Hello and welcome to The English Like a Native Podcast. My name is Anna and you're listening to Week 48, Day 5 of Your English Five a Day. This is the series that gives you a healthy daily dose of English vocabulary and listening. So stick with me and slowly but surely improve your overall English. If you want to take things a step further with more interaction and opportunities to speak, then head over to the website, englishlikeanative.co.uk and consider joining our club. So, let's start today's list with the noun the default. The default. Default, D E F A U L T, default. The default as a noun is the pre-selected option that is automatically chosen unless an alternative is specified. So, for example, if you did take my invitation and come over to my website, the default option for the club is a monthly subscription to the standard Conversation Club, which is all the live classes unless you decide, actually, I don't want a monthly subscription. I'd rather do a three-monthly subscription, or you might choose the yearly subscription because then you get to save some money. So the default is a monthly subscription. But you might choose something other than the default. Here's another example,"When setting up the new software, English was the default." That makes me smile. The example sentence. It reminds me a couple of days ago of picking up my son's iPad. He was struggling with it and getting very frustrated and he said,"Mummy, mummy, can you help me with this game, please?" And so I picked it up and realised he'd changed the language to like Czech or something. And I had no clue what I was looking at. There was a list of options. And I had no idea how he'd managed to change the default language, which, on our iPads, is English to Czech. Oh, my goodness, it took me a little while of clicking around, but I eventually found the languages option and managed to change it back to English. Next on the list is the adjective scarce. Scarce. We spell this S C A R C E, scarce, scarce. Notice how we don't pronounce the R. We just have scarce. If something is described as scarce, then it's in short supply. There's not enough of it to meet demand. For example,"During the drought, fresh water became scarce, leading the community to implement strict conservation measures." Now, normally in this country, at some point during the summer, after a number of heat waves, we are subjected to the hose pipe ban. It happens almost every year at some point, we are told that we're not allowed to use sprinklers or our hose pipes in the garden. So, if we want to water our plants, then we have to do it using a watering can, which is laborious if you have many flowerbeds and pots to water. But this is because water can be scarce during those hot summer months. And this year, for the first time in a long time, we haven't had a hose pipe ban because we've barely had any periods of hot weather. We've had a few days here and there. But it's been relatively cold, and quite a short-lived summer. really. So water has not been scarce. Water has been available throughout the summer, this year, lots of rain, lots of downpours. No scarcity at all. Next on the list is the phrasal verb make up, to make up. We spell this, make M A K E. Up, U P. To make up means to combine, to produce. So, you combine a number of parts and that produces or makes up the whole. So it means to form or constitute something. So for example,"52 cards make up a whole deck." So if you want a complete deck of cards, then you need 52 cards to make up the complete set. Here's another example,"Small businesses make up a significant portion of the country's economy." Next on the list is the noun pang, pang. We spell this P A N G, pang. A pang is a sudden sharp feeling of pain or discomfort often emotional. Oh, you could think of it as a twinge of emotion. For example,"Sienna felt a pang of guilt as she walked past the shelter, knowing she had been meaning to volunteer her time but not yet committed." I often feel a pang of sadness or melancholy when I look at my children's baby pictures or see their little videos from when they were tiny, and I have this little pang of sadness because I miss those versions of my children. The younger versions that you feel will be with you forever. And then suddenly they're all grown up. They're much bigger. They don't want to cuddle you in the same way. They don't look at you in the same way. They don't have the cute little lisps that they had when they were first learning to talk. So I get a little pang of sorrow. When I see those old pictures and wonder, where has the time gone? Last on today's list is the verb browse, browse. When we're on the internet, we tend to browse. We spell this B R O W S E, to browse. To browse is to look at the information on the internet. So it's to look around, basically, you browse. Now, this is often used when talking specifically about looking around, rather than looking for something very specific. So, if I turn on my computer and I go to englishlikeanative.co.uk, because I want to look specifically at what the Conversation Club has to offer, then I'm not browsing. I'm doing something specific. But if I go to Google and I type in online speaking practice, and then it shows me lots of different options. Then I'm browsing, I'm looking through, I might have a look at one website and then go to another website. I'm looking, I'm looking around. Here's another example,"Who remembers the days before social media when we mostly used our computers to browse the internet, going from website to website?" Okay. That's our five. Let's do a quick recap. We started with the noun the default, which is that preselected option that is automatically chosen unless we change it. Then we had the adjective scarce, which means that something is in short supply, there's not enough of it to meet demand. We had the phrasal verb to make up, which means to combine in order to produce the whole. Then we had the noun pang, which is that a sudden sharp feeling of discomfort or pain is often an emotional discomfort. And we had the verb browse, which is to look at information on the internet. So let's do this now for pronunciation purposes. Please repeat after me. Default. Default. Scarce. Scarce. Make up. Make up. Pang. Pang. Browse. Browse. Excellent. Alright, let me test your memory. If I turn on my washing machine and the programme that it automatically loads when I turn it on is my daily wash programme. How would I describe this preselected option? It's the default. Yes. Fantastic. And if I am running out of washing powder and I go to the shops and I say,"Hey, there's no washing powder on your shelves. Where's the washing powder." And they say,"I'm terribly sorry, Madam, there's a a shortage in supply." What adjective could I use to describe washing powder at this point in time? Scarce. Yes, it's scarce at the moment."Oh, no!" And if I'm working on fractions with my children and I'm showing them that the cake has six pieces. And if you put all the pieces together, then you have the whole cake. What phrasal verb can I use to describe combining pieces in order to produce the whole cake? Make up. Yes. All six pieces of cake make up a complete whole cake. And if I have a sudden feeling of sorrow when I look at a picture of someone that I miss, what noun could I use to describe this feeling? A pang that's right. And I decided actually, rather than sitting here having pangs of sorrow, why don't I just find this person that I miss on the internet? Surely, they must be on the internet somewhere. So, I have a look around the internet. What verb could I use? I browse the internet, looking for this person that gives me pangs of sorrow. When I think about them, I need to find them. Okay. That's our five let's listen out for them once again, in today's storytime. When it comes to browsing the internet, the truth is that English is the default. Web page, after web page, they're all in English, right? Over 50% of the internet is in English. The next most popular language online, Spanish, makes up around 5% of websites! It's unbelievable, isn't it? Other languages are much more scarce online. Did you know that only 0.3% of websites are in Danish? It gets worse. 0.1% or in Latvian or Norwegian. Another incredible statistic is that only 1.4% of the web is in Chinese, despite there being over a billion Chinese people. Worse still, only a few hundred of the 7,000 languages in the world are used online. When you're a monolingual English speaker like me, you feel a pang of guilt as you browse the web. Why is the default my language? How did I get so lucky? Even if I did speak another language, it makes sense to browse the web in English as it's the language of the internet. If you want to know how we got into this situation, you need to know a bit about the history of the internet. It was English speakers who created and launched the World Wide Web. And up until recently, English-speaking countries had the most internet users. Then again, maybe it's a good thing. English is the global language so having the internet in English means plenty of people can understand what's written on it. Then again, lots of people don't speak or read English. But the amount of English on the internet is actually in decline. It used to be as high as 75% back in 1998. So English isn't as dominant as it once was. Maybe the online world will become more multilingual in the years to come and other languages won't be so scarce. And that brings us to the end of today's episode and to the end of Week 48. I do hope you found this useful. Until next time, take very good care and goodbye.