English Recordings

Good morning Sir! > Good morning Chad!
Hi Ben! > Hi Tom!
Good afternoon Miss ! > Good afternoon Oliver!
Good evening!
Good night!
See you soon!
Goodbye!
Nice to meet you!

One of the best horror films I have seen is “The Blair Witch Project”. It tells the story of a terrifying ordeal in the woods of northern USA. Some of the scenes in the film sent shivers down my spine, especially the one when the students run out of the tent in the middle of the night. When they go back, one of the guy’s rucksack has been emptied. When that same guy goes missing the next day, it gives you goosebumps.

Perhaps the scariest part of the film is at the end, when you see one of the surviving students literally shake with fear in the corner of the basement. It certainly frightened the life out of the girl when she saw him, and I jumped out of my skin at the end when the camera stopped filming. The film scared the hell out of me for weeks afterwards, and I’m not ashamed to say that I didn't go into an empty room in the house for quite a while, unless there was someone there with me.

A: Are you Ned Hunter?
B: Yes, I am.
A: I understand that you are one of the stable boys at King’s Pyland?
B: I am. There are three of us.
A: Where were you last night at 9 o’clock?
B: I was in the stable. I was keeping watch.
A: Were you there alone?
B: Yes, my two friends had gone to the house for supper.
A: And what happened?
B: The maid servant brought me my supper. Curried mutton. My favourite dish. That’s why I remember.
A: So you had your meal in the stable?
B: That’s correct.
A: What happened next?
B: A young man came near the window and beckoned me to come closer.
A: What did he look like? Had you seen him before?
B: It was too dark to see him properly, but I think I had seen him at the races a couple of times. I’m not sure.
A: And what did he tell you?
B: He asked me a question.
A: What question did he ask?
B: He wanted to know which horse we expected to win at the Wessex Cup, Silver Blaze or Bayard. He had a piece of paper in his hand, or some money. I couldn’t see.
A: Do you think he wanted to bribe you? What did you do?
B: Nobody will ever bribe me. I am an honest man. I was angry and jumped up to untie the dog and ran after him.
A: And you couldn’t catch the man?
B: No, I couldn’t. The man had disappeared.
A: Did you leave the door of the stable open while you were chasing the man?
B: No, I didn’t. I locked it.
A: Did you inform Mr Straker about what had happened?
B: Of course, I did.
A: You said you didn’t see or hear anything during that night. Somebody entered the stable, went off with Silver Blaze and you didn’t hear that. How can you explain that?
B: I had fallen asleep.
A: Do you often fall asleep when you are on duty, Mr Hunter?
B: No, never. Somebody must have put something in my food. I had my back to the man while I went to untie the dog. Perhaps…
A: Quite remarkable, Mr Hunter. I’ll need to see you again.

On Monday, clap your hands
On Tuesday, snap your fingers
On Wednesday, rub your nose
On Thursday, touch your toes
On Friday, stamp your feet
On Saturday, take a seat
On Sunday, go to sleep

Hello, my name is Hannah and I am 35 years old. I work as a car engineer in West London. I totally agree with the Mayor’s decision to install CCTV cameras everywhere in London. London has become such a dangerous city in the past few years. First, CCTV cameras are very useful when the police need to identify a thief, a criminal or a terrorist. CCTV cameras are a good way to reduce crimes and to protect people. The city must provide security in public places. Honestly, I feel safer knowing that the cameras are here to protect us. I can walk the streets of London freely.

Cut with your scissors,
Then stick with some glue.
Erase your errors
And colour in blue.

Discuss with the crowd
And write in your notebook.
But don't speak too loud
To read a good book.

Don't draw with a marker
But highlight keywords.
And listen to the teacher
Don't look at the birds!

⑤ The consequences are clear. There has been a collapse in intergenerational mobility: in contrast to their parents and grandparents, children today in the UK, as in the US, have very little expectation of improving upon the condition into which they were born. The poor stay poor. Economic disadvantage for the overwhelming majority translates into ill health, missed educational opportunities, and ― increasingly ― the familiar symptoms of depression: alcoholism, obesity, gambling, and minor criminality. The unemployed or underemployed lose whatever skills they have acquired and become chronically superfluous to the economy. Anxiety and stress, not to mention illness and early death, frequently follow.
⑥ Income disparity exacerbates the problems. Thus the incidence of mental illness correlates closely to income in the US and the UK, whereas the two indicators are quite unrelated in all continental European countries. Even
trust, the faith we have in our fellow citizens, corresponds negatively with differences in income: between 1983 and 2001, mistrustfulness increased markedly in the US, the UK, and Ireland ― three countries in which the dogma
of unregulated individual self-interest was most assiduously applied to public policy. In no other country was a comparable increase in mutual mistrust to be found.
⑦ Inequality, then, is not just unattractive in itself; it clearly corresponds to social problems that we cannot hope to address unless we attend to their underlying cause. There is a reason why infant mortality, life expectancy, criminality, the prison population, mental illness, unemployment, obesity, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, illegal drug use, economic insecurity, personal indebtedness, and anxiety are so much more marked in the US and the UK than they are in continental Europe. The wider the spread between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the worse the social problems: a statement that appears to be true for rich and poor countries alike. What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is. Thus Sweden and Finland, two of the world's wealthiest countries by per capita income or GDP, have a very narrow gap separating their richest from their poorest citizens ― and they consistently lead the world in indicators of measurable well-being. Conversely, the US, despite its huge aggregate wealth, always comes low on such measures. America spends vast sums on health care, but life expectancy in the US remains below Bosnia and just above Albania,
⑧ As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the purpose of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed ―not only by capitalism's traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders. Relative indifference to wealth for its own sake was widespread in the postwar decades. In a survey of English schoolboys taken in 1949, it was discovered that the more intelligent the boy the more likely he was to choose an interesting career at a reasonable wage over a job that would merely pay well. Today's schoolchildren and college students can imagine little else but the search for a lucrative job. How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn't always this way. Thinking "economistically," as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans. There was a time when we ordered our lives differently.

All around us, even in a recession, we see a level of individual wealth unequaled since the early years of the twentieth century. Conspicuous consumption of redundant consumer goods ― houses, jewelry, cars, clothing, high-tech toys ― has greatly expanded over the past generation. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and a handful of other countries, financial transactions have largely displaced the production of goods or services as the source of private fortunes, distorting the value we place upon different kinds of economic activity. The wealthy, like the poor, have always been with us. But relative to everyone else, they are today wealthier and more conspicuous than at any other time in living memory. Private privilege is easy to understand and describe. It is rather harder to convey the depths of public squalor into which we have fallen.
② To understand the depths to which we have sunk, we must first appreciate the scale of the changes that have overtaken us. From the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, the advanced societies of the West were all becoming less unequal. Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies for the poor, the provision of social services, and guarantees against acute misfortune, modern democracies were reducing extremes of wealth and poverty. To be sure, great differences remained. The essentially egalitarian countries of Scandinavia and the considerably more diverse societies of southern Europe remained distinctive; and the English-speaking lands of North America and the British Empire continued to reflect long-standing class distinctions. But each in its own way was affected by the growing intolerance of immoderate inequality, initiating public provision to compensate for private inadequacy.
③ Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away. To be sure, "we" varies with country. The greatest extremes of private privilege and public indifference have resurfaced in the US and the UK: epicenters of enthusiasm for deregulated market capitalism. Although countries as far apart as New Zealand and Denmark, France and Brazil have expressed periodic interest in deregulation, none has matched Britain or the United States in their unwavering thirty-year commitment to the unraveling of decades of social legislation and economic oversight.
④ In 2005, 21.2 percent of US national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners. Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the US population: 120 million people. The UK too is now more unequal ― in incomes, wealth, health, education, and opportunities ― than at any time since the 1920s. There are more poor children in the UK than in any other country of the European Union. Since 1973, inequality in take-home pay increased more in the UK than anywhere except the US. Most of the new jobs created in Britain in the years 1977-2007 were either at the very high or the very low end of the pay scale.

This fallacy is related to the Appeal to Popularity fallacy. Despite the differences between these two fallacies, they are both united by the fact that they involve appeals to emotions. In both cases the fallacies aim at getting people to accept claims based on how they or others feel about the claims and not based on evidence for the claims.

Another way to look at these two fallacies is as follows

Appeal to Popularity

Most people approve of X.
So, I should approve of X, too.
Since I approve of X, X must be true.

Appeal to Emotion

I approve of X.
Therefore, X is true.

On this view, in an Appeal to Popularity the claim is accepted because most people approve of the claim. In the case of an Appeal to Emotion the claim is accepted because the individual approves of the claim because of the emotion of approval he feels in regards to the claim.

Examples of Appeal to Emotion

The new PowerTangerine computer gives you the power you need. If you buy one, people will envy your power. They will look up to you and wish they were just like you. You will know the true joy of power. TangerinePower.

The new UltraSkinny diet will make you feel great. No longer be troubled by your weight. Enjoy the admiring stares of the opposite sex. Revel in your new freedom from fat. You will know true happiness if you try our diet!

Bill goes to hear a politician speak. The politician tells the crowd about the evils of the government and the need to throw out the people who are currently in office. After hearing the speech, Bill is full of hatred for the current politicians. Because of this, he feels good about getting rid of the old politicians and accepts that it is the right thing to do because of how he feels.

It should be noted that in many cases it is not particularly obvious that the person committing the fallacy is attempting to support a claim. In many cases, the user of the fallacy will appear to be attempting to move people to take an action, such as buying a product or fighting in a war. However, it is possible to determine what sort of claim the person is actually attempting to support. In such cases one needs to ask "what sort of claim is this person attempting to get people to accept and act on?" Determining this claim (or claims) might take some work. However, in many cases it will be quite evident. For example, if a political leader is attempting to convince her followers to participate in certain acts of violence by the use of a hate speech, then her claim would be "you should participate in these acts of violence." In this case, the "evidence" would be the hatred evoked in the followers. This hatred would serve to make them favorable inclined towards the claim that they should engage in the acts of violence. As another example, a beer commercial might show happy, scantily clad men and women prancing about a beach, guzzling beer. In this case the claim would be "you should buy this beer." The "evidence" would be the excitement evoked by seeing the beautiful people guzzling the beer.

This fallacy is actually an extremely effective persuasive device. As many people have argued, peoples' emotions often carry much more force than their reason. Logical argumentation is often difficult and time consuming and it rarely has the power to spurn people to action. It is the power of this fallacy that explains its great popularity and wide usage. However, it is still a fallacy.

In all fairness it must be noted that the use of tactics to inspire emotions is an important skill. Without an appeal to peoples' emotions, it is often difficult to get them to take action or to perform at their best. For example, no good coach presents her team with syllogisms before the big game. Instead she inspires them with emotional terms and attempts to "fire" them up. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. However, it is not any acceptable form of argumentation. As long as one is able to clearly distinguish between what inspires emotions and what justifies a claim, one is unlikely to fall prey to this fallacy.

As a final point, in many cases it will be difficult to distinguish an Appeal to Emotion from some other fallacies and in many cases multiple fallacies may be committed. For example, many Ad Hominems will be very similar to Appeals to Emotion and, in some cases, both fallacies will be committed. As an example, a leader might attempt to invoke hatred of a person to inspire his followers to accept that they should reject her claims. The same attack could function as an Appeal to Emotion and a Personal Attack. In the first case, the attack would be aimed at making the followers feel very favorable about rejecting her claims. In the second case, the attack would be aimed at making the followers reject the person's claims because of some perceived (or imagined) defect in her character.
(Cont.)