Intro
1. Learn Vocabulary - Learn some new vocabulary before you start the lesson.
2. Read and Prepare - Read the introduction and prepare to hear the audio.
If you live somewhere that’s warm all year, all you have to worry about is getting too tan or letting too many bugs in your house. For the rest of us, when wintertime comes, it means paying lots of money to stay warm.
Buildings can be heated with electric heaters, solar power, or furnaces that burn gas or oil. Of course, there are lots of tricks to keeping your heating bill low, like insulating your house and plugging leaks. Blankets and sweaters don’t hurt, either.
Listen to Mason and Lily talk about how they are staying warm in this winter English lesson.
Dialog
1. Listen and Read - Listen to the audio and read the dialog at the same time.
2. Study - Read the dialog again to see how the vocab words are used.
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Mason: I just got my heating bill for January and it was a pretty brutal month here.
Lily: Oh, yeah, that stinks.
Mason: What else am I going to do about it, right?
Lily: You can be like me and huddle under blankets with a space heater.
Mason: Well, space heaters can be pretty expensive too.
Lily: That’s true.
Mason: I mean, you’re renting and you do an electric heater, but doesn’t your apartment have heating of some sort?
Lily: Yeah, I have one of those fake fireplaces that runs on gas and is hooked up to a vent, but it doesn’t really heat anything except for a two-foot radius around it. So, you’re burning a whole lot of gas for not a whole lot of effect, except for the comforting, fire-looking thing.
Mason: I had electric heat in almost all of the apartments I used to own and that was just terrible. One, it’s ugly, terribly ugly, and two I feel like it’s basically just that little glass fireplace taken to the extreme. You have a very warm perimeter about one foot away from your walls that only goes up about two feet high, which is useless to me.
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Discussion
Mason recently got his heating bill. It was pretty brutal.
Lily thinks that stinks. She wonders what kind of heat Mason has. She has a fake fireplace. It uses a lot of fuel, but doesn’t keep her very warm. Both Mason and Lily have lived lots of places with electric heat.
What kind of heat do you have in your home? Is it expensive? What do you do to keep warm during the cold months?
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