2020-01-06
7 分钟Hi there.
This is Harry, and welcome back to our podcast where we try to help you with your understanding of the english language to improve, in particular your conversational English, helping you with the grammar, vocabulary, phrases and expressions.
So what do I have for you today?
Well, the first podcast is a series of phrasal verbs.
These are used, as you know, quite frequently in English, but particularly in informal English.
And these days we are more inclined to use informal link English in relation to how we speak and also how we write, particularly with emails and other forms of social media.
So the phrasal verbs I have for you today fall through, put off, bring out, and break out.
So I'll go through each of them and give you some examples.
So the first one, fall through.
Well, fall through literally means something drops, like you fall through a hole in the ice.
If you're skating on ice and it's not so strong, you can fall through the ice, meaning you go from the surface into the water and get quite wet and quite cold, I would imagine.
Yeah.
Or if you've got a hole in the pocket of your trousers, which I seem to have on a regular basis, you put some coins into your pocket and they fall through the hole and onto the ground.
Okay, so that's the literal meaning of to fall through, but we can use it in another way as well.
Something, when something falls through, it means it doesn't go ahead or it cannot progress.
For example, if you have booked a holiday, you have paid a deposit and you're looking forward to it, but then at the last minute or a few days before you're due to depart, something happens, either a family crisis or a business crisis, and you're not able to travel.
So you tell your friend or colleagues, well, I was hoping to go on my holiday, but my arrangements have fallen through, meaning I've had to cancel them due to a family emergency or something has happened in work.
Okay, so when something falls through, it's no longer able to continue.
So my holidays have fallen through.
Okay, so we use that have fallen through, and we're using it there in the present.