10 Weirdest Most Confusing Things About British Homes
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hello everyone
and welcome back to english with lucy
today
we’re going to be talking about more
weird british things
in particular we are going to talk about
our strange
strange homes most people
who travel to the uk are surprised by
some of the things that they find in our
homes
and in our hotels we’ve got really
strange
plugs why do our plugs look like that
i’ll explain it why do we have carpet
in our bathrooms and why do we have
separate hot and cold taps so that you
can either freeze your face
or burn your face there is no in between
the fun part of this video is finding
out whether you relate to any of these
whether it’s the same in your country
or completely different or maybe you’re
british and it’s completely different
for you as well
let me know in the comments section to
help the learners of english that are
watching this lesson
i have made it a listening and
vocabulary lesson
whenever i say an interesting word or
phrase
it will appear on screen with the
definition
i have also created a free pdf with
further examples it’s got every word and
phrase
used in this lesson plus much more
if you’d like to download that you can
click on the link in the description box
and it will be sent directly to your
inbox let’s get started with the lesson
okay the first weird thing about british
homes
now not all british homes in fact not so
many anymore
have this but in my house we do have
this
it wasn’t my choice but it is here it is
carpet
in the bathroom now why oh why oh why
would anyone put carpet in the bathroom
a couple of reasons here in the uk it
gets very cold
and it’s very expensive to heat our
homes carpeted areas retain more heat
it also feels nice under our feet it’s
something that you see
in houses that haven’t been renovated in
a while or
old-fashioned houses it is incredibly
unhygienic
i think i have mentioned this before but
i have had a situation
where a toilet overflowed in a carpeted
bathroom
and it was it was awful it was
absolutely horrendous
let’s move on to this next one then it
is separate
hot and cold taps or faucets as you may
call them in other countries
now more modern houses have mixer taps
we have one bathroom up here with a
mixer tap
and one bathroom with the separate hot
and cold tap
why are they different well one bathroom
was renovated more recently
whenever any of my friends come over
from abroad and they see these separate
taps
they are flabbergasted you can either
burn your hands or freeze your hands and
when you wash your face you have to
splash water in equal measures to not
burn or freeze the answer is is that you
can fill the sink
with water and then splash warm water on
your face but it’s not practical
there is a solid reason behind this
though
in the old days cold water came from a
main supply
and it was safe for drinking but hot
water
was stored in our attic in our loft the
hot water was not safe for drinking
and they didn’t want them to mix at all
who knows how long that water had been
sitting in that tank
lots of houses now still do have those
tanks in the attic
i think where i grew up at my parents
house we had a tank in the attic and one
day they found a dead bird
in it so that’s why a lot of people
don’t mix
their hot and cold taps it’s also
something that’s quite traditional to
have the nice
separate taps for me it’s just too
impractical
number three is chain pull
toilet flushes how fancy are these
i went to a very old school and i
remember we had these chain pull
original toilets well i’m not sure if
they’re original but they were very old
now you still do see the modern ones but
it’s kind of a
mock old-fashioned style originally
toilets had to have their tanks
mounted up high to allow for gravity
to push all the water through you would
pull the chain so you didn’t have to
stand up whilst doing your business
number four is
push button toilet flushes i hate these
so much because whenever i have a long
thumbnail i always
catch it on the edge lots of other
countries have these but it is something
that my foreign friends have remarked on
when they come over
they are designed to allow you to
control how much water is used when you
flush
so there’s a small button and a big one
the big one is for
big business the small one is for small
business
they’re designed to save water but they
are horrible for anyone with long nails
number five let’s talk about the plugs
finally
in the uk we have three pronged
plugs and arguably they are
some of the safest plugs around they
might look inefficient
you know you can’t switch there’s only
one way you can put them in i know with
the two prongs you can do it either way
but these are all about safety in a plug
socket
with two holes a child could stick a
fork in or something metal
and they could get electrocuted with
these plugs it’s
nearly impossible to get electrocuted
this is a grounding prong and it’s
longer
slightly longer than the other prongs
when you push this into one of our
sockets it lifts some flaps that are
covering
these two prongs that hold the current
this grounding prong
unlocks the socket basically another
thing that people notice
is that most of our wall sockets have
switches on and off switches it’s red
when it’s on
and it’s white when it’s off the reason
for this is quite obvious it allows you
to switch off an appliance without
actually having to
unplug it one annoying thing about those
sockets though is that because they’ve
got a flat back
they are so painful if you tread on them
and i know with the other two pronged
ones the likelihood of you treading one
you know isn’t as high perhaps the
thought behind this
is because they are so painful when you
tread on them they don’t want people
leaving them on the floor upturned so
they’d prefer them to stay in
and to be switched on and off at the
plug number seven
something that people especially people
from america
seem to notice is that we have we often
have
our washing machines in our kitchens
and this is because we have much less
space in our houses our houses tend to
be a lot
smaller than the houses in america when
i went to the u.s for the first time i
was blown
away by how big everything was
the kitchen islands were so big you’d
have to walk all the way around to pick
up something you left on the other side
especially in cities in townhouses we
don’t have that much space so we don’t
waste
space on a utility room which is
my dream i actually finally have a
utility room for the first time
ever here in this house and it is
glorious
but before that i washed all of my
clothes in my kitchen
and it was very noisy when you were
trying to relax trying to cook
you had your washing machine and your
dryer going around and that’s another
thing
we have washer dryers which are washing
machines that also dry our clothes
but i have never had one that dries
properly it doesn’t seem to do that good
a job so now i have
a separate washing machine and tumble
dryer although i just tend to hang out
my washing
on a washing line number eight sometimes
we have
light pull cords in our bathrooms so you
know
if you go into a disabled toilet you
might see a red
cord that they can pull to call for help
we actually have these as light switches
in our bathrooms and sometimes if you
have one in your bathroom and you can
become
so used to putting it to switching of
the light if you ever use a disabled
toilet which
unless you need to you shouldn’t it’s
very easy to accidentally pull the help
cord
so in the uk we have quite strict rules
on electrics in our bathrooms
people want to reduce contact with live
electrical parts as much as possible
so you will often find the light switch
on the outside of the bathroom not
inside
but if that isn’t available if you don’t
want a light switch outside of your
bathroom then you can have
a cord to pull yeah we have that as
children
in all of our bathrooms my mum yeah my
mum has cords everywhere she’s a very
safe woman
i have seen bathrooms in the uk with the
light switches inside
it might be to do with distance from
the shower or bath let me know if you
are british
tell me about the light switch in your
bathroom i can’t believe i’m asking you
that but
i’m genuinely interested number nine is
we don’t tend to have plug sockets in
our bathroom and if we do
they are often in our lights and i’ll
tell you about that
i’ve actually got them here in this
house as well i think it’s another more
old-fashioned thing
plug sockets are not allowed in uk
bathrooms unless they can be fitted
at least three meters from a shower
or a bath to overcome this sometimes
lights would be fitted above the mirror
with a plug socket for shaving
you are allowed shaving sockets i think
i’ve seen those in bathrooms but i’ve
never ever seen a three-prong
socket in a bathroom in the uk have you
i think it’s illegal
we’ve got some really strict laws here
number 10
we don’t have air conditioning we tend
not to have any air conditioning
some people might have it you do find it
in
offices and libraries and places of work
but in our homes we don’t have it
because
it just doesn’t really get that hot here
we normally have a couple of unbearable
weeks in the summer and then it’s just
back to normality our houses are built
and designed to retain as much heat as
they possibly can for the winter
we have to heat our homes a lot so it’s
very inefficient to have all the heat
escaping
in those hot summer weeks i don’t say
summer months summer weeks
the houses can get unbearable in fact if
you look at any
video that i’ve posted in july or august
chances are i’ve got a little sweat
moustache and potentially
some sweat patches as well because my
studio gets so
so so hot but we don’t have any air
conditioning so there is nothing i can
do about it
we do tend to use fans in the summer
i’ve got one
little bonus one as well we don’t have
mosquito screens on our windows i know
that this is a very common thing to have
in countries where mosquitoes are a big
problem
but mosquitoes i mean we do have them
but it’s not as severe as some of the
more humid climates
when i go abroad to a tropical country i
get
eaten alive i don’t know what it is i
think they can smell i’m new and
inexperienced and they just
ravage me we do get the odd mosquito
but it’s not a huge problem so at least
we’ve got that going for us
right that is it for today’s lesson i
hope you enjoyed it i hope you learned
something
don’t forget to download the pdf it’s
got
all of the key phrases and vocabulary
words that i’ve used
in this lesson along with their
definitions and their examples
also got a quiz that you can use to test
your understanding of these new
words and phrases if you’d like to
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description box
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improve your vocabulary skills
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then i have my vlogging channel where i
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e no air i will see you soon for another
lesson
why do our charges are suck it creates
a huge problem i’ve got a quiz and it’s
got all of the vocabulary words
uh it’s got a quiz and
i don’t know what’s wrong with me i’m
literally at the very end here
come on lucy don’t forget to download
the quiz
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