Speak Better English with Harry | Episode 47

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• 00:10

  Hi there.

• 00:10

  This is Harry.

• 00:11

  And welcome back to our english podcast where I try to help you with your understanding of english grammar using sentences and other phrases.

• 00:21

  And hopefully this will help you in your conversational English.

• 00:24

  So the sentence that I have today is, again, a little bit political, very current, and an article that I picked up recently.

• 00:33

  So first reading, a team of french police dubbed cyber gendarmes has destroyed a virus that infected more than 850,000 computers worldwide.

• 00:49

  Authorities say, so this is an example of reported speech.

• 00:55

  Okay, so let me give you the reading again.

• 00:57

  A team of french police dubbed cyber gendarmes has destroyed a virus that infected more than 850,000 computers worldwide.

• 01:09

  Authorities say, okay, so as I said, a good example of reported speech.

• 01:15

  It's not what I have said, but it is what somebody else has reported.

• 01:19

  And in this case, it says, authorities say it doesn't give any other indication of who those authorities are, but we assume it's some spokesman for either the french government or the, perhaps the french police department or the minister of the interior, whoever may be responsible for these sort of actions.

• 01:41

  But the fact that it is reported speech, we, we say, well, we use the words either say or tell.

• 01:50

  So you always see these verbs used in reported speech.

• 01:53

  He said that.

• 01:55

  She told him that.

• 01:57

  Okay, so in this situation, we have say authorities say, so they are making this statement.

• 02:05

  So they say, a team of french police.

• 02:10

  So we don't know which team.

• 02:12

  So we're using just the indefinite article.

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