| 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 Adila. Hi, Adila. I hope I said your name correctly. Adila says when do we use above and over when we're talking about speed, temperature and so on? Nice question. |
| Yeah. So we use above and over to refer to too much of something, especially when we're talking about the speed of something or the temperature of something as in your example. |
| So to give a very, very common example of this when we are driving in a car, there's usually a speed limit, let's say in the USA, 60 miles an hour, right? So if you drive 70 miles an hour, you are going above the speed limit or you are driving over the speed limit. |
| We can use both of these words to talk about going beyond the limit. |
| So if a police officer stops your car because you're going to the police officer might say, Did you know that you were going over the speed limit? Or did you know you were driving above the speed limit, which means too much, right? In these cases, we do the same thing for temperature. |
| So for example, let's say you want to talk about a really, really hot day. |
| And let's say you want to describe like, the hottest part of the day, you can say, the temperature today was over 30 degrees, like 30 degrees Celsius, it's really, really hot, right? You can say the temperature was above 30 degrees as well. So this means it is more than that. |
| So this is what above and over are used to do when we're talking about like numbers data, right? So of course, we can use it to talk about how much of something like a quantity of something. |
| But when we're talking about these other concepts, like how quickly we are moving, or how hot or how cold something is, we can use above and over to refer to beyond that. |
| And of course, we can also do the opposite, we can also talk about things that are less than with the word under. |
| So for example, temperatures were under three degrees today or temperatures were under zero, we can also use below to do this. |
| Oh my gosh, the temperatures below freezing today is also a very common expression. |
| We do this with speed to you're driving really, really far under the speed limit, or you were driving well below the speed limit, we can also use below and under in the same ways that we use above and over in these situations. |
| So I hope that this answers your question. Thanks very much for sending it along. Okay, let's move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Frances. |
| Hi, Frances. Frances says Hi, Alicia, could you tell me the difference between to rob and to steal? Thanks a lot for your work. Frances from Belgium. Yeah. |
| Okay, cool, Frances. Let's talk about the difference between to rob and to steal. So one of the key differences here is in the grammatical structure that we use to use these words to use these verbs when we talk about taking something from someone else. |
| So both to rob and to steal mean to take something that does not belong to you, right, you take something and you don't pay for it. And that's bad generally. |
| So when we use these words, we have to think about the different grammatical structures that we have. |
| So let's imagine a situation where a thief takes something from a jewelry store, we can use both steal and rob to talk about this situation. But we use different grammatical structures. |
| When we do this, when we use the verb steal, we typically have an object, which means the thing that was taken in the situation. |
| When we use the verb rob, however, we're just talking about the two people or the two organizations that are involved in the situation. |
| So here are a couple example sentences to show you what I mean. Let's focus on steal. |
| First, we could say, for example, the thief stole a necklace from the jewelry store. |
| So here we have three pieces of information who stole it, the thief, we have the necklace, the thing that was taken, and we have the jewelry store, where did it come from? We could also make a passive sentence here, for example, a necklace was stolen from the jewelry store by a thief, we could use this kind of sentence structure as well. |
| However, when we use the verb rob, we don't talk about the specific thing that was taken. |
| So let's take a look at some example sentences with rob that talk about the same situation. |
| So we could say, for example, the thief robbed the jewelry store, this sentence tells us that a thief took something or took many things from a jewelry store, but we don't know exactly what. |
| We could also make a passive sentence structure to the jewelry store was robbed by a thief. |
| This also tells us someone came to the jewelry store and took a lot of things. |
| But in this sentence that uses rob, we don't see specifically what was taken. |
| So if you don't know what was taken, if you don't know exactly what items disappeared, and so on, if you don't know the details of that you might use the word rob and the noun form is robbery. |
| If however, you do know object that was taken or more details like that, you can say this thing was stolen or a thief stole this thing from the store. |
| So the grammatical structures that we use with these two words are different. |
| Also, more generally, we kind of tend to use the word rob when we're talking about someone maybe doing something personally to us. |
| Like if someone's like comes to you on the street and says give me your bag or something like that, I hope it doesn't happen. |
| You might describe that as saying I was robbed, right? You kind of want to have that feeling of oh my gosh, someone did this terrible thing to me and rob tends to have a little bit more of that like personal feeling. |
| If someone comes up to you and says, Oh, someone stole my bag, it doesn't sound exactly the same. |
| In that situation, it could be like, maybe you forgot your bag at a cafe for a minute or so and someone took it in that case. |
| But to be robbed sounds kind of more aggressive, like someone had a plan, they came to you, they were violent or something like that. |
| So rob kind of has this more personal kind of aggressive feel, whereas to steal could be a little bit more silent, a little bit more sneaky. |
| So this is kind of the difference in feeling between to rob and to steal. |
| But also keep in mind that the grammatical structures that we use when we use these two verbs are a bit different as well. So I hope that this answers your question. Thanks very much for sending it along. Good one. |
| Okay, let's move on to your next question. Next question comes from Juan. Hi, Juan. Juan says, Hello, teacher. I hope everything is fine. Everything is fine. Thank you. I've always been interested in knowing the degree of extremity of the word appalling. Could you explain please? Okay, sure. |
| So how extreme is the word appalling? So let's talk about this word. The word appalling, this is an adjective. We use this word when we feel extreme shock and surprise and usually like disgust. |
| So we use this word, as you can probably guess, in very rare situations, when something very, very terrible has happened, like maybe war, a war crime, or someone has done something that's just unforgivable, we can describe that behavior as appalling. |
| So I mean, I suppose there are some situations where it may be appalling behavior might be different, depending on your country, depending on your culture. |
| But appalling behavior is usually something that is against like society's guidelines against society's rules, it could be something that's really hurtful or harmful to other people, it could be something that's really, really gross, really disgusting. |
| So there are a lot of different kinds of situations, you might think of something as being appalling, but we generally use it to refer to something that is very, very extreme. |
| So we could also say if someone is very, very rude to us, like you can't believe this person is so rude, you might call that kind of behavior appalling behavior. |
| So it's for something that is more than expected in a bad way, right? So some other examples of using appalling right in the middle of the meeting, he called me a bunch of really rude insults, it was appalling. |
| So this expresses someone's behavior is completely, completely rude. It's really, really unexpected. |
| That was appalling. |
| Or maybe you might see a terrible story in the news about like, war situation and like hundreds of innocent people die. You might say, Oh, my gosh, this is appalling. How can anyone do this kind of thing? So appalling is used in those very extreme situations, or something really unexpected or really, really unpleasant happens. |
| So I hope that this answers your question. Thanks for sending it along. 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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