| Hi, everybody! Welcome back to Ask Alisha, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them, maybe! |
| Let’s get to your first question this week. |
| First question this week comes from Muhammad Baber Ali. |
| Hello, Muhammad! |
| Muhammad says… |
| Hi, Alisha! What is the difference between “I'm in school” and “I'm at school”? |
| Nice question! Yeah, this little preposition makes a big difference, “I’m in school” versus “I’m at school.” |
| Let’s talk about “I’m at school” because it’s a little easier and simpler to explain. |
| “I’m at school” means you are physically located inside or at your campus at this point in time. “I’m at school” means your location is the school. So you can use this for an elementary school, you can use this for high school, for college, whatever! Any kind of educational facility, if you want to describe being at that location, you want to talk about your physical location, you should say, “I am at school.” That’s what this expresses. |
| Let’s compare this then to “I’m in school.” |
| “I’m in school” can have a couple of different uses. It can mean I’m currently attending school, so that means I’m taking classes and I’m doing tests and so on, so doing school things. That means I’m attending school. We use this expression “I’m in school to talk about that.” |
| Like “I’m in school right now, I’m going to finish in 4 years” or something like that. You might hear something like that. |
| So, “I’m in school” refers to attending lessons, to attending some kind of instruction. |
| So this is really the key difference between the two. “I’m in school” means I am attending lessons. I am getting an education right now. I’m in school for some topic. “I’m at school” refers to your physical location, being on a school’s campus. So I hope that this helps you understand the differences. Thanks very much for the question! |
| Okay, let’s move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Mariam Atef. |
| Hi, Mariam. |
| Mariam says... |
| What's the difference between “barter” and “exchange” and “trade”? |
| Okay, great question! Barter, exchange, and trade. |
| Let’s start with the word “barter.” |
| So, to barter (as a verb), “to barter” means to try to get a good deal on something. So, when you barter for something, you’re talking about things you can offer another person to get something else in return. So, this could be money, it could be goods, it could be services. When you barter, you’re trying to get a good deal or maybe a fair deal with another person for something. |
| We don’t use this a lot in everyday English speech because in most cases, in US market places and English-speaking market places, there’s a set price for something, for a good or for a service, so we don’t do a lot of bartering. But depending on the culture and depending on the market situation, there may be some cases in which bartering is appropriate. |
| So, for example, if you go to maybe an independent seller somewhere in the world and you can name your own price or try to negotiate a discount, you can use the word “barter” to express that. |
| For example: |
| “I spent about ten minutes bartering with this shopkeeper to see if I could get a better price on this lamp that he had available. It’s really cool.” |
| So, “bartering” refers to that process of going back and forth between two people to negotiate a deal. |
| Let’s compare this to “exchange.” |
| “To exchange” can be used in a couple of different ways. One way is when you make a purchase from a store and maybe realize later it’s the wrong size or the wrong color or it’s not exactly what you wanted, but there’s a very similar item that is the correct item. You can talk about this process of bringing it back to the store and getting the other similar item as an exchange. We can also use this as a verb. So you might hear somebody go through a store and say I’d like to do an exchange please, which means I would like to bring this item back, item A, give it to you and get item B, which is very similar in return. |
| So, for example: |
| “I would like to exchange this for a medium. This is a small.” |
| So you want to exchange sizes or maybe you want to exchange colors. |
| So, with “exchange,” the idea is that there are maybe two or more similar items going back and forth and you’re not maybe making any new deals, but you’re just trying to get something similar to what you had before. You just need to fix an error or maybe find something that’s a little more appropriate for your situation, so this is exchange, to exchange. |
| Okay, lastly, let’s talk about the word “trade.” |
| “To trade” means to give someone one thing and to receive something else. So, you can give someone money and get a service or a good. This is a very basic example of a trade. But when we think about trading, generally today, we kind of think about giving someone else one item and receiving some other item from that person. |
| For example, if you have a book that I want to read and I have a book that you want to read, we might agree to trade books. That’s like saying, I’ll give you this if you give me that. |
| You might hear people referring to this as like a book exchange as well. In that case, it follows the same rule I talked about earlier, which means that two items that are kind of similar are swapped or traded. So there is a little bit of overlap between these vocabulary words. |
| Okay, so let’s recap really quickly. “To barter” means to negotiate for something, to try to get a good deal or to get a discount for something. “To exchange” or “an exchange” refers to giving someone one item and receiving a similar item in return. “To trade” means to give someone else an item and to receive another item, but the items aren’t always going to be similar. They might be completely different, but it’s up to the two people in the situation to decide on what is fair. So there may be some overlap between exchange and trade, but in the general sense, these are the key differences between these words. So, thanks for the interesting question. I hope that that helped you. Thanks very much! |
| All right, let’s move to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Rasel Ali. |
| Hi, Rasel! |
| Rasel says... |
| What’s the difference between “sensitive” and “emotional”? |
| Hmm, a really good question, okay. |
| Let’s talk about “sensitive” first because it has a couple of different uses. |
| When we talk about “sensitive,” a sensitive person, we’re talking generally about a person who reacts quickly to emotions and to feelings. So maybe they get angry very easily or they feel very sad very easily. Something causes them to feel their emotions very fast. So, we might describe that person as someone who is sensitive. We tend to use this more when we talk about people who get upset very easily, someone who gets very sad easily, or maybe who reacts negatively to something very easily. We might describe that kind of person as a sensitive person. |
| “You need to be careful what you say around her, she’s a little bit sensitive.” |
| Or “My boss is kind of sensitive today, I hope that she’s okay.” |
| So, “sensitive” refers to someone who reacts quickly to a situation. |
| We can also use “sensitive” to refer to a sensation, a physical sensation. So, for example, if you injure a part of your body like you injure maybe your wrist, for example, and just touching it lightly makes you feel pain. You might say, “Ah, my wrist is very sensitive right now.” So, you react very quickly to a little bit of stimulus. So that refers to a physical kind of sensitivity. You feel physically sensitive. So, perhaps, you can see that the key theme here is a reaction or some kind of reaction, whether it’s physical or emotional to some kind stimulus, so we react quickly to that. |
| Let’s compare this then to “emotional.” |
| So, someone who is emotional feels their emotions and expresses their emotions quite a lot. They may not always be very sensitive actually, but they express themselves quite openly. So someone who is very emotional might have no problem, for example, crying at a movie or maybe they’re very excited, enthusiastic about something good that happened and they want to express that. So, someone who is emotional isn’t always sensitive, but there may be some kind of overlap. That’s totally normal as well. |
| So this is the key difference between “sensitive” and “emotional.” “Sensitive” refers to having a reaction to something quickly whether it’s a physical or an emotional situation. Someone who is emotional expresses and feels their emotions openly. So thanks for an interesting question. I hope that this helps you. |
| All right, that is everything that I have for this week. Thank you, as always for sending your great questions. Thanks very much for watching this week’s episode of Ask Alisha and I will see you again next time. Bye! |
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