Stranded
As you heard earlier, thousands of people were left stranded in the Atlanta airport when the power went out. They found themselves without any way of getting to their destination. If you’re stuck somewhere, with no way of moving or getting out of your current situation, you’re stranded. We’ve all been there. I was stranded in the Atlanta airport during the snowstorm just a week before the power outage. If you missed the last train of the night, you might be stranded at the train station until the next morning; that has happened to me before also. As a kid, I sometimes missed the bus home from school; I was stranded at school until someone could finally come pick me up.
Here are a few more instances where you can be stranded. What if you’re at the mall and you shop until closing time, but you get to your car and you discover that it won’t start. You don’t have a ride home. You’re stranded there. It’s actually possible to be stranded at home. One year at Christmas, my town got a huge snowstorm. I was supposed to be with family that Christmas, but there was so much snow I couldn’t leave my driveway. I was stranded at home; I wanted to go somewhere else, but I couldn’t. Incidentally, if you saw the Christmas movie “Home Alone”, then you remember that eight-year-old Kevin was stranded at home while his family went on vacation to Paris.
Fundraiser
The second word this week is fundraiser. We learned earlier that some groups in Spain sell hundred-shares of Christmas lottery tickets as a fundraiser. A tenth of a décimo goes for 2 euros, but these groups sell them for 3 euros, and keep the extra one for their organization. In that way, it raises money for the charity. And that’s what a fundraiser is—it’s any activity that helps an organization get extra money. I’m not sure how it is in other parts of the world, but here in the United States, there are all kinds of fundraisers. When I was a kid, we’d sell magazine subscriptions as a fundraiser for my school and Christmas wreathes as a fundraiser for an after-school group I was in. Other popular fundraisers are concerts and 5K road races, where a portion of each ticket or entrance fee sold goes to an organization. Sometimes organizations will host a raffle or an auction, both of which are good fundraisers because they can generate a lot of money.
In my experience, a fundraiser is an activity that costs money, and a portion of that money goes to a good cause. So, you might say, I’m raising funds for cancer research. Would you consider giving money? But if you organized a concert and sold tickets for $10 each, you would tell your friends that the concert is a fundraiser, and you’d ask them to buy tickets instead of just giving you money directly.
What are some common fundraisers where you live? I’d love to hear from you either on social media or through email. I’m on both Twitter and Facebook at PlainEnglishPod. Speaking of which, I wanted to say hi to Guillermo from Spain and Frances from Brazil; they both connected on Twitter last week. If you’re interested in sending an email, my email address is jeff@plainenglish.[/tab]com
That brings us to the end of this week’s program; thanks for listening and have a happy and safe new year
Use realistic expressions like a native speaker
