Carry out
The word we’re going to focus on today is “carry out.” Here’s how you first heard it earlier in the program: Billy Graham formed the nonprofit Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to carry out his work.
Carry out simply means to do a particular piece of work, or to put it into operation. Billy Graham wanted to reach as many people as possible, so he needed an organization to help him fulfil his mission, to help him carry out his work.
You want to use “carry out” when you’ve got a plan or a vision, but you need to make that plan or a vision reality. You can say you want to carry out a plan, carry out a vision, carry out a person’s wishes or desires, or even carry out instructions. That one means to follow instructions. You might tell you kids you want your instructions carried out precisely; that means, you want them to do exactly what you said.
Here are a few other examples. The president of a company has a vision for a new product and he has a plan to create it; now he just needs his top managers to carry out his plan. That means the president had the idea, but the managers need to make that idea a reality. They need are the ones who need to carry out the company president’s plans.
You may have heard the news that the Xi Jinping, the president of China, may be allowed to have more than two terms as China’s leader; some people were saying he needs more than two terms to carry out his ambitious plans. We’ll talk more about that example on Monday.
One more: Billy Graham’s wishes to be buried in North Carolina at his library will be carried out tomorrow, March 2.
I think you get the idea now. Carry out is all about making a wish, a desire, or a plan into a reality.
That’s it for today’s episode—thanks for listening to Plain English. We have new episodes every Monday and Thursday. If you’re listening on Spotify, click “follow”; if you’re in Apple Podcasts or another podcasts app, don’t forget to click “subscribe” and you’ll get the new episodes in your podcast library as soon as they come out.
Thanks again for listening and we’ll be back with another episode on Monday
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