. Or you may have a problem, for example, in your kitchen, and you don’t know what the problem is, so you call a person who can help you. If it were a problem with sink, you would call a plumber that’s the person who fixes the sinks and toilets. And this plumber, you hope he will solve the problem, figure out what is wrong.

• to resolve: usually means to find the solution to a problem. Often in argument between two people who don’t agree. To resolve mean to come to agreement. You decide to come to agreement with these two people. It could be more people involved as well.
  Usually it’s for things that are negative matters when people disagree about things. For example, your neighbor has a dog, which makes noise all night, we would say he barks, and you can’t sleep. So you ask your neighbor to get rid of his dog and he doesn’t want to. Now you have this disagreement, we might call it dispute that you need to resolve.
  Resolution is a noun from the verb resolve. The noun from the verb to solve is solution. So you find the solution or you solve. You can find the resolution or you can resolve. They mean the same thing.

• smell good or to smell well:

Someone smells good.----mean that the person has a nice scent, which means that her body , clothes or hair she has, has a nice smell to it. It is sth that is pleasant to smell. When your girlfriend puts on perfume, you would say she smells good.

to smell well: means that the person is doing the smelling, and she can smell things very easily. She knows what’s she smelling. But you don’t hear that expression very often. It sounds a bit strange to say that a person smells well or touches well or tastes well. You can use it , however, for seeing and hearing. He sees well. He hears well. But you would not hear very often with the other senses. There are 5 senses, smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing. You will hear the word “well: with other words, for example, he cooks well, or he throws well. “Well” here means that the person does that action in a very good way or a very satisfactory way.