Copper

10-10-23 00 / episode: 267

Hi and welcome to the Les bears dot com podcast.

This podcast is for extensive English listening.

So every day I'll make a new podcast about a different topic.

That way you can hear lots of different vocabulary and you don't have to listen too long.

Two or three minutes at best.

Good morning.

Welcome to the Les Perri dot com podcast.

Today.

Today, I'd like to talk about copper.

Copper is really cool before I did this podcast, I did a little bit of research.

Not much but a little research about copper.

Copper has been used by people for about 10,000 years.

That's huge.

Now, I can't remember when we first started using fire.

Fire goes back a long way, but copper is definitely the first metal we started using metals are better than what came before.

Metal.

That was rock.

There was a lot of rock instruments, the stone age they used for cutting things, but metal was much, much better and copper was soft and easy to get.

So it was easy to work with.

It has a low melting point so we can get it out of the earth easily.

Copper was also the first metal that they used to mix with another metal that's called an alloy and it makes a better product.

So the one they made was bronze, which was stronger, harder sharper than copper itself.

Copper is really good for conducting electricity.

So we need it in wires.

Copper can also be used in fireworks and some special chemical compounds.

There's a lot of copper in the earth for a while there.

I was a little bit worried that we wouldn't have enough copper or we might run out soon.

Well, it turns out we might run out in the next 60 years.

But after that, there's more copper available, we could get it.

It's just really expensive to get and they figure there's enough copper to last us for hundreds of years if we can get it, copper is really, really important for our economy.

And the guy that makes the most is chile down in South America.

They make about one third of the copper on earth.

So we need copper for almost everything in our everyday life.

Like all the electrical wires and lights and um appliances.

So we don't want to run out of copper.

If somebody took over their copper production, uh A lot of countries could be in trouble.

Copper is really useful.

Look around your life and see where is copper being used.

Try to imagine.

Thanks for listening today about copper.