 Hi students, it's Shayna, your teacher from EspressoEnglish.net and the phrasal verb of the day is perk up. This is an interesting phrasal verb and you might not have encountered it before, but today you're going to find out what it means. Before I begin the lesson, I want to invite you into my phrasal verbs course, which is called phrasal verbs in conversation. I made this course in order to help you learn phrasal verbs in a more natural way. So some students try to learn phrasal verbs by just studying long lists of definitions. And that's okay, but I think it's more interesting, more fun, and more effective to learn phrasal verbs through real situations. So that's what my phrasal verbs in conversation course aims to do. If you'd like more information, then click on the link in the video description and you can see what's inside the phrasal verbs in conversation course. You can see a free sample lesson and you can sign up and start those lessons today if you want. So let's get to today's phrasal verb perk up. Here are the three possible definitions. Remember that only one is correct. And as I'm talking, I want you to think about which is the correct meaning and post your guess, post your answer A, B, or C in the comments to this video and then keep watching to find out if you're correct. Does perk up mean A, to become more cheerful or lively, B, to cooperate with someone, or C, to express strong gratitude? Let me describe the situation. Let's say you have a young daughter. She's three years old and one day you take your daughter out on a lot of errands. Erends are tasks that you do outside the house like going to the supermarket, the bank, and the post office, this kind of thing. And by the end of all these errands, your little girl is kind of tired because it wasn't really very much fun for her to go to all these different places and do all these different errands. And so she's in the car and she's kind of tired and a little bit in a bad mood and she's saying that she's hungry. And then you say, hey, why don't we go to the toy store? And immediately she perks up and she starts talking about her toys and she starts asking if you can buy something at the toy store. She perked up when you mentioned the toy store. So what does it mean to perk up based on that situation? Does it mean A, to become more cheerful or lively, B, to cooperate with someone, or C, to express strong gratitude? What do you think? The correct answer, and I hope you got it from my description of this situation, is A, to become more cheerful and lively. So in this example, mentioning a toy store will make usually a little boy or a little girl perk up. She will get happier, she'll get excited, more cheerful and livelier. Another example of perk up is a lot of people say that a cup of coffee can help them perk up in the morning. So if you're one of those people who wakes up and you don't have a lot of energy, then drinking coffee can help you perk up and become happier and more energetic, right? That's what lively means is to be more energetic. We also sometimes see the phrasal verb perk up used with other things that are not people when something makes a situation a little bit happier, a little bit livelier. One example would be if you're decorating a room in your house and the colors in the room are a little bit subdued, they're a little bit boring. Maybe you just have gray and black and white, okay? Then you might want to add some red or some blue or some yellow paint to perk up the design, to make it a little bit happier, more cheerful and more lively. So that's another example of perk up in a situation where it's not involving people, it's something, in this case, a little bit of color making the room more lively. Now we have one more expression with perk up that you might think is a little bit strange and that is when someone's ears perk up. So what does it mean for your ears to perk up? It doesn't mean that your ears are suddenly excited and jumping for joy, not literally anyway. Here's an example. Let's say you're in your office and nearby your boss is talking with another manager and you can hear their conversation but you're not really paying attention, you're focusing on your own work. And then your boss and this other manager start discussing promotions and talking about who's going to receive a promotion this year. Well then your ears would perk up. That means you would start becoming interested and start paying attention to that conversation about promotions because it's interesting to you and you want to know of course if you're one of the people who will get promoted. So if someone says their ears perked up it means they suddenly started becoming interested or suddenly started paying attention to something they were hearing, all right? I hope now you understand what it means to perk up and I'd love to see you use this phrasal verb in your own English. So try to post an example, post a sentence in the comments of a time when you perked up or someone else perked up or you could use it in the expression. My ears perked up when you suddenly heard something of interest to you. I'd love to see your sentences in the comments and again if you want to get a lot more practice with phrasal verbs then make sure you check out my phrasal verbs in conversation course because every single lesson also has practice exercises and actually inside the course you can send your sentences to me and I will check them and correct them to make sure that you're using all those phrasal verbs correctly. I hope you enjoyed today's daily phrasal verb lesson and I hope I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.