Ready for the Super Bowl?

The biggest TV event in America is this Sunday. Will you be watching the Super Bowl where you live?

Hi everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, the podcast that goes at the right speed for English learners. Today on Plain English, we’ll talk about the Super Bowl coming up this Sunday. Don’t worry—I won’t talk too much about the game; I’ll talk more about the spectacle. In the second half of the show, we’ll practice the English phrasal verb, “pit against.”

But before we get started, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who’s recently discovered the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, and our web site, PlainEnglish.com. We’ve had a lot of new people subscribe from all over the world, so I wanted to say hi to all the new listeners, and of course, welcome to the growing Plain English community.

If you want to learn a little more about me and why I’m doing this project, you can read an interview I did with Katie on the blog ESL Expressions. If you want to read that, you can go to PlainEnglish.com/interview and it will take you to the right page.

One thing I said in the interview with Katie I like learning about who’s in the audience, so take a moment to look up the show on Facebook and Twitter; I’m PlainEnglishPod on both. And send me a note you can also send me an email directly to [email protected]. I’d like to know more about you and what you think of the program so far.

Ready to get started?

Super Bowl Sunday in the US

One of the biggest days on the American cultural calendar is the first Sunday of February—Super Bowl Sunday. The Super Bowl is the championship game in American football, where the winners of the two football conferences face off for the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

This year’s Super Bowl will pit the New England Patriots against the Philadelphia Eagles—two teams from the northeast of the United States.

If you don’t know where New England is, by the way, picture a map of the United States in your mind. That group of states on the top right hand side of the map, which look kind of like a finger pointing up and to the right, that’s New England. The Patriots play near the city of Boston and tend to represent that whole group of smaller northeastern states.

The Patriots have been to nine out of the 51 previous Super Bowls, the most of any team. Their star player is Tom Brady, who is considered to be one of the best quarterbacks of all time. The quarterback is the leader of the offense in American football. Tom Brady has been to eight Super Bowls and has won five of them. Some of you might recognize him because of his wife; he’s married to Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen.

The Eagles have a star quarterback, too. The only problem is that their star quarterback got hurt at the end of the season. So the Eagles will be playing with their backup quarterback, Nick Foles. A backup is the player who’s ready to come in if the star is injured or needs a rest.

So between Tom Brady’s experience and the fact that the Eagles are playing with their backup, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Patriots are favored to win; that means that they are expected to win. But anything can happen, right?

Now if I’m being honest with myself, I have to admit that most of you don’t really know or really care about the actual football game, since American football is such a, well, American thing. So instead of talking more about the game, I thought I’d also tell you about what Americans do on Super Bowl Sunday.

And the first thing we do, is we watch. You can see that in the numbers. Over 111 million people watched last year’s Super Bowl. In fact, out of the ten most-watched television events in American history, nine are Super Bowls. About 70% of the televisions in the United States are tuned to the Super Bowl. But, interestingly, it’s not the most popular sporting event in the world—that honor belongs to the Champions League finals, European soccer. Those games get way more total viewers, over 380 million last year.

Another thing Americans do on Super Bowl Sunday is have a party. It’s really common for people to have a Super Bowl party with friends—and to cook chili or stew or chicken wings, things like that.

If you’re not in the United States and you don’t know or care much about football, well, you have company here, too. About a quarter of the people watching the Super Bowl think that the commercials are the most entertaining part of the game. Since the audience is so big, the commercials are really expensive—they cost about $5 million for just 30 seconds. So companies save their very best and funniest commercials for the Super Bowl, hoping to make a splash in front of such a big audience. For that reason, a lot of people watching the game actually watch it for the commercials instead of for the action on the field.

The game has a memorable halftime show, too. It’s usually a famous musician who plays for about 12 or 13 minutes. This year’s performer is Justin Timberlake, who had quite a memorable appearance with Janet Jackson in 2004.

One last thing you need to know about what Americans do during the Super Bowl: we bet. Sure, you can bet on the result of the game, but that’s boring. You can also bet on things like, how long will the national anthem take at the beginning of the game, how many points will be scored in each quarter, what celebrities will be shown on television, and what words the announcers will use. Americans bet over $100 million each year on just this one game.

Before we start on the second half of the program, I wanted to remind you to check out the transcripts online at PlainEnglish.com. Every episode has a full transcript on the web site, and each transcript includes translations of tough words and phrases from English to Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese and French. So my recommendation is that you read the transcript while you listen, and any time you don’t understand something, just hover over or tap on the highlighted word for the definition. Another thing you can do, if you want, is listen to the show from start to finish. Then, go back and read the whole thing out loud yourself. I used to do that to practice my pronunciation in Spanish and it helped a lot.

Today is episode number 17, so the URL is easy to remember: PlainEnglish.com/17 . Check it out.