Learn the English Phrases "by weight" and "dead weight"

Read along to practice your English and to learn the English phrases BY WEIGHT and DEAD WEIGHT

In this English lesson, I'd like to help you learn the English phrase "by weight." When you buy something, you can either buy it by weight. You pay a certain amount per pound or per kilogram, or I think the opposite is by volume. When I buy gas, I pay per liter. But when something is sold by weight, you pay for a certain number of pounds or kilograms or whatever other measure of weight they are using. When we sell bouquets, we sell by quantity. You buy 12, sorry, you buy 12 flowers in a bouquet, so you're buying I guess by volume but I would say by quantity. When I buy gas, it's by volume, and when I buy things like bulk food at the grocery store, where you scoop it yourself and put it in a bag, often you pay by weight. We actually have a store called Bulk Barn in Canada where you can buy everything by weight, candies, chocolate. I like buying chocolate by weight, although the scoop I make usually ends up costing more than I'm expecting.

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The other phrase I wanted to teach you today is the phrase "dead weight." This refers to anyone who isn't doing their job. We also would say they're not pulling their weight. If you watch a sports game, if you watch a football game and one person isn't running very fast and they don't play very good defense and they never score a goal, you might say that they're dead weight. You would describe that person as being dead weight. Not a very nice way to be described, but if you're dead weight, it means you're not really doing anything.

So to review, when you buy something by weight, you're paying by the pound or by the kilogram depending on how you measure things in your country. And when someone is dead weight, it means that they're not contributing the way they should to a team or at work or someone else.

But hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video. This comment is from Axmed. "Hello teacher Bob the Canadian. "Is this phrase correct? "'I met the President, or I met with the President'?" My response, both are correct, but with slightly different meanings, so I'm glad you brought this up. "I met the President." This means you saw him or her once briefly, maybe shook his or her hand and maybe got your picture taken. "I met with the President," this means you probably sat down for a bit of time and talked with the President.

So thanks for that comment by the way, Axmed. Yes, you can see from my response, slightly different meanings. The first one simply means that maybe you were somewhere and the President was there and you said "hi" and got a selfie taken with the President, and then the second one would mean you actually had a meeting. You actually sat down and you talked about things. You probably must be a very important person if you had an actual meeting with the President, although everyday people sometimes can meet the President or Prime Minister.

Someone I work with actually met the Prime Minister and got his picture taken. I was surprised. He didn't meet with the Prime Minister. He met the Prime Minister at like a meet and greet in a park I think that's where it was. So I was a little bit jealous. I thought, Bob the Canadian should someday get a picture with the Prime Minister. That would be really, really cool, of Canada.

By the way, did you know that's one of my dreams, which will probably never happen? I would love it if the Canadian Tourism Board hired me as an ambassador for Canada promoting this beautiful country. I thought, wouldn't it be cool if when I retire from teaching, if the Canadian government se

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