Daily English 1224 Setting Timers and Alarms

Dialogue/Story

Slow Speed begins at: 1:36
Explanation begins at: 3:42
Normal Speed begins at: 20:27

Complete Transcript

Welcome to English as a Second Language Podcast number 1,224 – Setting Timers and Alarms.

This is English as a Second Language Podcast episode 1,224. I’m your host, Dr. Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.

This episode is a dialogue between Laquisha and Yun about getting a reminder when you need to do something by using a timer. Let’s get started.

[start of dialogue]

Laquisha: What’s in the bag?

Yun: Three alarm clocks and a kitchen timer.

Laquisha: What are they for?

Yun: I have a very important interview tomorrow morning and these will help me prepare for it.

Laquisha: How?

Yun: The timer will help me time my responses to common interview questions so I don’t run off at the mouth. See? Instead of the stopwatch function, I use the countdown function so I’ll know when to wrap up.

Laquisha: And the alarm clocks?

Yun: I have a habit of pressing the snooze button after an alarm goes off. I’ve tried different kinds of alarms: ones that buzz, ones that beep, ones that vibrate, and ones that use a ringtone. But I still fall back to sleep.

Laquisha: And what do you plan to do with three alarm clocks?

Yun: I plan to set the alarms one minute apart and put them around my bedroom. By the time I turn them all off, I should be awake.

Laquisha: And if not?

Yun: Then maybe I should be applying for jobs as a mattress tester.

[end of dialogue]

Laquisha begins our dialogue by asking Yun, “What’s in the bag?” meaning “What is in your bag?” Yun says, “Three alarm clocks and a kitchen timer.” An “alarm clock” is a clock that, in addition to telling you what time it is, also has the option of making a noise, typically at a certain time of the day. This noise serves as an “alarm” – that is, something that tells you that you need to do something or that a certain time has been reached.

So, if you have an alarm clock and you “set” (set) the alarm for, say, seven o’clock in the morning, when it is seven o’clock, the clock will make a noise. We call that an “alarm.” The noise tells you it’s seven o’clock and you need to get your lazy butt out of bed.

Yun has three other clocks and a kitchen timer. A “timer” (timer) is different from a clock. A timer is a small instrument that you can set for a certain number of minutes or hours, and after that time is up – after that amount of time has gone by – the device, the instrument, will make a sound, will make a noise. So it’s like an alarm clock, except a timer makes a noise not at a certain time of the day, but after a certain amount of time that you tell it to make a noise.

Let’s say I want to take a short “nap” (nap). A nap is when you sleep for a short amount of time during the day. If I want to take a 20-minute nap, I can set my timer for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, the timer will make a noise and that will wake me up so I can get back to work. A “kitchen timer” is a timer that you might use in your kitchen.

Let’s say you are baking a cake. You are making a cake because it’s my birthday soon, and you want to give me a cake. I actually prefer gold, but let’s say you don’t have enough money to give me gold, so you want to bake me a cake. Well, you may set your kitchen timer for, I don’t know, 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, the timer goes off. That tells you it’s time to take the cake out of the oven. That’s what we use a kitchen timer for. Although of course you could use it for other things as well.

Laquisha says, “What are they for?” meaning “Why do you have three alarm clocks and a kitchen timer, Yun?” Yun says, “I have a very important interview tomorrow morning and these will help me prepare for it.” Laquisha asks, “How?” How will these alarm clocks and timers help you prepare for your interview? Yun says, “The timer will help me time my responses to common interview questions. Yun wants to know how long he’s talking. He wants to practice his answers to the questions he may be asked, so he wants to time them.

Notice we use the verb “to time” to mean to record how long a certain thing takes. If you are going to run a race, you will probably use a timer “to time” how long it takes you to run whatever distance you’re running. Yun wants to time his responses to common interview questions. He wants to make sure he doesn’t talk too long. Another way of saying “talk too long,” informally, is “to run off at the mouth.” “To run off at the mouth” is an expression which means to talk for too long, usually without knowing that you are talking as much as you are.

Yun says, “See? Instead of the stopwatch function, I use the countdown function so I’ll know when to wrap up.” Yun is showing Laquisha his timer. That’s why he says, “See?” He’s actually having Laquisha look at the timer. We talked about a kitchen timer. A kitchen timer is what we would call a “countdown timer.” A kitchen timer is a device that you set for a certain number of minutes. And after that time has passed, the timer will make a noise – that’s the traditional way that we define a kitchen timer.

Another way of referring to that kind of timer is a “countdown timer.” The word “countdown” (countdown) means to count backwards from a larger number to a smaller number: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 – that’s “counting down” from 10 to one. The verb is “to count down.” A “countdown timer,” then, starts at a certain amount of time and goes to zero, and when it gets to zero, it makes a noise. There’s another kind of timer we didn’t talk about, which is when you are able to make a machine turn on or have an electronic device turn on at a certain time. That’s also called a “timer.”

For example, if you are watching a certain television show and you want to record it – you want to have a video recording of it – you can set the timer on your TV or cable box in order to have the video recorder turn on at a certain time. That’s another use of the word “timer.” It’s popular on many smartphones and tablets nowadays to have something called a “clock” or a “timer” that does more than one thing. Not only does it work as a traditional countdown timer, but often it will also work as a “stopwatch.” A “stopwatch” (stopwatch) is a device that records how much time has passed.

Let’s say you want to know how long it takes you to get from your house to your work – you could use a stopwatch, or a timer on your smartphone that had a stopwatch function. The stopwatch is something that you turn on as you begin an activity and turn off when you are finished, and you look at it and you see “Oh, that took 10 minutes,” or “That took two hours.” That’s a “stopwatch.” It’s confusing because nowadays with smartphones and computers, many times these different functions, these different ways of marking and measuring time, are part of the same app or the same device.

Yun wants to know how long he’s talking so he’ll know when to wrap up his answer to his interview questions. “To wrap (wrap) up” is a two-word phrasal verb meaning to bring something to an end, to finish something – especially when you are talking. Laquisha says, “And the alarm clocks?” Now she wants to know why Yun has three alarm clocks. Yun explains, “I have a habit,” meaning “often” – “I have a habit of pressing the snooze button after an alarm goes off.”

Many alarm clocks have what is called a “snooze” (snooze) button. A snooze button is a part of a clock you push when an alarm goes off that turns the alarm off temporarily. Basically what it does is give you an additional amount of time before the alarm goes off again. “To go off,” I should explain, is for the alarm to make a loud noise.

So, if you set your alarm – your alarm clock – for seven o’clock in the morning, the alarm will “go off.” It will start making noise at seven o’clock. You can hit the “snooze button,” and that will give you, say, 10 more minutes. The alarm goes off. You turn it off. Then 10 minutes later, the alarm goes off again. Notice this phrasal verb “to go off” is a little confusing. It’s not the same as “to turn off.” “To turn off” means to stop the device from functioning. “To go off” means to make a sound. So, when the alarm clock “goes off,” it makes a sound.

To review, then: the alarm goes off at seven a.m. You hit the snooze button that makes the alarm sound stop. Ten minutes later, the alarm goes off again. You can keep hitting the snooze button and never actually get up out of bed, but eventually you will have to get up. Yun says he has a habit of pressing – that is, of hitting – the snooze button after the alarm goes off. “I’ve tried different kinds of alarms,” he says. “Ones that buzz, ones that beep, ones that vibrate, and ones that use a ringtone. But I still fall back to sleep.”

Alarm clocks often have different ways of making you get up or indicating it is a certain time. One way is “to buzz” (buzz). “Buzz” is a kind of sound like [buzzes]. We describe the sound of a bee, for example, as a “buzz.” “Beep” (beep) is a high-pitched sound [beeps] – something like that. Other alarm clocks “vibrate” (vibrate) “To vibrate” means to move back and forth very quickly. If you have a cell phone, a mobile phone, you probably have a vibrate function. Instead of the phone making a noise, it moves back and forth quickly.

A “ringtone” (ringtone) is the sound that a phone might make when someone is calling you. It’s just another word for a short piece of music or some other sound that you would typically find on a cell phone. Yun has all these different kinds of alarm clocks to make sure he wakes up. Laquisha says, “And what do you plan to do with three alarm clocks?” Yun says, “I plan to set the alarms one minute apart and put them around my bedroom.” “Apart” (apart) means within a certain time or distance between two things.

So if he’s setting his alarm clocks one minute apart, one alarm clock will be set for seven o’clock, the next one will be set for 7:01, the next one will be set for 7:02. You often see or hear the word “apart” with the word “far” (far). “How far apart are Los Angeles and San Francisco?” That means “What is the distance between them?” How far apart are your appointments? I have an appointment at seven and at seven thirty. They are thirty minutes apart. In this case, Yun is going to set his alarms one minute apart and put them around his bedroom.

He says, “By the time I turn them all off, I should be awake” – that is, no longer sleeping. Laquisha says, “And if not?” meaning if he isn’t awake after turning off his three alarm clocks. Yun says, “Then maybe I should be applying for jobs as a mattress tester.” Yun makes a joke at the end here. Laquisha says what if he’s still sleepy after hearing three alarm clocks. Yun says, “Maybe I should be applying for jobs as a mattress (mattress) tester.”

A “mattress” is what you sleep on at night, usually. It’s a soft, rectangular object that is part of a bed. A “mattress tester” would be someone whose job it is to test how good a mattress is. Yun is joking here. He’s saying if he is a person that loves to sleep so much, maybe he should be working as a mattress tester – a person who goes around and tests how good a mattress is on a bed.

Now let’s listen to the dialogue, this time at a normal speed.

[start of dialogue]

Laquisha: What’s in the bag?

Yun: Three alarm clocks and a kitchen timer.

Laquisha: What are they for?

Yun: I have a very important interview tomorrow morning and these will help me prepare for it.

Laquisha: How?

Laquisha: And the alarm clocks?

Laquisha: And what do you plan to do with three alarm clocks?

Yun: I plan to set the alarms one minute apart and put them around my bedroom. By the time I turn them all off, I should be awake.

Laquisha: And if not?

Yun: Then maybe I should be applying for jobs as a mattress tester.

[end of dialogue]

We’ll wrap up this episode of ESL Podcast by thanking our scriptwriter, Dr. Lucy Tse.

From Los Angeles, California, I’m Jeff McQuillan. Thank you for listening. Come back and listen to us again right here on ESL Podcast.

Glossary

alarm clock – a small electronic device with large, glowing numbers that tell the time, with the ability to turn on a radio or make a loud noise at a set time, used to wake someone up

* Hi boss, sorry I’m late, but I forgot to set my alarm clock last night.

kitchen timer – a small device that beeps, dings, or makes another sound after a certain amount of time, usually used to help one know when something should be done cooking

* The kitchen timer went off a few minutes ago, but the cake still isn’t cooked all the way through, so I put it back in the oven for another 10 minutes.

to time – to track how long something takes; to record the passage of time while something else is happening

* Who’s going to time the athletes as they run around the track?

to run off at the mouth – to speak for too long, without knowing when to stop or without being able to stop; to talk too much

* Harold often runs off at the mouth when he’s nervous and says things he didn’t plan to say.

stopwatch – a device that records how much time is passing, starting at zero

* The coach uses a stopwatch to see how fast each athlete can run 100 meters.

countdown – counting backwards, from a bigger number down to zero

* Millions of people turned on their television to watch the countdown to the space shuttle launch.

to wrap up – to finish something; to bring something to the end, especially by summarizing it quickly or emphasizing one’s most important point

* I have to leave for another meeting, so let’s try to wrap up this call by 2:40.

snooze button – a button on an alarm clock that allows one to delay the alarm for about five minutes, used when one does not feel ready to get up when the first alarm goes off

* I set the alarm for 5:45 a.m. so that I would have time to go running, but I was so tired that I ended up hitting the snooze button for the next half hour.

to go off – for an alarm clock or another device to make a loud sound at a particular time

* Please take the potatoes out of the oven when the timer goes off.

to buzz – to make a loud buzzing sound like a fly, a bee, or another insect

* The dryer buzzes when the clothes are dry.

to beep – to make a short, loud, high-pitched, electronic sound

* The car beeped and a warning light appeared on the dashboard.

to vibrate – to make very rapid, small movements, especially for a cell phone to do this as a way to make the owner aware of a phone call or notification

* Please turn off your cell phone or set it to vibrate during the performance so that other audience members are not disturbed by your incoming calls.

ringtone – a short song or other recorded noise that is produced by a cell phone when there is an incoming call

* Sean has a funny ringtone of a mooing cow, but it might not be appropriate for the workplace.

to set – the configure a device, especially to indicate at what time an alarm should go off

* We need to leave the house by 6:15 a.m., so please sent your alarm clock for no later than 5:30 a.m.

apart – within a certain distance or time between two or more things

* They finished the race just a few seconds apart.

awake – not sleeping; no longer sleeping

* I didn’t call earlier, because I wanted to make sure that you were awake first.

mattress – the soft rectangular object that is placed on a bed, covered with fabric, and laid upon for comfort while sleeping

* If you often wake up with a sore back, maybe it’s time for you to buy a new, more supportive mattress.

Comprehension Questions

1. What happens if you push the snooze button?
a) The alarm clock gets louder.
b) The alarm clock turns off.
c) The alarm clock stops beeping, but starts again a few minutes later.

2. Which of these is the quietest?
a) A buzzing alarm
b) A beeping alarm
c) A vibrating alarm

Answers at bottom.

What Else Does It Mean?

to time

The verb “to time,” in this podcast, means to track how long something takes, or to record the passage of time while something else is happening: “The agency times each customer service call to find ways to reduce its call center costs.” The phrase “to be timed to do (something)” means to be scheduled or arranged to happen at a certain time: “We timed our visit to the famous park so we can see the beautiful flowers in bloom.” The phrase “to time (something) well/badly” means to do something at precisely the right/wrong moment: “If we time this well, you should arrive at the bus stop just moments before your bus arrives.” Finally, the phrase “lead time” refers to how much time is needed to complete something: “How much lead time does the writer need to give us a final draft?”

to buzz

In this podcast, the verb “to buzz” means to make a loud buzzing sound like a fly, a bee, or another insect: “The doorbell buzzed, but nobody answered the door, so I guess they weren’t at home.” The phrase “to buzz with (something)” means to have a lot of excitement, motion, or activity: “The room was buzzing with excitement as everyone waited to hear who had won the award.” The phrase “to buzz (someone) in” means to press a button that opens a gate or door and allows someone to enter: “When you arrive, use the microphone by the door to announce your name and why you’ve come, and then they’ll buzz you in.” Finally, the phrase “buzz off” is a rude way to tell someone to go away: “Why are you still here? Buzz off!”

Culture Note

The CONELRAD Emergency Broadcast System

The CONELRAD Emergency Broadcast System was intended to be used as a way to send messages to “the American public” (American citizens) if there were an attack during the “Cold War” (a long period of tension primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1947 and 1991).

CONELRAD, which “stands for” (is an abbreviation for) “Control of Electromagnetic Radiation,” would allow messages to be “transmitted” (sent) on radio channels and TV stations, changing the stations very quickly so that location of the “origin” (where something comes from) of the “signal” (communication information sent over a distance) could not be identified by the attackers. This was done to prevent the “enemy” (who one is fighting against) from attacking the source of the signal.

Former President Harry S. Truman “established” (created) CONELRAD in 1951, but the system was “somewhat” (partially) unreliable, especially during “lightning” (electricity in the sky) storms, and it was replaced by the Emergency Broadcast System in 1963. CONELRAD was intended only for wartime emergencies, not to notify people of “impending” (about to happen soon, usually something that is dangerous or bad) “natural disasters” (damaging natural events like fires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes).

The “dials” (parts of a radio or another piece of electronic equipment that can be turned to indicate one’s selection) of many radios sold in the past had a special “mark” (something that can be seen), a triangle around the letters “CD,” which stood for “civil defense,” that indicated where listeners should point their dial in order to hear the emergency “broadcasts” (messages).

Comprehension Answers

1 - c

2 - c