 Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from The Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak. This program is designed for English learners. So we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English. On today's program, you will hear reports from Dan Friedel, Gina Bennett, and Gregory Stockle. John Russell presents this week's everyday grammar lesson. He then tells us about some pronunciation tips and tricks. But first, here is Dan Friedel. A report from the United Nations says the Taliban are putting more and more restrictions on women in Afghanistan. The Taliban retook power in Afghanistan after the United States withdrew from the country in 2021. Taliban leaders said at the time they would permit women to be more involved in work, school, and public life, than during their previous rule between 1996 and 2001. However, the UN says the Taliban's Vice and Virtue Ministry is cracking down on single and unaccompanied women. In one case, the UN notes, The ministry told a woman to get married if she wanted to continue working at a health clinic. The ministry said it was not right for an unmarried woman to have a job. The restrictions follow a pattern of the Taliban breaking their 2021 promise that life in Afghanistan would be more open to women. Girls are not permitted to continue going to school after sixth grade, for example. Places that cut and style women's hair have been shut down, and women who are not wearing a hijab, the Islamic head covering have been arrested. In May of 2022, the Taliban said women should go back to wearing the religious clothing called a burqa. A burqa is a covering that only shows a woman's eyes. The UN's Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is reporting on the restrictions. The group's latest report centers on restrictions on women who leave home without a male guardian. There are no official rules about women needing to be accompanied by a male relative, but the Taliban now say women are not permitted to travel a certain distance away from their home without a man who is either their husband or a relative. The UN's report said three female healthcare workers were held by police in October when they left home without a guardian. They were only released when their families signed a document saying it would not happen again. In the Pakhtia province, the Vice and Virtue Ministry stopped women without guardians from entering health centers starting in December. The men from the ministry are now entering women's health centers to be sure that all women inside are with a male guardian. The Vice and Virtue Ministry is also known as the Taliban's Morality Police. Ministry workers have been going to bus stations, education centers, and other public places to make sure women are following their rules. They are looking for women who are not wearing head coverings and stopping buses to make sure women are not traveling without a male family member. Women are also being arrested for purchasing birth control, which the Taliban have not officially banned. Zabiullah Mujahid is the spokesman for the Taliban. In a statement, he said the UN report is filled with misunderstandings. He said the UN is ignoring or criticizing Islamic law known as Sharia. Mujahid added that the Islamic government in power in Afghanistan must fully observe all aspects of Sharia for both men and women. I'm Dan Friedel. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said Thursday that its first lunar mission landed within 100 meters of its target over the weekend. Japan became the fifth country to reach the moon as a smart lander for investigating moon, or slim, touched down on the moon early on Saturday. But trouble with the spacecraft's power system made it difficult to know whether it landed in the target area at first. Here, moon landers targeted landing areas as large as 10 kilometers. However, with its improved accuracy, Japan's slim aimed at a target area of just 100 meters. Sinichiro Sakai is JAXA's project leader for the lander. He said, we proved that we can land wherever we want. Sakai hoped that it would bring more missions to try to land on unexplored places on the moon. One of the lander's two main engines stopped working during the landing, causing slim to move 55 meters away from the target area to another position, Sakai said. Without engine trouble, he said slim could have landed as close as 3 to 4 meters from the target. However, the spacecraft could not produce power after landing. JAXA scientists said its solar panels might be facing the wrong direction. JAXA said it received all data about the touchdown within the two hours and 37 minutes before the lander lost power. Officials said there is still hope the craft will be able to recharge when that side of the moon enters daytime in the coming days. The power outage meant the lander's camera could only capture low resolution images, JAXA said. The goal of landing within a target area of less than 100 meters led scientists to call slim the moon sniper. It used vision-based guidance that JAXA says could be a powerful tool for future exploration of the moon's mountainous areas. These areas might hold resources of fuel, water, and oxygen. Japan follows the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, and India as nations reaching the moon's surface. The mission was the result of 20 years of work on precision technology by JAXA. JAXA has experience with difficult space landings. Its Hayabusa-2 spacecraft, launched in 2014, touched down twice on the 900-meter-long asteroid Ryugu. Hayabusa-2 collected material that was returned to Earth for scientific research in 2020. In the past year, three lunar missions have failed. One by Russia's space agency, one by a private Japanese company, and another by a private U.S. company. However, more lunar landers will head to the moon this year. U.S. company Intuitive Machines aims to launch its IM-1 lander in mid-February. China plans to send its Chang'e-6 spacecraft to the far side of the moon in the first half of the year. And the American space agency NASA is planning its lunar polar exploration rover Viper for November. I'm Gina Bennett. Croatian artist Tomislav Horvat is not the first person to make models out of matchsticks. But he might be creating the largest projects. A matchstick is the short, thin piece of wood that is used to make matches for lighting fire. Horvat thinks nothing of using 210,000 matchsticks to create a life-size statue or sculpture of a musician playing on a large piano. The instrument even comes complete with matchstick strings. But that was not enough for the 34-year-old from the northern village of Domacinet. He is just a year and a half away from completing his version of Michelangelo's sculpture of David. Michelangelo was a famous Italian artist who lived about 500 years ago. He created a famous marble sculpture of the Bible's King David that is in the city of Florence. I need another 30,000 matchsticks to finish it. That is, it'll need about 430,000 in total, he said. I've been working on it for six years. Horvat began making small models, but in 2013 he took on a larger project. He decided to create a life-size version of American actor Al Pacino as his celebrated character Don Corleone from Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film The Godfather. Sculptures that size would collapse without a supporting structure. He creates this additional structure from a material called paper mache or wood. The pianist is his second work that is of a large size. His third is Desperate Man, which is made of 54,000 matches and took a year and a half to make. Horvat has shown his works in galleries in Croatia, including the capital Zagreb. But they are not, for now, available to buy. I'm Gregory Stockle. An American scientist has started a Tempest in a Tea Pot by offering Britain advice on its favorite drink, tea. Tempest in a Tea Pot is an expression to describe a strong, noisy and angry reaction over something small or unimportant. Michelle Francel is a chemistry professor at Bryn Mawr College outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She said tea drinkers should add a little salt to make a perfect cup of tea. That advice is included in her book Steeped, The Chemistry of Tea. The book was published Wednesday by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Mixing tea with salt water has never gone well for British-American relations. In 1773 American colonists in Boston, Massachusetts were angry at Britain for adding more taxes to raise money. So they dumped British tea into the sea. The event became known as the Boston Tea Party. It led to the start of the American Revolution. Francel's suggestion caused outrage among tea lovers in Britain. They see Americans as coffee drinkers who know nothing about tea. And they think if Americans drink tea at all, they just heat water in a microwave. Don't even say the word salt to us, said the etiquette guide de Bretz on the social media service X, formerly known as Twitter. Even the US Embassy in London joined the tempest in a teapot. In a social media post, it promised the good people of the UK that the unthinkable notion of adding salt to Britain's national drink is not official United States policy. Let us unite in our steeped solidarity and show the world that when it comes to tea, we stand as one, the Embassy said in the post. The US Embassy will continue to make tea in the proper way by microwaving it, it added. The Embassy later said that the post was a lighthearted play on our shared cultural connections rather than an official press release. Francel's book, Steeped, however, is no joke. The advice, its publisher said, comes from three years of research and experimentation with more than 100 chemical compounds. The book, the publisher added, puts the chemistry to use with advice on how to brew a better cup. Francel said adding a small amount of salt, not enough to taste, makes tea seem less bitter. This is because the sodium ions in salt block the bitter receptors in our mouths, she explains. She also suggests making tea in a warmed pot, shaking the tea bag around, and serving tea in a short and wide cup to keep the heat. And she says milk should be added to the cup after the tea and not before, another issue that often divides tea lovers. Francel has been surprised by the reaction to her book in Britain. I kind of understood that there would hopefully be a lot of interest, she told the Associated Press. I didn't know we'd wade into a diplomatic conversation with the US Embassy. Imagine you want to talk about the people in your country or in the world. In other words, you want to talk about a population. How might you do so? In today's everyday grammar, we will explore the noun population. You will learn important ideas about the term and how to use it in everyday situations. Let's start with a visit to the dictionary. If you look in a dictionary, you might wonder about two words that seem closely related. We have the noun population and the verb populate. Is it important to know about the verb populate, you might ask? Google and Graham Viewer permits us to examine words and phrases in thousands of books. We can get a good idea of how often individual words and structures are used. When we examine the frequency of population and compare it to that of populate, we reach a clear finding. The noun population is much more commonly used. Another way to understand the idea is this. You are much more likely to hear population in everyday situations. Population is a noun meaning the number of people, animals, or other living things of a kind in an area. We commonly use population as a countable noun. In other words, you can add an S to the end of population to get the plural form populations. So, you might hear or read the singular form population as in, Experts expect the world's population to increase by a very small amount over the next year. We use the singular form because we are talking about all the people who live in the world, one very large group. How might we use the plural form? In this case, we might use other terms to clarify that we are talking about different groups. For example, you might read or hear something like this. Elderly and overweight populations face greater risk from the illness. In this case, we use the plural form populations because we are talking about all of the members of two separate groups, elderly people and overweight people. Now that we have explored the noun population, we should consider the word in terms of broader language situations. How do we commonly use the word population in everyday speech? Let's start by examining the most commonly used words that come before and after population. Since population is a noun, we might expect that determiners, words that tell us if a noun is general or specific, should be commonly used before it. Google's Engram viewer tells us that the word the is the most commonly used word before population. So you are very likely to hear or read something like this. Experts said the population declined by one percent. And what about the most commonly used word after the noun population? We find that the short word of is the most common by far. So you are very likely to hear or read something like this. The population of Japan is aging quickly. Over and under are two words that can be attached to population to form a new single word. Overpopulation describes a situation in which there are too many people. Underpopulation describes a situation in which there are too few people. Importantly, we generally use overpopulation and underpopulation as non-count nouns. In other words, there is no plural form. We do not add an S to the end of either word. How might you expect these terms to appear in everyday situations? Here are two examples. Experts predict overpopulation will result in food shortages. Experts predict underpopulation will result in labor shortages. In today's lesson, we explored a useful noun and how to use it in everyday situations. We will close our lesson with a call to action. Please answer the following questions in an email to learningenglish at voanews.com. What is the population like in your country or city? Is the population increasing or decreasing? In a future lesson, we can provide feedback on some of the writing that we receive. I'm John Russell. You just heard this week's everyday grammar lesson. Now John Russell joins us to talk a little more about it. Hi John, welcome. Hi Ashley, thanks for having me on the show. In the lesson, you mentioned that we often use population as a count noun, meaning it has a plural form. We make the word plural by adding an S to the end of the word. But why do we spell the word with an S, but produce a sound that is more like Z? That's an important question. Let's pronounce both words. Population and populations. Notice that the noun population ends with a N sound. Listen again. Population. The ending consonant sound, N, is voiced. In other words, we can feel our vocal cords move when we produce the sound. That's right. So if our last consonant sound is voiced, we use another voiced sound after it to make it plural. Remember, Z is voiced too. So we can think of like going with like. Voiced consonants at the end of a word like to go with another voiced sound to make the word plural. So population goes with populations. Yes, and that is why words like duck, words that end in a voiceless sound, have a voiceless consonant to show the plural form. Duck, ducks, is voiceless and S is voiceless. Well, thanks again for coming on the show to talk more about your lesson this week. Thanks for having me. See you next time. And that's our program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak.