This episode’s vocabulary
Muddle through
phrasal verb — to manage to do something although you are not organized and do not know how to do it.
Puzzle sth out
phrasal verb — to discover or understand something by thinking hard about it.
Crossword
noun — a game in which you write words that are the answers to questions in a pattern of black and white squares.
Puzzle
noun — a problem or question that you have to answer by using your skill or knowledge.
To solve
verb — to find an answer to a problem.
To underpin
verb — to give support, strength, or a basic structure to something.
Totalitarian
adj. — of or being a political system in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freedom to oppose them.
Stick out to the end
idiom — to endure, tolerate, or continue through to the end or completion of something.
To relive
verb — to remember clearly an experience that happened in the past.
Questions and answers
Hello, hello, hello. And welcome to speaking part two. In this one Rory is gonna describe a puzzle, jigsaw, crossword that he has played. Yeah. Oh my God, it could be better than a law on environmental protection. But it's a pretty tricky one. So a puzzle. He's gonna say what it's like how easy or difficult it is how long it took him to solve it, and how he feels about it. Rory, are you happy to get this question?
Oh, it's a puzzle how am I going to get through this?
Oh, you'll have to muddle through. My boy.
But I'll puzzle out an answer.
Fire away.
My family and I used to do the crossword in the evening telegraph when we were all together back home. And I suspect that my mum and dad still do. Although to be honest with you, we rarely talk about it these days. I should say, the evening telegraph is like our local newspaper. And it gets published every day. And it always has a puzzle page. And one of the main puzzles that people are attracted to there is the crossword. It's not exactly the hardest thing to solve in the world. And there are words that repeat themselves. My parents call them "tele-words". But it's a fun test of vocabulary. And I think it sort of underpins us all being together at dinner time, which is kind of important if you sort of value your relationship with your family. I usually gave up about halfway through and my mom was always a bit totalitarian with writing the answers. Like sometimes she would ignore us when we gave answers, and she would just put her own down. But dad would always stick out to the end, my brother and I would just sort of chip in every now and then while we were eating dinner, or if we were cleaning the dishes and stuff like that. So despite the fact that we weren't all in 100%, you know, it's still like a nice thing to do together as a family, while other things are going on. To be honest, I don't mind much about the crossword itself. It's more sort of, like I said, the idea of having something to bring us together. And I really look forward to reliving it when I go back home. Actually, I hope we get the chance to do that. Because one of the things that I missed about being in Russia for one and a half years and not going home was actually doing things together with my family. And I think this will be quite a nice place to start.
Thank you very much, Rory! Do you think that you're gonna do this again sometime soon?
Oh, yeah. Like I said, I want to do it with my family when I go back, although I suspect the problems that I mentioned will be the same. -