2024-03-04
31 分钟Hi everybody.
My name is Shawna and this is the american English podcast.
My goal here is to teach you the English spoken in the United States through common expressions, pronunciation tips, and interesting cultural snippets or stories.
I hope to keep this fun, useful, and interesting.
Let's do it.
Welcome back to the second part of episode number 160, how cereal became the number one breakfast food in the US.
I normally say that I'm excited to talk about the different cultural aspects in the second part of expression episodes, but this one really hits home.
Cereal arouses a sense of nostalgia in a lot of the Americans that I know.
It brings about memories of childhood, simpler times, family breakfast.
It's a wonderful topic of conversation that you can have with native speakers.
Ask them what was your favorite cereal when you were a child?
And then maybe you can share something that you learned in today's lesson.
Now, this is a short story with a lot of useful vocabulary.
Take notes if you need, or be sure to sign up to premium content.
You'll find the link for that in the episode notes.
We're going to start with a bit of vocabulary.
The word serial has its roots in Latin.
It comes from the word cerealis, which is derived from ceres, the name of the ancient roman goddess of agriculture and grain crops.
Now, when the word cereal entered the english language in the 18 hundreds, it was used to talk about any type of edible grain, from rice to barley, oats, and more.
Today, cereal is widely used to refer to a variety of breakfast foods that are made from processed grains.