📙 Part 2: Describe an intelligent person you know

This episode's vocabulary

Possess (verb) - to have or own something, or to have a particular quality.

Shrewd (adj.) - having or based on a clear understanding and good judgment of a situation, resulting in an advantage.

Prod (verb) - to encourage someone to take action, especially when they are being slow or unwilling.

Acquired taste - something that you may not like at first, but begin to like after you have tried it.

Assessment (noun) - the act of judging or deciding the amount, value, quality, or importance of something, or the judgment or decision that is made.

Summon (verb) - to remember or imagine something.

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Questions and Answers

M: Rory is going to talk about an intelligent person he knows. He's going to say who this person is, what they do, why he thinks they are smart and how he feels about him or her. Rory, fire away, Rory.

R: Well, I know quite a few clever people. But one of the cleverest I've met in my life is my old mentor, Claire, she used to supervise my work and that of about a million other people when I started out working as a teacher, at the same school as her, actually. She has this extraordinary wealth of knowledge about teaching and how people work that few others possess to the extent that she can almost predict what's going to happen before it happens in a lot of cases. Between this and a list of qualifications as long as my arm she's possibly, she's obviously quite brilliant, though I don't think she would ever say that about herself. She's quite shrewd in this sense. Of course, you can be, you can be a smart person and still fail to make an impact. And this is where she is so clever with how she does things, though, she understands that what people respond to and how to motivate them in the right direction. And she delivers her ideas in such a way that it is designed to get people to think about what she said after she said it. As with many other people I know I don't think I could have done quite as much without her help and advice. In addition to the opportunity, she sort of poked and prodded me in the direction of in her own little way. I'm quite pleased to know her even though we hold roughly equal status now. And we're quite physically distant due to the pandemic, I definitely owe a great deal to her. And like I say, I think a great many other people have as well, although she can be an acquired taste in the sense. She's a bit like Marmite you either love it or hate it. But, and she would agree with that assessment, probably. But I think it's important for people to bear in mind, even if you dislike somebody due to their manner of delivery or whatever, that they might have been extremely beneficial to you. And certainly I can say this in Claire's case. And hopefully she'd agree with me, even though it's highly unlikely she'll ever hear what I've just said about her.

M: What about your friends? So do they know this person?

R: All of my friends in Moscow know Claire, and all of them without exception hold great admiration for her. Although they might not have expressed it to her directly, they've certainly told me.

M: Yeah, she has an outstanding sense of humor.

R: You've worked with Claire.

M: Yeah, I've worked with Claire. Yeah, I saw her actually last week.

R: It's important to point out that all of the people that we're talking about in all of our part twos, where we have to talk about people are real people.

M: Yeah, they are real people, right. But if you don't have any intelligent person in your life.

R: If you don't know any intelligent people...

M: But again, like it's stress in the exam, you're stressing out and like, oh, I forgot all people I know. It's okay. You can lie, so you can make it up.

R: You can summon Claire.

M: Yeah, or you can say like I'm going to be talking about Rory and just lie.

R: If you're feeling terrified you can summon Claire. And then you'll know what fear really is.

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