Natural Collocations for Talking About Plans [126] - podcast episode cover

Natural Collocations for Talking About Plans [126]

Jan 17, 2020•6 min•Season 1Ep. 126
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Episode description

🚨 If you use English at work, these phrases matter.  These are the only English phrases I allow my private students to use at work, and the ones I tell them to stop using.  👉 Download the PDF (€9): https://www.englishlessonviaskype.com/workphrases-podcast

In this episode, you'll learn natural collocations for talking about plans in English.

Native speakers don't just say "I have a plan". They say "make plans", "draw up a plan", "shelve a plan", or "finalise arrangements". These combinations come up constantly in work and everyday conversations.

In this lesson, I cover the most common expressions for making, changing, and discussing plans—with real examples that show you when each phrase fits naturally.

This episode helps intermediate and upper-intermediate learners speak more confidently about the future and sound less translated.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Hi there, this is Harry and welcome back to the podcast where we tried to help you understand and make better use of the English language. And today I have some co-locations dealing with plan or plans, either single or plural. Okay. So we've got a number of words which go together with plan or plans and I let try and explain them to you. So we can have bold plans or a bold plan. We can have audacious plans or an audacious plan. We can have daring plans or a in plan and an ingenious plan.

Okay. So bold, daring, audacious and ingenious. Basically have the same meaning means something really exciting, something that somebody else might not try. There's a bold plan to develop the , uh , four G or five G network throughout the country so that every house can have 4g or 5g at in fast internet connection. A bold plan because there are millions of houses that have to be upgraded.

We can have a daring plan to rescue people that are, have been kidnapped by some terrorist organization, a dare in plan, which involves counter espionage and , uh, certain , uh, soldiers who work in, in, in a covert operations. Yeah . So they, they, they operate in secrecy.

So they're going to try and rescue these people who have been kidnapped or how to run some, we can have an audacious plan or [inaudible] means something really nobody else would have thought about, you know , um, for example , uh , an audacious plan to overthrow the government by refusing to vote or to demonstrate outside the parliament buildings and bring pressure on the government. Something that other , uh , political groups have not considered an audacious plan.

Really something that nobody had considered. And an ingenious plan, meaning a very clever plan. Something again that nobody had considered because it was just too ingenious, too clever. Yeah. So bold plans, Darien plans or [inaudible] plans.

Quite risky or dangerous plans or an ingenious plan and or genius and ingenious plan to get to Mars by first of all , uh, flying to the moon, building a station on the moon, extracting water from some resource that they've discovered on the moon, creating energy and then flying to Mars. Okay. So at an ingenious plan, we can also a shadow of a plan, meaning to put it on the shelf. Uh, we're not going to go ahead with it.

So literally like when you take a book and you've finished reading it, you put it on the shelf because you, you're not going to to read it anymore. So when we have a plan and we shelve the plan, literally we pick it up and put it somewhere because we've decided that, okay, might be a good plan, but now's not the time to implement it. So we've shelved plans.

The government have shelved plans to extend the runway in Heathrow airport to abandoned plans while abandoned a little bit more serious than that, where we had a plan. But because of cost overruns, we've abandoned it. We've just decided, Oh, it's not going to go ahead. We've downed tools as the say and decided to pull out. So we've abandoned plans to make some upgrades. We can scrap plans to scrap something means to make it redundant.

A scrap is something that's no longer , um, have any value, like an old car that is 25 years old and rusted is only worth scrap. Meaning we break it up and use the good parts but discard the rest. So we can scrap a plan, like a bit of paper. We roll it up in a ball and we throw it away.

We've scrapped the plans and more former word to say to jettison a plan jettison is often used in the , uh , shipping industry where when a ship is at sea and it has a dirty water or something, that it's fuel that it cannot use. It jettisons who they , it throws it literally into the water or an airplane.

If it's circling overhead and has to make an emergency landing, it will first of all, jettison some fuel to reduce the, the weight , uh , sort of fly around and , uh, disperse the fuel in the atmosphere. So to jettison or to scrap it or to , um, to get rid of excess of few . Okay. So they're words that call locate with plan to a bold plan at in plan, an audacious and ingenious plan to show the plan, to abandon the plan, scrap a plan, and finally jettison a plan .

Okay, so that's my podcast based on the word plan. Hopefully you've enjoyed that and uh , if I can help you, of course, please contact me as always, w w w. dot. English lesson via skype.com . Always happy to take your calls and when you get there, look out for the connection with the easy peasy Clover , effective and efficient, cheap way for you to improve your English language. Again, thanks for listening, Joan . Megan , soon.

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