Update lesson: Chile constitution, Colombia hippos, TikTok, and more

Chile tries for a new constitution; series finales; another HIV patient cured; 70 hippos to get a new home

Today's expression: With a straight face
Explore more: Lesson #565
April 20, 2023:

We talk about a lot of topics at Plain English, and today we're getting up to speed on several topics we've discussed before. The topics cover politics, sports, entertainment, business, health, and a new home for some heavy hippos. Plus, learn the English expression "with a straight face."

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Here’s an update on some previous topics we’ve talked about on Plain English

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. JR is the producer and he has uploaded the full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/565.

Today, we’ll take a look back at a few topics we’ve covered in the past: TikTok, Colombia’s hippos, Chile’s constitution, a few TV shows, and a fifth patient has been cured of HIV. In the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you how to use the English expression “with a straight face.” And we have a song of the week. Let’s get going.

Revisiting previous topics

TikTok

Hey, there’s this new app that all the cool kids are using. Have you heard of it? It’s called TikTok. You may remember it from Plain English lesson 204 on November 4, 2019. Let it never be said that Plain English is behind the times with social media!

Now, the app has over a billion monthly active users. The short-form video approach has caught on with consumers. The secret sauce is the app’s ability to quickly understand what you like based on your behavior, and then serve you more of what you like. It’s the ultimate in social media laziness: you don’t even have to say what you like. The app just knows based on how many seconds of which videos you watch.

The app’s Chinese-owned parent, ByteDance, is coming under fire in America over consumer data privacy. China’s government has passed laws and regulations that give it access to data collected by private firms. So American legislators are concerned that the data collected by TikTok will be shared with China’s government. There are also concerns that TikTok’s algorithm can be tweaked to manipulate public opinion. TikTok says that it does not share data with any government or outside entity.

American lawmakers are considering a few options. One is to require ByteDance to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company. If that doesn’t happen, lawmakers are threatening to ban the app entirely for American users.

China is protesting—with a straight face —that America’s threats to ban TikTok are an abuse of state power. They have half a point. TikTok, it’s worth noting, is not available in China, and neither are Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and others.

Layoffs

What’s the best way to conduct a layoff ? In lesson 547, you heard about how companies are doing it. McDonald’s is taking a new approach. The Chicago-based company decided to close its headquarters for three days, asking all employees to work from home. The company then gave the news via video calls to all affected employees. That approach meant that everyone was at home when they got the news, and there wasn’t any of the awkwardness of in-person layoffs.

Chile constitution

In Lesson 371, you heard Chile was drafting a new constitution , and in Lesson 504, you heard that voters rejected it. The country is trying again, and the process is complicated. An expert committee will create a preliminary draft of a new constitution this spring. Then, an elected council will make a final draft, using the preliminary draft as a starting point. The final vote should be at the end of 2023.

Why two drafts? You’ll remember that the elected chamber last time struggled to find consensus and it created a document that heavily appealed to only one part of the electorate. That wasn’t enough to achieve the supermajority needed to approve the draft, so the draft failed. This time, the first draft will be created by an appointed council of academics, former officials, and advisers to political parties, with roughly equal representation of the left and right.

HIV cure

A fifth person has been cured of HIV . In Lesson 137, you heard about the second patient reported to be cured of HIV. It happened by accident: the patient received a bone marrow transplant, stopped taking anti-retroviral drugs, and later had no detectable viral load. Since that time, three more patients have had the same outcome after similar surgeries. Bone marrow transplants are far more dangerous than existing anti-retroviral treatments, so this is not a treatment for anyone that doesn’t otherwise need a transplant. Still, every success can provide researchers with more information that may eventually lead to a safer, permanent treatment for HIV. The fifth patient was from Dusseldorf, Germany.

Farewell to Succession, Better Call Saul

We’re saying goodbye to two great shows. You heard about Better Call Saul in Lesson 277, and then I repeatedly used it as an example in the Expressions section of multiple other lessons—that’s how much I loved it.

The season finale came in August. I finally watched it and it was…amazing. This is my favorite show on TV; it’s a prequel to the Netflix hit “Breaking Bad.” But it also has some flash forwards that tell you what happened to the character after the events of “Breaking Bad.” There are some good cameos in the finale. If you liked Breaking Bad, you must see Better Call Saul. And now the whole series, from start to finish, is on Netflix—if you’re outside the U.S.

We also talked about Succession on HBO Max . That was Lesson 463. The final season is out now—I haven’t seen it yet but I can’t wait.

Others

In Lesson 123, I expressed hope for drone package delivery . Not a whole lot of progress there: Amazon’s tests have not been as successful as they wanted, so we’re going to have to wait a little bit longer to get our Amazon packages delivered by drone. In Lesson 208, we talked about ghost restaurants . Those are “restaurants” that have no physical presence; they’re just an online store on the apps. Some companies spammed the online platforms with multiple “restaurants” with the same menu, causing Uber Eats to delete thousands of ghost restaurants from its platform. Legitimate ones are allowed to stay. In Lesson 37, you heard about the Japanese baseball player Shohei Ohtani who pitches and hits—an unusual thing in baseball. Ohtani struck out his pro teammate Mike Trout to win the World Baseball Classic tournament for Japan in March, so congratulations to Japan.

Hippos

And finally today, Colombia has a hippo problem . Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord, imported four African hippopotamuses to Colombia for his private zoo. As you heard in lesson 243, they escaped and started disrupting the local ecosystem and bothering residents of the Antioquia department. There are now 130 hippos roaming around. It’s difficult to control the population, since they have no natural predators and they reproduce faster than authorities can sterilize them.

Colombia has a new idea: the country is going to capture 70 of the animals and ship them to other countries. Don’t get me wrong: the other countries want them! Ten are going to a sanctuary in Mexico and sixty are going to India.

The plan is to lure them into special crates, and then fly the crates to Mexico and India. They’re going on a plane! The whole operation—to capture them and ship them—will cost $3.5 million.

Cheaper per gram than mailing a check

When I first heard that number—$3.5 million—I thought, that’s it? I received a paper check in the mail in the United States and the cheapest option with tracking to send that paper check from my mailbox in Texas to Mexico (which borders Texas!)—the cheapest option was fifty dollars. And Colombia is sending 70 hippopotamuses to Mexico and India for only $3.5 million. That’s just $50,000 per hippo, or $33 per kilogram. I think that’s pretty good, all things considered.

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Expression: With a straight face