The natural world

English sentences almost always need a subject. When there is nothing to be the subject, English uses it.

• It is raining.
• It is cold today.
• It is late.

Nothing is doing the raining. The it means nothing at all. It is there only because the grammar needs a word in that place.

Many languages simply leave this out. In Spanish, llueve is a complete sentence. In English, is raining is not. You must say it is raining.

weather is uncountable

You cannot say a weather or weathers. Weather is always one thing.

• The weather is nice today.

To talk about one kind of weather, use another word: a storm, a shower, a cold day.

hot and cold do a lot of work

Hot and cold describe the weather, food, drink and how your body feels. That is a wide job for two short words, and English adds more when it needs to be exact:

• warm is pleasantly hot
• cool is pleasantly cold
• freezing is very cold
• boiling is very hot

Warm and cool are both positive. Hot and cold can be either good or bad.

Animals arrive late

You met dog early in this course. That is because people say dog very often.

You will wait a long time for goat and elephant. This course teaches words in the order people actually use them, so common animals come first and the rest come much later.

That is a fair trade. You will be able to talk about work and money long before you can name a farm animal, and work and money come up more.