Learn 10 health words
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| Hi, everybody and welcome back to Top Words. My name is Alisha, and today, we're going to talk about 10 health-related words. Let's go. |
| "Heartbeat" |
| The first word is "heartbeat." "Heartbeat" has two parts to it, heart and beat. Your heart is the organ inside your body that pumps blood, and the pumping motion, we say, is the beat, the rhythm of your heart. That thump, thump is like a beat, a regular rhythm of your heart, your heartbeat. So, in a sentence, "He has a regular heartbeat." |
| "Pulse" |
| The next word is "pulse." "Pulse" is the feeling of your heartbeat. So, people can take their pulse or measure their pulse, find their pulse usually at the wrist or just here underneath your chin, like where your head and your neck meet, you can feel the pulse, your pulse easily here. So, "pulse" is the beat of your heart, your heartbeat, but in a different place in your body. So, we can feel your heartbeat here. That feeling of your heartbeat is called your "pulse." In a sentence, "My pulse feels a little fast." |
| "Temperature" |
| The next word is "temperature." "Temperature" means your body's temperature. So, there's a regular temperature. Roughly or about a regular temperature for each body, I think it's 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, something like that. But a temperature means if you have a high temperature, you have a fever. Low temperature maybe means something else, hypothermia, for example. But your temperature is your body's temperature. So, we use the expression "to run a temperature." "To run a temperature" means to have a high temperature. So, run a temperature. "He's running a temperature" means he has a high temperature. He has a fever. So, in a sentence, "Your son is running a high temperature." |
| "Blood type" |
| The next expression is "blood type." There are many different blood types. There's A, B, O, there's positive, negative, and so on. "Blood type" is your type of blood, the kind of classification your blood has. Each person has a different blood type. Do you know your blood type? In a sentence then, "What's your blood type?" |
| "Physical exam" |
| The next expression is "physical exam" or "physical examination." A physical exam is like a full-body checkup. It's often done in like about high school age, junior high school or high school age, especially for students who are athletes, they're playing sports. But it's typically a good idea to get a physical exam once a year. It's like a full-body check-in, like your body's range of motion, maybe just the general status of your body, and so on. So, a physical exam, or just a physical is also an expression we use. Like, "I need to get a physical," or, "I got a physical last week," or, "I hate getting physicals." We use the word "physical" to mean physical exam. In a sentence, "When was your last physical exam?" |
| "Height/weight" |
| The next word or words is "height" and "weight." Your height is how tall you are, and your weight is how heavy you are. So, your height, in the U.S., we use feet and inches. In other countries in the world, most other countries, we use the metric system. So, centimeters or meters and centimeters. So, for example, when you express your height in the U.S., I would say like, "I'm 5'2," like 5 feet, 2 inches," I think. I think I'm 5'2." I don't know. And then to use the same expression instead of feet and inches, we would use centimeters to express our height using the metric system. So, for example, "I'm 162 centimeters." So, there are these two different ways to express your height depending on which country you're in. |
| The same thing goes for your weight. So, in the U.S., it's pounds, like, "I'm 400 pounds," or in countries which use the metric system, it's kilograms. So, "I'm 7,000 kilograms," something like that. You would use kilograms or pounds to express your weight, depending on the country that you're in. In a sentence, "Do you know your height and weight?" |
| "To hurt" |
| The next one is a verb. The verb is "to hurt." When you are just going about your everyday life and you injure yourself, you have like--I don't know, you shut your finger in a door or you crashed against--I don't know. You run into a wall or you stub your toe, meaning, you hit your toe on an object. We say, "I hurt myself," or, "Oh no, I got hurt." So, "to hurt something" means to injure something, but the nuance--like the difference between hurt and injure, hurt is more light, I suppose. It's like a small accident. Maybe I scratched myself with a pen, or like I mentioned, I ran into a wall. It's a very light injury. Injury, however, is maybe a more serious issue, a serious accident, like a sports injury. "Hurt" is usually when you hurt yourself, you can recover quickly. |
| There's that, but we also use "hurt" to explain pain in the body. So, we can say, "I hurt myself," or we can use the word "hurt" to talk about something that is causing us pain. So, like, "My head really hurts," or, "My stomach hurts," or, "My back hurts, my arm hurts," something that is causing pain. Instead of saying, "I have pain in my head," or "This is painful," we say, "My something, something hurts," or, "Does your head hurt?" or something like that. We use the verb "hurt" instead of painful more often. So, in a sentence, "My back really hurts." |
| "To injure" |
| The next verb is "injure, to injure." As I just talked about, "hurt" and "injure" are similar. "Hurt" is kind of light, "injure" is a bit more serious. So, like playing sports and you have a bad accident or you, I don't know, just have a crazy experience and something dangerous happens to your body and you suffer an injury as a result. There's some wound or something occurs that was not there before. That's an injury. You have injured yourself, or you injured someone else. So, it usually has the nuance of something a little bit more serious than just hurt. So, in a sentence, "I injured my leg playing sports." |
| "Ache" |
| So, I talked about using "hurt" as a verb. "My stomach hurts. My back hurts." We also use the word "ache" to talk about pains. We use it usually at the end of a body part. So, for example, a headache as a noun, a stomachache as a noun, a backache, a shoulder ache. We use this to talk about kind of like a low dull, like continuing pain. So, usually like a really quick sharp pain, like if you pinch your skin, for example, it's quick, it's sharp. It goes away very quickly. It stops quickly. But for a continuing pain, something that continues to be very uncomfortable, like your stomach is hurting, we use "ache" for that. So, a stomachache, for example, headache. So, we can use this expression. We can also use ache as a verb, like, "My stomach aches" is also okay. "Ache" sounds like it's continuing now. So, it spelled A-C-H-E, but the pronunciation is "eyk." Okay. In a sentence, "I have a bad headache." |
| "Nausea" |
| The next word is "nausea." "Nausea" is a noun. "Nausea," there's also the adjective nauseous, which is spelled a little bit differently. But "nausea" is that feeling, that stomachache feeling. You feel like you might be sick. And by "be sick," I mean you feel like the contents of your stomach might come out if you feel sick to your stomach. We call that feeling "nausea." That feeling is called "nausea." So, it's usually a very uncomfortable feeling. Your stomach feels very, very unhappy, very uncomfortable. That is called "nausea" in English. In a sentence, "I woke up with really bad nausea." |
| Alright, that's the end. So, those are 10 health-related words. I hope that those are helpful for you in talking about your body or explaining yourself to a doctor if you need to in English. Thanks for watching and we'll see you again soon. Bye! |
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