Ramp up
There were a lot of great words in today’s episode, and if you were listening closely, you might have heard two that we’ve featured before. The first one, ”to get your fix” was the featured expression the first time we discussed marijuana legalization, back in episode 18. The second one was ”follow suit,”which was the expression we talked about in episode 84. So if you’d like to learn more about those expressions, just go to PlainEnglish.com/18 and href=”https://plainenglish.com/84″ target=”_blank”>PlainEnglish.com/84 to listen to those episodes.
But the phrasal verb I’d like to share with you today is “ramp up.” A ramp is like an inclined path. So sometimes instead of stairs, you’ll see a ramp where you can push a wheelchair. But to ramp up means to increase something from a low base, usually (but not always) in the context of business or commerce.
In Canada, the legal marijuana industry needs to ramp up production. It’s currently at a low base: the lowest possible, right? It’s starting from scratch, starting from nothing. It needs to grow to be able to serve the market. But then eventually it will get big enough and it will stabilize. Eventually it won’t need to grow quite so fast. So it needs to get bigger this year, bigger next year, bigger the year after that, and then maybe it can stabilize, or stop growing so quickly.
I’ll give you a couple other examples. I’m starting a new project at work, but it’s been going slowly at first. There hasn’t been a lot to do, but starting in the next couple of weeks, it’s going to get really busy. So we need to ramp up in the next few weeks. We started with just one or two people working a day or two a week on it, but eventually we’ll have about four of us working full time on the project. We’re still ramping up.
We’re going to have Congressional elections here in November and candidates have been ramping up their television advertising for the important final month of the campaign. They’ve increased their spending week after week so that it reaches its maximum right before people go and vote.
What else? Oh, a big thing here is that online retailers and shipping companies like FedEx and UPS ramp up their hiring in the fall so they can handle all the holiday-season online shopping. Big companies like Amazon.com, UPS, FedEx, and traditional retailers ramp up their hiring around October so they have enough trained workers to handle the crush of business in November and December.
Hey don’t forget that Plain English listeners can get an audiobook for free just by signing up for a free trial membership to Audible. Audiobooks are a way to test your listening comprehension with speech at a bit faster pace than we have here. If you pick a book you already know, then you don’t have to worry so much about understanding the story—you can concentrate more on picking up the words. If that sounds like it might be of interest, check out PlainEnglish.com/book and you can read about the free trial membership to Audible.
That’s all for today. Yesterday was the big election in Brazil, so we’ll talk about that on Thursday’s episode, which will be number 99. I hope you all have a great week. JR and I will see you right back here on Thursday.
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