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Learning English use a limited vocabulary and are read at a slower pace than VOA's other English broadcasts. Previously known as Special English.(2020/04/04 09:30)
This week we answer a question from Viola in China, who writes:
Question:
I'm following your program all the time and I love it so much. I desperately want to learn about the meaning of the word "ever," especially the differences between "ever" and "never." Thanks very much!
- Viola, China
Answer:
Dear Viola,
Thanks for following our program. There are some simple rules that may help you learn how to use the words "ever" and "never."
Ever
"Ever" is an adverb, so it affects the meaning of a verb. The simple meaning of "ever" is "at least once." It can also mean, "at all times." Language experts tell us that "ever" only belongs in sentences with some negative quality. For example,
She didn't ever call back.
means the same as, She did not call at all times.
You will see "ever" in questions. The question,
Have you ever seen the northern lights?
means the same as Have you seen the northern lights at least once?
Where is the negative in that question? Grammar experts say that when you ask a question, there may be a negative answer. So "ever" is used in this kind of question.
Ever can also express a doubt, as in:
If you ever see that man again, ask his name.
The speaker here is unsure about whether the listener will see the man again.
Never
On the other hand, "never" already has a negative idea, so it belongs in sentences without any negative. "Never" is also an adverb, and it means "not ever," or "not at any time."
I have never seen such a beautiful sky.
Another difference is that you can use "never" as a one-word answer, while you cannot do so with "ever." For example:
A: You copied my work.
B: Me? Never!
And that's Ask a Teacher for this week. I hope you never stop asking questions!
I’m Jill Robbins.
Dr. Jill Robbins wrote this story for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor.
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Words in This Story
negative – n. a word or statement that means “no” or that expresses a denial or refusal
doubt – v. to be uncertain about (something); to believe that (something) may not be true or is unlikely
Do you have a question for the teacher? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section(2020/04/04 07:02)
We present the fourth of four parts of the short story "The Blue Hotel," by Stephen Crane. The story was originally adapted by the U.S. Department of State. The audio was recorded and produce by VOA Learning English.
The Swede’s face, fresh from Johnnie’s blows, felt more pleasure than pain in the wind and the whipping snow. A number of square shapes appeared before him and he recognized them as the houses of the town. He traveled along a street until he found a saloon. He pushed open the door and entered. At the end of the room four men sat drinking at a table.
The Swede dropped his bag upon the floor and, smiling at the saloon-keeper, said, “Give me some whiskey, will you?” The man placed a bottle, a whiskey glass, and a glass of ice-filled water upon a table. The Swede poured himself an extra-large amount of whiskey and drank it down.
“Bad night,” remarked the saloon-keeper, without interest. He was acting as though he were not noticing the man, but it could have been seen that he was secretly studying the remains of blood on the Swede’s face. “Bad night,” he said again.
“Oh, it’s good enough for me,” replied the Swede, as he poured himself some more whiskey. “No,” continued the Swede, “this isn’t too bad weather. It’s good enough for me.”
The large drinks of whiskey made the Swede’s eyes watery, and he breathed a little heavier. “Well, I guess I’ll take another drink,” said the Swede after a while. “Would you like something?”
“No, thanks; I’m not drinking. How did you hurt your face?”
The Swede immediately began to talk loudly. “Oh, in a fight. I beat the soul out of a man at Scully’s hotel.”
This caught the interest of the four men at the table.
“Who was it?” asked one.
“Johnnie Scully, son of the man who owns the hotel. He will be nearly dead for some weeks, I can tell you, I beat him well, I did. He couldn’t get up. They had to carry him into the house. Have a drink?”
Instantly the men in a quiet way surrounded themselves in privacy. “No, thanks,” said one.
It was a strange group. Two were well-known local businessmen; one was a lawyer; and one was a gambler.
But a close look at the group would not have enabled an observer to pick the gambler from the other men. He was, in fact, so delicate in manner and so careful with whom he gambled that the men of the town completely trusted and admired him.
His business was regarded with fear and lack of respect. That is why, without doubt, his quiet dignity shone brightly above the quiet dignity of men who might be merely hat-makers, or builders or salesmen. Beyond an occasional unwise traveler who came by rail, this gambler supposedly cheated only careless farmers who, when rich with good crops, drove into town full of foolish pride. Hearing at times of such a farmer, the important men of Romper usually laughed at his losses. And if they thought of the gambler at all, it was with a kind of pride of knowing he would never dare to attack their wisdom and courage.
Besides, it was known that this gambler had a wife and two children in a nice little house, where he led a perfect home life. And when anyone even suggested that there was a fault in his character, the men immediately described the virtues of his family life.
And one must not forget to declare the bare fact of his entire position in Romper. It is true that in all affairs other than his business, this card-player was so generous, so fair, so good, that he could be considered to have a higher moral sense than nine-tenths of the citizens of Romper.
And so it happened that he was seated in this saloon with two local businessmen and the lawyer.
The Swede continued to drink whiskey and to try to make the saloon-keeper drink with him. “Come on. Have a drink. Come on. No? Well, have a little one, then. By God, I’ve beaten a man tonight, and I beat him good, too! Gentlemen,” the Swede cried to the men at the table, “have a drink?”
“Ssh! Quiet!” said the saloon-keeper.
The group at the table, although really interested, had been trying to appear busy in talk. But now a man lifted his eyes toward the Swede and said shortly, “Thanks. We don’t want any more.”
At this reply, the Swede straightened. “Well,” he shouted, “it seems I can’t get anybody to drink with me. I want someone to drink with me now. Now! Do you understand?” He struck the table with his hand.
Years of experience had hardened the saloon-keeper. He merely answered, “I hear you.”
“Well,” cried the Swede, “listen then. See those men over there? Well, they’re going to drink with me, and don’t you forget it. Now you watch.”
“Stop that!” shouted the saloon-keeper.
“Why should I?” demanded the Swede. He walked to the men’s table, and by chance laid his hand on the shoulder of the gambler. “What about it?” he asked angrily. “I asked you to drink with me.”
The gambler simply turned his head and spoke over his shoulder. “My friend, I don’t know you.”
“Never mind!” answered the Swede. “Come and have a drink.”
“Now, my boy,” advised the gambler kindly, “take your hand off my shoulder and go away.” He was a little, thin man and it seemed strange to hear him use this tone to the big Swede. The other men at the table said nothing.
“What! You won’t drink with me, you little fool? I’ll make you then! I’ll make you!” The Swede had grasped the gambler fiercely at the throat, and was dragging him from his chair. The other men jumped up. The saloon-keeper ran toward the table. There was a great scene of shouts and movements, and then a long knife appeared in the hand of the gambler. It shot forward, and a human body was cut as easily as if it had been a piece of fruit. The Swede fell with a cry of greatest surprise.
The businessmen and the lawyer must have rushed out of the place backward. The saloon-keeper found himself hanging weakly to the arm of a chair and gazing into the eyes of a murderer.
“Henry,” said the latter, “you tell them where to find me. I’ll be home waiting.” Then he left. A moment afterward the saloon-keeper was in the street racing through the storm for help and, more important, companionship.
Months later, the cowboy was cooking meat on the stove of a small cattle farm near the Dakota border when there was the sound of a horse stopping outside. The Easterner entered with mail and newspapers.
“Well,” said the Easterner at once, “the fellow who killed the Swede will spend three years in prison. That’s not much, is it?”
“He will? Three years!” The cowboy turned the meat in the pan. “Three years. That isn’t much.”
“No,” replied the Easterner. “There was a lot of sympathy for him in Romper.”
“If the saloon-keeper had been any good,” said cowboy thoughtfully, “he would have gone in and hit that Swede on the head with a bottle in the beginning of it. That would have stopped all this murdering.”
“Yes, a thousand things might have happened,” said the Easterner sharply.
The cowboy moved his pan of meat on the fire, continued with his philosophy. “It’s strange, isn’t it? If he hadn’t said Johnnie was cheating, he’d be alive this minute. He was an awful fool. I believe he was crazy.”
“I feel sorry for that gambler,” said the Easterner.
“So do I,” said the cowboy. “He doesn’t deserve three years in prison for killing that fellow.”
“The Swede might not have been killed if everything had been honest.”
“Might not have been killed?” exclaimed the cowboy. “Everything honest? When he said that Johnnie was cheating and acted so crazy? And then in the saloon he practically asked to get hurt?” With these arguments the cowboy made the Easterner angry.
“You’re a fool!” cried the Easterner fiercely. “You’re a bigger fool than that Swede. Now let me tell you one thing. Let me tell you one thing. Listen! Johnnie was cheating!”
“Johnnie,” said the cowboy, blankly. There was a minute of silence, and then he said strongly, “Oh, no. The game was only for fun.”
“Fun or not,” said the Easterner, “Johnnie was cheating. I saw him. I know it. I saw him. And I refused to stand up and be a man. I let the Swede fight alone. And you—you were simply jumping around the place and wanting to fight. And old Scully too. We are all in it! This poor gambler just got pulled into it. Every sin is the result of shared effort. We, five of us, have shared in the murder of this Swede. You, I, Johnnie, old Scully; and that fool of an unfortunate gambler came merely at the end of a human movement, and gets all the punishment.”
The cowboy, hurt and angry, cried out blindly into this mystery of thought: “Well, I didn’t do anything, did I?”
The End
Now it's your turn. What do you think about the gambler's punishment for the murder? Write to us in the Comments section.
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To download a lesson plan to accompany this part of the story, click here.
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Words in This Story
saloon - n. a place where alcoholic drinks are served
whiskey - n. a strong alcoholic drink made from a grain (such as rye, corn, or barley)
lawyer - n. a person whose job is to guide and assist people in matters relating to the law
gambler - n. a person who plays a game in which he/she can win or lose money or other valuable things
courage - n. the ability to do something that you know is difficult or dangerous
fault - n. a bad quality or part of someone’s character
character - n. the way someone thinks, feels, and behaves; someone's personality
virtue - n. morally good behavior or character
cattle - n. cows, bulls, or steers that are kept on a farm or ranch for meat or milk
sin - n. an action that is considered to be wrong according to religious or moral law(2020/04/04 07:00)
For years, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles has been famous for its large collection of European paintings, sculptures and other works of art. Recently, it has become popular for something else: an art challenge on social media.
Last week, the Getty asked its followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to remake famous pieces from its collection. “We challenge you to recreate a work of art with objects (and people) in your home,” the museum wrote.
The rules were simple: Choose your favorite work of art. Use three things from your house to recreate it. Then, take a picture and share it on social media.
The public’s response came in the hundreds, then the thousands, of creative and funny remakes. And, it has not stopped yet.
When a coworker challenged Amy Retartha to do the art challenge, she knew exactly which painting she would use: Pablo Picasso’s “Old Guitarist.” Retartha, who lives in South Bend, Indiana, says she has always loved that painting, especially because of its history.
“There’s a story behind that piece because, at the time Picasso painted it, he was a poor artist and he had painted over a painting he didn’t like to reuse the canvas.”
If you look closely at the painting in person, you can see evidence of another person’s face behind the guitarist, she says.
Retartha, who has been making art since she was a child, says it took only 20 minutes to do the piece. She used blue and white bedding, a white mask, and one of her husband’s guitars. The local library where she works put the picture on its Instagram page.
Other people did the Getty challenge with something else they had at home: their children.
CGathier on Twitter remade the famous oil painting “Self-Portrait with Pipe” by Vincent Van Gogh with her son as Van Gogh. In her creation, her son is wearing a gray hat and has white material around his head and a pipe in his mouth.
With many parents now homeschooling their children, the Getty challenge came at a perfect time. One woman on Twitter used the challenge as an art lesson for her son. With a toy monkey, a cat and other objects, the boy recreated “Self-Portrait with Thorns and Hummingbird” – a painting by celebrated Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
Other people included real animals in the challenge.
A picture that is appearing all over social media is of a woman who remade a 13th century Italian piece with just two objects: a scarf and her dog. It comes from a painting called “Madonna and Child,” whose painter remains a mystery to this day.
Annelisa Stephan is assistant director for digital content at the Getty Museum. She has seen people use their dogs, cats, rabbits and even ferrets. As the challenge becomes more popular, one animal she would love to see people use is a snake -- a common symbol in Roman art.
Stephan says the challenge was born when the Getty recently asked its followers on social media what they wanted to do from home and got hundreds of replies.
“People really showed that they really wanted to look at art and engage with it and they were also eager to have fun.”
So, the Getty staff began looking online for fun ideas and were moved by the art challenges of the Rijskmuseum in Amsterdam and an Instagram page called Between Art and Quarantine. Similarly, those challenges asked people to use home objects to remake art.
Stephan notes the Getty challenge has grown so much that people in the United Kingdom, Portugal and other European countries are doing it. She has even seen challengers from Australia.
But is there something no one has done yet that she would enjoy seeing? She would love to see people do recreations of the Roman sculptures. Stephan suggests people look at the portrait heads and see if any “look like them or has an expression that might speak to them.”
I’m Alice Bryant.
Alice Bryant wrote this story for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.
Have you tried the art challenge yet? If so, send us your art creation at learningenglish@voanews.com.
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Words in This Story
sculpture – n. a piece of art that is made by carving or molding clay, stone, metal or something else
challenge – n. an invitation to participate in a competition
response – n. something that is done as a reaction to something else
canvas – n. a specially prepared piece of cloth on which a picture can be painted by an artist
pipe – n. a tube with a small bowl at one end that is used for smoking tobacco
toy – adj. of a kind that is meant for a child to play with
scarf – n. a long piece of cloth that is worn on your shoulders, around your neck or over your head
content – n. the ideas, facts, or images that are in a website or in a book, speech, movie or something else
engage – v. to become involved with
eager – adj. very excited and interested(2020/04/04 06:59)
Lauren Beukes is a writer who likes to tells stories about power between men and women. Her new book “Afterland,” will tell the story of a disease that kills almost the entire male population.
"I wanted to explore what a world without men would look like and how it wouldn't necessarily be a better place,” says Beukes. She began her book years before the coronavirus outbreak.
Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. He says he got the idea for his new book from the filmmaker Ridley Scott. Scott asked him years ago after reading Cormac McCarthy's dystopian "The Road": "How could social order break down so much after a disaster?" His upcoming novel, "The End of October," describes an international outbreak that begins in Asia.
He says people have become so worried about terrorism that they have forgotten the power of natural disasters.
Plagues have been with us for at least as long as people have been able to write about them. But among artists and writers, their meaning has changed a lot based on the writer and the period.
Once an outbreak was believed to be a punishment from God. People were punished for sinning in some way. However, outbreaks also allow us to see that there is good and bad in all humans.
For the Greek historian Thucydides, the plague that nearly destroyed Athens proved to him that praying made little difference, and men could easily break the law or become violent during a crisis.
Edgar Allan Poe showed the arrogance of trying to defy disease in "The Masque of the Red Death."
Stephen Soderbergh made the movie “Contagion” about ten years ago to show how easily society can come apart.
Many artists found a voice painting the Black Plague of the Middle Ages. They showed frightening deaths as well as images of Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch whose presences were meant to comfort the families of the dead.
"Saint Sebastian had survived being shot with arrows, and Saint Roch was believed to have survived…the plague, so you often see them appearing in art," says C. Griffith Mann. He is head of the Department of Medieval Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Also during the Middle Ages, the writer Bocaccio wrote “The Decameron,” that describes how young women and young men flee from the plague. Alone in a great house, they tell each other stories to pass the time.
Boccaccio knew “what we would/could do in the time of the plague: We need to escape from our 'real' world,” says Wayne A. Rebhorn. He is the head of the English department at the University of Texas at Austin.
“If the plague shows just how desperate and fragile human life can be, stories offer a way to cope with that desperation,” he says.
Plague books can be a way of looking at the way societies change. The 1665 plague in London was the subject for Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year." It was published many years after the plague struck. Auburn University professor Paula Backscheider says Defoe's book came out at a time when the Renaissance was changing the way people looked at religion. They asked the question: Why do human beings suffer?
Defoe was trying to decide if the plague came from God, or if it came from science, Backscheider explained. He wanted to know, if it came from science, how could people protect themselves, she added.
In the 20th century, Albert Camus' "The Plague" was widely seen as a parable for the Nazi occupation of France and as a statement about the uncertainty of life.
I’m Jill Robbins.
The Associated Press reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.
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Words in This Story
dystopian - adj. a world in which society is repressive
plague - n. a disease that affects many people at one time
arrogance - n. the belief that one person is better than another
sin - n. an evil act
medieval - adj. the time period between the dark ages and the renaissance
fragile - adj. easily breakable
cope - v. to be able to deal with something
Renaissance - n. a time of rebirth, specifically in Europe
parable - n. a simple story used to illustrate a spiritual lesson.(2020/04/04 06:58)
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