 English vocabulary word of the day, crop. First let's learn the pronunciation. The C-R sounds like in the words crash and critical. The letter O has the A sound, like in the words hot, lock, and stop. Say the word after me, crop. The word crop refers to plants that are cultivated for food, like corn, potatoes, rice, apples, etc. Farmers, those are people who work in the area of agriculture, plant crops. They put the seeds into the ground and wait for the plants to grow. Then, when the food is ready to be collected, they harvest the crops, meaning to collect the food from the fields. The word crop can also be a verb, meaning to cut a photograph to remove extra or unnecessary parts. So, as you can see in the picture, we have a big photograph, but we only want to keep the part in the center, so we crop the photograph. We cut out the extra or unnecessary parts. You can crop a printed photograph using scissors, or you can crop a digital photograph using your computer software. We have an expression, the cream of the crop, which means the very best of a group of similar things. For example, the dancers performing tonight are the cream of the crop. That means there are a lot of dancers, but the ones who are performing tonight are the very best. Here's another example. It's a very selective school. They only accept the cream of the crop, meaning this school only accepts the very best students. Finally, we have a phrasal verb with the word crop. If problems, issues, or obstacles crop up, it means they unexpectedly appear. For example, the project was delayed because of all the technical problems that kept cropping up. It's an informal way to say the problems were appearing, and we didn't expect them. Now you know four ways to use the word crop. If you'd like to expand your vocabulary further, take my Vocabulary Builder course, available at espressoenglish.net. You can click the link in the video to take some free sample lessons from both levels of the course.