YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast
Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.
WotD: Make do
English students are often baffled by two verbs appearing together, as in ‘Go wake up your father.’
I’m frequently asked if there should be an ‘and’ in between.
In this case, you could because the two verbs are not one term.
However, in the case of make do, you cannot separate them.
To make do means to manage to live or survive with less than you want or less than is necessary.
For example, Tuesday night is pizza night at my house.
I always cook pizza from scratch.
This week (last Tuesday), I realized we had no more pizza sauce left in the freezer.
Seeing as it was already 6:30 pm, the dough was made, and the toppings chopped up, I made do with pasta sauce instead.
Like or follow ArtisanEnglish.jp on social media.
Naturally, pasta sauce is not ideal for pizza, but in a pinch, you make do with what you have.
Anyone in Japan who has had the misfortune to suffer through a significant typhoon, earthquake or financial trouble should understand what I mean.
In all three situations, people have to make do with what they have instead of using what they want.
If you can’t sleep in a damaged house, you make do at the evacuation shelter.
If you can’t afford new books for university classes, you make do with second-hand ones even though the page numbers may differ.
The concept of making do is all about using the resources you have at hand and ensuring they work because, for some reason, you are unable to use what you wish you could.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 75.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.