 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. Coming up on the program, John Russell reports on efforts by the United States to increase battery production. Ashley and Katie Weaver have a story on the Thanksgiving holiday, and Andrew Smith and Jill Robbins present the lesson of the day. But first... The DOE recently announced it would provide $3.5 billion to companies that produce batteries and the important minerals that go into them. Officials see batteries as an important climate solution. The devices can power cars and store clean electricity made from solar panels or wind turbines. The idea is to use fewer fossil fuels for cars and power plants. Lithium ion is currently the favored battery for electric vehicles and clean electrical storage. The DOE wants to strengthen the supply. The agency estimates that by 2030 demand for lithium batteries will increase by as much as 10 times. President Joe Biden's administration has set a goal of lowering the pollution that causes climate change to zero by 2050. It also wants electric automobiles to represent half of all new car sales by 2030. Some officials, industry experts and others are concerned that the supply of battery materials will not keep up with the demand. Others worry that too much of the industry is located in Asia. Judy Lutkenhouse of the Texas A&M University said she is closely watching U.S. battery production and manufacturing. I'm worried that we may not catch up and end up in the same situation we're in now with the semiconductor industry, she said. Pandemic closings and suspensions slowed manufacturing in Asia. A microchip shortage resulted affecting the availability of vehicles and electronic products. The same thing can happen with batteries if we don't diversify where batteries are made and where materials are sourced, Lutkenhouse said. She said the U.S. must take part in battery production and manufacturing to avoid possible worldwide shortages in the future. A measure called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides $6 billion in total financing for battery manufacturing, including the processing of materials needed to make them. So far, 15 projects are receiving the assistance. They include companies that mine materials like graphite and nickel that are used in lithium batteries. Later, contracts will go to other companies, including finance and chemistry businesses. Here's how it works. A company might want to build a factory to make special materials for electric cars. It estimates the cost of building the facility and commits to covering half of the cost. If the company is selected for the program, the government payment would cover the other half. Albomoral, a major lithium producer, received financing for a factory in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. The factory processes lithium from ore collected around the world. The company said that in addition to EVs, demand for lithium also comes from electronics like medical devices and smartphones. Without the DOE financial support, the project would have likely progressed along a different timescale, Albomoral said in an email. Matthew McDowell is with the Georgia Institute of Technology. He said the law has changed U.S. battery manufacturing in the past three years. He is excited, he said, about the new batteries for clean energy storage, including solid state batteries, which could possibly hold more energy than lithium ion. Tom Moranhout of Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy said it will be difficult to increase the worldwide supply of minerals for the predicted battery demand in 2030. It's pretty huge, he said, noting that a new mine on average takes 16 years to begin commercial production. But with the price of lithium rising, Moranhout said, different battery types become more interesting. One he hopes to see increase is sodium ion batteries to help with the electrical grid. The potential is quite huge, he said, because they are safe and not costly. Companies can officially request financing through mid-March. I'm John Russell. The American holiday of Thanksgiving is celebrated every year on the 4th Thursday in November. The holiday is during autumn, the main season for harvesting crops. Thanksgiving is an autumn harvest festival, like those found in many cultures around the world. On this day, most Americans gather with friends and family. Many take time to think about what they are thankful for, cook up a storm, and eat. A lot. The star of most Thanksgiving dinners is a roasted turkey. Turkeys are large birds native to North America. The turkey is cooked in an oven for many hours, often with a mix of celery, bread, onions, and spices inside the bird. This mix becomes stuffing, another star of the Thanksgiving dinner table. Ana Mateo here at Learning English says the smell of turkey and stuffing roasting together is the quintessential smell of Thanksgiving. Quintessential means the perfect example of something. After the bird is cooked, the stuffing is taken out and served as a side dish, one of many side dishes. Families often make other foods like mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and vegetable casseroles. A casserole is a dish that cooks slowly in an oven. And do not forget about the gravy. This rich sauce is made from the fatty liquid that comes off the turkey as it cooks. People cover their turkey meat, stuffing, and mashed potatoes with gravy. The meal does not end with the turkey stuffing and side dishes though. For some people, the best part of the meal is dessert. The quintessential Thanksgiving dessert is pie. Pumpkin, cherry, apple, or pecan pie are all great ways to finish off a Thanksgiving meal, if you are not too full of food by that point. Some Americans must travel long distances to be with their families. In fact, the Sunday after Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the entire year. This is usually when people return home from family gatherings. Not everyone can make the return home each Thanksgiving. So young people living in cities away from their hometowns sometimes celebrate Friendsgiving, a Thanksgiving meal with their friends instead of their family. They gather at someone's apartment or house and have a potluck. This is a meal where everyone who is invited brings food to share with others. Thanksgiving is a big day for television, games, and other entertainment. One tradition is the television broadcast of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It takes place each year in New York City. Workers of the Macy's store on Harold Square organized the first parade in 1924. Many of the workers were immigrants and wanted to hold a big parade like the ones in Europe. So they dressed in costumes and borrowed some animals from the zoo. They also carried small balloons that floated just overhead. Many professional American football games are also played on Thanksgiving. Fans of the sport enjoy relaxing and watching a game or two after eating a big Thanksgiving meal. Some start Thanksgiving Day early and in a healthy way. So-called turkey trot races take place in many towns and cities. These events involve runners dressing up in a Thanksgiving-related costume and running a short distance, usually five kilometers. Many turkey trots urge runners to bring canned food to donate to local food banks, nonprofit organizations that give food to poor people in the community. Certainly not everyone in America has an easy Thanksgiving. The United States is home to many poor and homeless people. Some cannot afford a Thanksgiving dinner. Others are without friends or families. Many religious and service organizations around the country try to fill these needs. Some provide community dinners at churches and other centers. Some groups also deliver Thanksgiving meals to people too sick or old to leave their homes. The writer, O. Henry, called Thanksgiving the one holiday that is purely American. It is not linked to a religion or a certain group. Anyone in the United States on the 4th Thursday of November is welcome to celebrate Thanksgiving. I'm Katie Weaver. And I'm Ashley Thompson. And Katie Weaver joins me now for a chat. Hi, Katie. Happy Thanksgiving. Same to you, Dan, and your family. Are you cooking up a storm? Well, this year my family isn't hosting Thanksgiving, so I don't have to cook anything. I'm just bringing wine. What about you? I am making about 10 pounds, or four and a half kilograms, of green beans. Some will include spicy meat, but I also need to make some that are vegan. I make them every year. It is a simple recipe, but it takes a lot of time to make that many beans. And how many people attend? Between 25 and 30. We try to play charades after dinner. What's charades? Can you explain it? We divide the group into two teams. Each team chooses titles of books, movies, plays, songs, and more for the other team. Then each player tries to act out a title. No words allowed. Their teammates try to guess the title. That sounds like a lot of work. No, it is really fun and funny. Besides, it gets everybody up and moving after that big Thanksgiving meal. Yeah, after a big Thanksgiving meal, I'm usually in the couch for a couple hours watching TV, not moving at all. Anyway, thanks for joining me, Katie. Happy to do it, Dan. See you again soon. My name is Anna Matteo. My name is Andrew Smith. And my name is Jill Robbins. You're listening to The Lesson of the Day on the Learning English Podcast. Welcome to the part of the show where we help you do more with our series Let's Learn English. This series shows Anna Matteo in her work and life in Washington, D.C. In a recent Lesson of the Day podcast, we talked about Anna going to the store to buy food for a dinner party. In Lesson 39, which is called It's Unbelievable, we see Anna shopping online. She sees an advertisement on television and, as you can imagine, learns an important lesson about advertising. Winter weather in Washington, D.C. can be really windy. And wind messes up my hair. It is really windy today. Oh, look at my hair. Will it be windy this weekend? I'll listen to the news. I am tired of my untidy hair. Yes, yes I am. And it's uncomfortable. Yes, yes it is. Hey, is that Pete? Hi, I'm Pete and I have the perfect product for you. Hair Be Good. Just spray Hair Be Good on your hair. Wrap in a towel and you are done. Hair Be Good works and it's inexpensive. One can costs only $10. So go online and order your Hair Be Good today. Hair Be Good sounds perfect and I can trust Pete. I am buying some right now. Okay, I will order one can of Hair Be Good for $10. I'll pay with a credit card. My delivery will arrive in two days. Awesome! We should add that in Less Learn English you can find lesson plans with many activities and explanations like the ones we give you in this podcast. For example, there's a pronunciation practice video about the feeling Anna describes for her untidy hair. One of the new words in this lesson can cause problems for English learners. That word is uncomfortable and it's opposite, comfortable. When you say this word, you do not pronounce some of the letters that you see in the written word. In this lesson, you hear Anna say that her hair is uncomfortable. Yes, I am. And it's uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. Hey, that sounds like one of those reduced forms we've been teaching in some of our earlier podcasts. Yeah, are you happy? It wouldn't be a lesson of the day without a reduced form. That's right. Let's listen to more of the story. I want to find out if the hair product helps Anna fix her hair. I'll use it before I go to work. Okay, Hair Be Good. Make my untidy hair tidy. No, make it fabulous. Hi, Anna. Hello, Amelia. Anna, you look different. Thanks. I used a new product called Hair Be Good. Well, it's not. It's not what? Good. Your hair does not look good. Oh, no, this is not good. Why don't you go home and take care of this? Good idea. Listeners, we need to describe for you now how Anna's hair looks in the video. It's standing up straight from her head in all different directions. You could say it's even more untidy than it was before. It looks very strange. Now, you can guess that Anna will be very unhappy with Pete when she meets him on her way home from work. Let's listen. Hi, Anna. Hello, Pete. Is something wrong? This is wrong. What did you do to your hair? Hair Be Good did this to my hair. Oh, you bought it. Yes, I bought it. You said in your ad it was a perfect product. This is not perfect. This is imperfect. It's unbelievable. I believed your ad, Pete. It was dishonest. I hope this doesn't damage their friendship. And by the way, you probably figured out that untidy means not neat. In this lesson, you hear Anna use adjectives with negative prefixes. Prefixes are those little two or three letter pieces that come before a word and change its meaning. The prefixes in this lesson are the letters I-N, in, the letters U-N, on, the letters D-I-S, dis, and the letters I-M, M. Hey, we had an example of dis in our previous podcast when we talked about Anna and the guy from the country disagreeing. That's true. We did. And like I said before, Anna is really unhappy with Pete because she believed his TV ad. She didn't know it was a dishonest ad, one that was not really telling the truth. So it was unbelievable. Thanks, Joe. For those examples of how those prefixes give the opposite meaning to an adjective. Like when Anna tells Pete that the product in his advertisement does not work. Yes, I bought it. You said in your ad it was a perfect product. This is not perfect. This is imperfect. In this example, imperfect means the opposite of perfect. The prefix is I-M or M. I suppose our listeners are wondering why there are so many prefixes to make the meaning opposite. Dr. Jill, do you have a linguistic explanation for that? Of course I do. One reason is that English words were borrowed from several different languages. One of them is German. Words from German use a prefix, an, or U-N. And a lot of words come to us from Latin through other languages like French. Those words from Latin use the prefix I-N or in. Okay, but what about the other prefixes like I-M as in imperfect? Perfect comes from Latin, doesn't it? Yes, but the prefix in or I-N changes to M or I-M before adjectives that begin with P, B, and M as in impossible and imperfect. So there it changes because of the sound of the next letter. That makes sense. There are some important words that take the I-M, M, like import, immunize, immortal. And important, too. There are two other prefix sound changes like that. The prefix in, I-N, changes to I-L or ill before the letter L as in illiterate or not able to read. That's right. If you are literate, you can read. And if you are illiterate, you cannot read. That prefix also gives us words like illegal and illogical. And isn't there one more prefix? I-R, ear. The letters I-N in changes to ear before words that begin with R as in irresponsible, which means careless. Right, so we get irregular and irrelevant. But let's get back to our story. Will Anna forgive Pete? You don't believe everything you see in ads, do you? No, Pete. Just the ones with my friends. Your hair will be okay. Just wash it a couple of times. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Pete. Here. Here's your product. You should call it hair be really, really bad. Until next time, Pete. Until next time. I guess it will take a little time for her to forgive him. But she's learned not to believe everything she sees on television. That gives me an idea, Andrew. Let's ask our listeners to write to us about some advertising they learned that was not 100% true. Write to us at learningenglishatvoanews.com or in the comments on our YouTube video. And here's a useful vocabulary word for our listeners. An advertisement that is very untrue, we call that a scam. S-C-A-M. So perhaps you have encountered some scams, but hopefully not. And whether you find us on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or on our website, learningenglish.voanews.com, we hope you have enjoyed the lesson of the day on the Learning English podcast. And thanks for listening. I'm Dr. Jill. And I'm Andrew Smith. 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.