Podcast 139 - Edmund the Elephant (by M. A. Bilbrough)

Stories for students studying B1 level English

Story starts at 6:10

B1 story - Edmund the Elephant

Hello again!

And welcome to Practising English, where I'm going to tell you another story. Now, the story today, I suppose you could say it's about identity, our self-identity. It's very important to know who we are, the part we play, our role in society. Usually, perhaps that is defined by the job we do, or what we do with other people, how we behave. It's important to know who we are. And this is a little story about that, I suppose. But there again, on the other hand, it could be just a silly story about an elephant! Anyway, I'm going to continue now with the story. There will be a little explanation of the vocabulary. This is a B1-level podcast, but good for B2-level students too. So here we go.... [music]

There are lots of B1 words here, but I'm just going to bring out some which refer to clothes. So, for example, this story takes place in a theatre and in the theatre, you often change your clothes, because perhaps you are going to be in a play, or in this case, in a concert. The person in the story, as I've already mentioned, is not a person at all. It's an elephant and his name is Edmund. And he gets dressed, ready to play in a concert. Now the place he gets dresses is a dressing room, a dressing room, so that is a special room where the people who perform in the concert, can get dressed before they start.

So the verb is to dress in something. That means to put on clothes, and the clothes that he puts on are a suit, a three-piece suit, which is made up of a jacket, trousers and waistcoat. Now a waistcoat is something that goes underneath a jacket. It's like a small jacket, but with no sleeves. So we call that a waistcoat.

And well, other words related to clothes. For example, to fit. Now 'to fit' is an important word if you're talking about clothes, especially if you're buying clothes. To fit means the piece of clothing is your size. If it fits, it is your size it's not too big or it's not too small. So we say 'it fits' - the past tense 'it fitted' him, it was the right size.

The person who makes clothes specially for somebody, so you pay them to make a suit for you, for example, is a tailor. Usually, we go to a shop and we just buy something in the shop and we hope that it fits. But perhaps if we have more money, we can pay someone to make the clothes for us and that person is a tailor. There are some words which refer to the material and the pattern. And referring to the pattern, there is the word striped. Striped means that the piece of clothing, the article of clothing has lines across it. And that's called striped.

And then the material - in this case is silk. Silk is a very fine material. It's very light. And in fact, interestingly, it's made by little worms, who make this material naturally and they use those threads that come from these worms to make silk.

Right, and also then there's a gold chain that he wears. This gold chain is fastened that means attached to his jacket.

Okay, well that's about it, really. But I'm going to ask you three questions as well before I start the story.

And the first one is,

1) What is made of silk in the story? Striped silk, what article of clothing is it?

And question two is,

2) What is attached to the chain that he has on his jacket? What is it which is fixed to the chain?

And the third question is,

3) What is the mistake that Edmund the elephant made?

Okay. So listen for the answers to those questions. And listen out for those words that I mentioned too. Here we go...

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