Spread out
Here’s a phrasal verb for you: “spread out.”
“Spread out” is something you can be or something you can do. Let’s start with “spread out” as a property . In both cases, the idea is that things—people or things—are not clustered closely together. There is a lot of space in between individuals.
In the glory days of the big, indoor regional mall , each mall had a food court . And all the restaurants would be clustered around a central eating area . They’re not building malls like this anymore. In newer malls, the restaurants are spread out throughout the mall . That means they’re not all clustered together, all in the same area. They’re distributed , one by one, in different spots in the mall, with a lot of space in between each one.
Sometimes if you go to a park, there’s a picnic area. And in one park, you might see a lot of picnic tables clustered together. But in another park, the picnic tables might be more spread out. There might be more space in between each table, to give each group more room.
If you describe a city or a place as “spread out,” it generally means there’s a lot of space between the buildings. Many American small towns and suburbs are very spread out. They developed in the age of the car , so the houses didn’t all have to be grouped around the center of a town.
Where I grew up, in Connecticut, for example, there was a lot of space between the houses. And our town had about 12,000 people in it, but we were all spread out. There were no tall buildings, there were very few apartments . Almost every family lived in a detached house with a yard and plenty of space around it.
So as a result , you couldn’t really walk anywhere in my town. The streets didn’t have sidewalks . It would take forever to walk anywhere. It really wasn’t safe. When I was a kid, one of my schools was about six kilometers away—kids can’t walk that far to school. So we all had to take the school bus. The town was too spread out.
Denser places like Chicago, for example, or the very closest suburbs are different. In those areas, there are a lot of houses, one right next to another, with apartment buildings or duplex houses mixed in. So these areas are not spread out. And in cities and the closest-in suburbs, students do walk to school because their towns are not very spread out.
So that’s “spread out” as a property . How about “spread out” as an action? Let’s say you’re a yoga instructor and you’re giving an outdoor yoga class . You get to the spot of the class and you see your students all talking to one another. You want to get started with some stretches . The students will be extending their arms and legs, bending forward and back ; you don’t want them clustered closely together.
So you might tell them: “Spread out. It’s time to start.” In this case, “spread out” is a command , a request , and it means: move around and put more space in between yourself and the other people. Don’t group and gather and cluster together. Spread out so we all have room to stretch and start.
Are you a visual learner ? I’m not really a visual learner, but sometimes it helps to spread out all the information I have on a huge table . There were times at work, when I was doing a big project, there was a lot of information to keep track of— documents , maps, notes , pictures, stuff like that. And it just helped to see it all at once .
So sometimes, I’d go to a conference room and spread out all my materials on a big table. So I’d walk in with a stack of papers in my hand. Then, I would spread them out on the table—and the papers would cover the full table. That’s spreading the papers out.
See you next time!
And that is all for us here at Plain English. This was lesson number 697, so remember to find the full lesson resources, the transcript, translations, quizzes, practice area, all that stuff, at PlainEnglish.com/697.
Coming up on Monday…there’s a lot more to the school experience than just learning in the classroom. And that’s what we’ll be talking about in the next lesson—sports, after school activities, clubs, lunches, things like that. That’s on Monday’s Plain English. See you then.
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