E003 Weather Forecaster

Welcome to English with Kimberley.

In this episode, I want to introduce you to the use of prepositions like ‘in’, ‘at’ and ‘on’.

For example, ‘The weather in February, in the summer, in Australia is often very hot’.

Hey! Here’s a little quiz to start with.

What do you think has been the hottest temperature, in Celsius degrees, in Australia?

Was it

a) 30?

b) 40?

c) 45?

or d) 51?

Well!

It’s ‘d’, 51 degrees Celsius – actually, according to Wikipedia, it was 50.7 degrees Celsius on Saturday on the 2nd January in 1960 in South Australia.

By the way, do you know that in some countries they use a different temperature measure than Celsius – for example in the United Kingdom they use Fahrenheit quite a lot.

Don’t confuse them as the numbers are quite different. Zero (0) degrees Celsius is 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

32 degrees Celsius is the average Japanese hot spring or ‘onsen’ temperature – very hot, while 32 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature that water freezes at – very cold

When we talk about the weather we often use time periods like ‘today’, ‘this week’, ‘last year’, ‘Monday’, ‘May’, ‘2016’ and so on.

When we talk about these time periods we often use a preposition.

For example:

‘It was hot on the weekend’ – tells us when, or what time it was hot – That is, ‘on the weekend.’

Did you notice that the prepositions are always at the beginning of the time period.

For example:

– ‘on the weekend’
– ‘in the morning’

Other examples are:
Time with ‘at 6.00’
Periods of the day with ‘in the afternoon’
Days of the week with ‘on Monday’
Months with ‘in March’
Seasons with ‘in spring’
and

Years with ‘in 1997’
So, we can have:

The hottest temperature in Australia was recorded on Saturday, in the afternoon, at around 2.00, in the summer, in January, in 1960.’

Here’s a quick quiz – just for fun!

Try and finish this sentence.

The weather forecaster said that there will be rain in the evening…

a) on 6.00.

b) at 6.00.

or c) in 6.00.

Yes. You’ve got it!

It’s b), ‘The weather forecaster said that there will be rain in the evening… at 6.00’.

You can leave your feedback about this podcast on iTunes.

You can also find a script of this podcast at www.goaustralia.biz

If you want to have more practice with prepositions, just type the word ‘prepositions’ in your search engine, surf and see what comes up.

I hope you have enjoyed this podcast and you’ll join me again.