General Flashcards
Giving Warnings and Cautions -------------------------------------- to pay attention watch your head heads up look out
-heads up:a warning; telling someone about something before it happens
* Didn’t anyone give you the heads up about how difficult it can be to work for
Beatrix?
-look out: a warning to let people know that there is a danger and they need to
be careful
* Look out! That dog bites people who get too close to it.
to schmooze
to network; to have casual conversations, usually to make a
good social contact or to get connected with important people
* The party was so boring! There were just a lot of lawyers schmoozing and
trying to get new clients.
to scour
to look through many things, trying to find a specific one or a certain
detail or piece of information
* The police scoured the room, looking for information that would help them learn
who had stolen the television.
to squint
to mostly close one’s eyes so that only a small part of the eye can be
seen and the skin around the eye is very wrinkled, usually because there is too
much light or because one has poor vision
* When Younceoul saw that her son was squinting, she decided to take him to
the eye doctor to see if he needed glasses
U-turn.
A “U-turn” is when you are driving down a street in one direction – it’s a “two
way” street, meaning cars go in both directions – and you want to go in the
opposite direction. So you’re traveling, for example, west on a street and now
you want to go east on the street. You can, in many places, make a “U-turn,”
where the car is traveling in the shape of a “U.” You turn the car around so it
goes in the other direction. There are some places where a U-turn would be to
dangerous, so you may see a “No U-turn” sign.
One Way Do not enter two-way Detour’ sign speed limit No Stopping speed bumps school crossing
.“You’re going too fast. According to that sign, this is a school crossing
zone.” A “school crossing” is a part of the street where many children, next to a
school, will be crossing the street. Because it is dangerous for children to be
crossing the street when there is a lot of traffic – when there are a lot of cars –
many places put up “school crossing” signs, meaning you should be extra careful
– you should be very careful in this area because children will be crossing the
street, going from one side of the street to the other. A “zone” is just another
word for an area.
pull off
To “pull
off” the road or the street means to slow your car down and eventually to stop
driving. You put your car on one side of the road or street for a short period of
time. For example, if you get a cell phone call – a mobile phone call – you may
pull off the road so you can talk to that person and not have to worry about
causing an accident
speed bumps
-” A “speed bump” is a small
section of the road that is higher than the rest of the road; it causes the cars to
slow down.
Many of the streets where there’s a lot of traffic also have
many people who live that street, and so they complain that the traffic is
dangerous for them and the city puts in speed bumps to slow the traffic down. I
personally don’t really like these, but then again, I don’t live on a busy street.
“back on track”
To be
“back on track” means to be doing something correctly after doing it incorrectly
for a certain amount of time. So you’re doing something wrong, and then you
realize and you correct your mistake, and now you’re doing it correctly – the right
way – we would say you “got back on track.
Detour’ sign
” A “detour” is an alternate route; it’s a way
to go from one place to another place when the normal route – the normal way
that you would go – is not possible. So for example, if they are fixing the street –
there is construction on the street, or there’s a special event and the street is
blocked – the street is closed – you might have to “take a detour,” meaning you
might have to go a different way in order to get to where you want to go.
* More than 3,000 runners are running downtown today, so there are a lot of
detours for cars to go around them.
