Catherine Hello and welcome to 6 Minute Vocabulary. I'm Catherine…
Finn And I'm Finn. Catherine, look at this photo – do you like it? I took it this morning.
Catherine Wow, Finn. That's not bad. I didn't know you were into photography.
Finn Well, I love taking photographs.
Catherine Really? Well funnily enough, the words photography and photograph are good examples of today's topic, which is word stress. We’re going to look at the way word stress can change in words that come from the same root word.
Finn We'll show you how to work out the stress of these words...
Catherine There'll be a quiz...
Finn And we'll leave you with a top tip for learning vocabulary.
Catherine But first, let's listen to John. He's a photographer, which is a person who takes photographs as a job. He's talking about his latest project.
Finn Here's a question to think about while you listen: what's John's project?
INSERT John The book is a collection of photographs of my father. He studied geography as a young man and went all over the world during his career. He visited some very interesting geographic locations – the Andes, the Sahara – beautiful places. The book's like a photographic record of his life – a kind of a biography in pictures.
Finn So, that's John. We asked you: what was his project?
Catherine And the answer is: a biography.
Finn A biography is the story of someone's life – usually a book.
Catherine But, John's a photographer, so he told the story of his father's life in photographs. Let’s hear a clip.
INSERT 1 CLIP 1 He studied geography as a young man…
Finn John's dad was interested in geography: the study of the physical features of the earth. And geography is a key word in today's show because of its stress.
Catherine Yes. Now, geography has four syllables, ge-o-gra-phy, and the stress falls on the third syllable from the end. Geography, not geography, geography or geography. It’s geography.
Finn Words that end in the letters p-h-y - pronounced 'fee' - usually have this stress pattern. Like biography and photography. Do you like photography, Catherine?
Catherine To be honest, not really.
Finn Not really? Sorry to hear that.
Catherine No, never mind. Anyway, these words – like geography, biography and photography - are all nouns. We can change them to adjectives, by changing the y at the end to i-c – pronounced 'ik'. And when we do this, the word stress moves to a different place in the word. Here's John again.
INSERT 1 CLIP 2 He studied geography as a young man […] He visited some very interesting geographic locations…
Catherine Did you hear the difference? When we say adjectives that end with i-c, the stress falls on the penultimate syllable, that's the syllable just before the last one. So it's geography, but geographic.
Finn Geography, geographic. And we have photography, pho-to-graph-ic…
Catherine And there are other words like dramatic, to do with theatre and drama; alphabetic, to do with the alphabet, and artistic, to describe things to do with art. Finn, are you artistic?
Finn Well, I like to think of myself as quite artistic, yes. And Catherine, what's the most interesting geographic location you've been to?
Catherine It's a lovely place in Turkey called Ölüdeniz.
IDENT You’re listening to BBC Learning English.
Finn And we're talking about word stress. We've looked at the stress patterns of words that end with p-h-y, like photography.
Catherine And words ending with i-c, like photographic.
Finn And now, it's time for a quiz. Choose the correct pronunciation for the words in these sentences. Catherine will tell you the answers. Ready? Number 1. I like reading books about famous people. I love a good a) biography, b) biography or c) biography?’
Catherine And it's b) biography.
Finn Well done if you got that right. Number 2. 'The police arrested him when they found … a) photographic evidence, b) photographic evidence or c) photographic evidence.'
Catherine And the answer is - c) photographic evidence.
Finn And that’s the end of the quiz.
Catherine And that almost brings us to the end of the programme.
Finn But before we go, here's today’s top tip for learning vocabulary: if you use an online dictionary, you can usually hear an audio recording of a word’s pronunciation. Listen carefully to the word stress and try to copy it.
Catherine Top tip, Finn.
Finn Thank you.
Catherine There's more about this at bbclearningenglish.com. Join us again for more 6 Minute Vocabulary.