Hi everybody.
My name is Shauna 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.
Hi everyone.
Welcome back.
Today is a 5 minute English episode and we're going to talk about the most common pets in the United States.
Cats and dogs.
Did you know that more than 65 million households in the United States have a dog and nearly 46 million have a cat.
Pets are a huge part of American life, and I know from last week's chat on Instagram that a lot of you have pets also.
Now, today we'll be talking about a lot of different vocabulary that will be useful when talking about these two very special animals.
You'll learn descriptive adjectives to talk about their appearance, common verbs to describe their behavior, as well as must know phrasal verbs and collocations.
As usual, I'll introduce these terms through a story.
Hopefully this will help you understand many of them from context, because to me, that's the easiest way to learn new vocabulary.
And yeah, let's go ahead and begin with five basic terms you'll probably need to know to understand this story better.
So pet vocabulary.
The first is pet.
What is a pet?
A pet is an animal that lives with people for companionship.