Bob's Short English Lessons Learn the English Phrases THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG and TO TIP OFF
Read along to practice your English and to learn the English phrases THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG and TO TIP OFF
In this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn the English phrase the tip of the iceberg. Now an iceberg is a gigantic block of ice floating in the ocean. And you can see the top of it, but there's a lot more below it. So we use the English phrase, the tip of the iceberg, to talk about things where you can see a little bit of it, but there's a whole lot more that is hidden. Here's a good example. Sometimes I'm sitting and I'm grading some student work, and I have a pile about this big, and another teacher might say to me, oh, that's not very much grading. I could say, it's just the tip of the iceberg. There are three more piles of grading in my classroom that I have to go and grade later today. So when you say something is the tip of the iceberg, it means you can see a little bit of it, but there's a whole bunch more to it that is hidden.
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The second phrase I wanted to teach you today is the phrase to tip off. When you tip someone off, it means you tell them a secret, or you tell them something that was supposed to be a secret. Let's say my sister is planning to have a surprise party for me, and my other sister tips me off. My other sister tells me about the party. We would then say that she has tipped me off. She told me about something that was supposed to be a secret.
So let's review. The tip of the iceberg is any time you can see a small part of something, and maybe not realizing there's a whole bunch to it that's hidden as well. And when you tip someone off, it means you let them know something that was kind of supposed to be a secret.
Hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video. This comment is from Valeria, and Valeria says, hi, dear teacher, Bob, thank you for the new lesson. I've never heard about a fruit cellar. Is there a special place in the basement for fruits? And my response is this, yes, in the basement of our house, there is a fruit cellar, many houses in Canada have them. It is a room that stays somewhat cool all year round. We actually don't use ours that much anymore, as a fridge is more convenient.
So yes, fruit cellars, an interesting thing that all houses use to have, and most houses still do, but not everyone uses them to store fruit anymore. They were really handy, because they were below the ground, and so they stayed somewhat cool. So if you look right here, you'll see that there is a basement below my house. We have rooms in the bottom floor of our house below the ground. And because they are below the ground, they stay somewhat cool. And long ago, people used to harvest apples and pears, and they would keep them in the fruit cellar. It wasn't as cold as a refrigerator, but it was cold enough to keep things relatively cold, somewhat cold compared to what it was like outside. And they were especially good in the winter, because they never froze.
So because they were below ground, they would stay somewhere around, I'm gonna say 55 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know what that is in Celsius. Let me see if I can do the math really quickly. Probably around 10 or 11 degrees Celsius. I hope that's right. Double it, and add 30. 10 is it? Yes, somewhere around there, around 10 or 11 degrees Celsius. That's my quick math.