(Upper-Intermediate) Can plants talk to each other?

Can plants talk to each other? It certainly doesn’t seem that way: They don’t have complex sensory or nervous systems, like animals do, and they look pretty passive. But odd as it sounds, plants can communicate with each other — especially when they’re under attack. 

Vocab

To beef up

Scarce (adj.)

The make-up (n.) of sth

To eavesdrop

A chemical fingerprint

To emit

Airborne (adj.)

To decipher

A symbiotic relationship

Filaments (n.)

Blight (n.)

To prompt / trigger

To ramp up 

 Ted Lesson:

Can plants talk to each other?  

 Gap fill for second listening:

Basking in the ___

Odd as it _______

Under _________

Plumes of ____________ chemicals

Increase the _____________ of

________ sb of danger

A self-__________ mechanism

__________ on signals

C________ warnings

_______ types

Airborne b__________

Ramp up p____________

Group speaking questions based on vocab:


Do you sometimes eavesdrop on other people's conversations?

What prompted you to study in New Zealand instead of another country?

Can you decipher these Chinese characters using the helpful prompts?













Here's the answers:











Expand the "person" character to convey...



follow

crowd

big



Combine the mouth and person pictograms to convey "prisoner"











Check:










Name five things that emit heat.









Name two things that emit steam.












Do they emit sounds?

Trees
Fish
Spiders
Lightbulbs
Grass
Leaves
Planets





Name some living things that can emit light?







What do these things have in common?

Shoes
Cheese
Vinegar
Arm pits
Feet
Rubbish bins





The sounds of the planets in our solar system

Phantom Ave

Rubbish truck swallowing a bunch of balloons. 

Two young men in black New World outfits, a long way from the supermarket.

Do the guys in the BP Connect, connect?

Man sleeping against an ATM. No one can get to their money.

Walking past the same tree having the same doubt.

Each week I start at zero. I go as deep as I can into negative numbers then head back to zero.

In a nightmare the prime minister strangled me with his tie.

An enormous obvious out my front window. I stare at it all day. Its light floods the room all night.

The old cemetery was incorporated into the new shopping mall. Trolleys scuff the headstones. Some shoppers leave fresh flowers, bought at the mall florists. 

Somewhere on a screen I cross the park in the moonlight.

Papyrus thriving in concrete. 

I try to hypnotize other passengers on the bus, other passengers try to hypnotize me.

Imagine passing habitable planets as uninhabitable ones. 

Conversations in K-Mart look really different when you can see auras.

On one side of the motorway there's an empire of locks, on the other side, there's an empire of keys.

Wabi-sabi police car.

I think I might be grey, not going grey, madly screamingly grey.

Any steps can be temple steps.

Sometimes, the billboards are the only refuge of colour.

Paradox Mall

Rocks lining the road stop it floating away. 

You wake up at sunset, work all day at sunset, go to bed at sunset.

He had a convincing voice. He barely needed to open his mouth before you were convinced completely. He didn’t even need to open his mouth, or his eyes. He just sat there convincing everybody, including himself. 

An armchair on an asteroid.

Bank of the Self. 

The only passenger on the bus, the only person in the gas station, the only shopper in a supermarket aisle, a cat sitting in the road late at night.

Furniture breaks free and wanders across the city, joins a herd. The herds are rounded up by furniture trucks.

Before I can start seeing I have to watch some ads.

At first, I could only make out tiny fragments. Then images began to form, shadowy blobs, which slowly took on colour, clarity and volume. I moved among them, hearing sounds and sensing living presences.

The suburb has wind machines installed in the four quarters.

The new city will be made of an indestructible material which will radiate a vibration that eliminates all tension.

From the bus window, I glimpse someone in a brown dressing gown heading towards their letterbox. Later, I find a brown dressing gown in my wardrobe.

Laundromats began as cave temples. Faint constellations are still visible on the ceilings. People descended into the caves, stripped off and threw their clothes into spinning drums. They stared at the spinning drums and went into a trance then danced naked all night under the stars.

When I first arrived here there was nothing to see, just an empty field. Then some locals turned up and began to gesticulate. After a while, the town began to appear to me, in exquisite detail, right down to the numbers on letterboxes.

I own the Bank of the Self. I have only one customer.

Sometimes it’s good to stop and imitate things you see. A swaying tree.

Pyramid supermarket - select items by pressing on hieroglyphs. Later the shopping rolls out in a sarcophagus.

Spirit supermarkets are not arranged in aisles, but isles. Don't overload your boat.

Exclamation mark crash-landing site.

Rocks lining the road stop it floating away.

Corner of Depression Drive and Suffocation Street

You can drive right into the restaurant, drive right up to the counter, through the kitchen, up the wall and across the ceiling. 

The hidden supermarket has no sign, no carpark. Shoppers feel along the darkened aisles, tossing items hopefully into their trolleys. The usual announcements and music help normalise the atmosphere.

On the bus, I try to hypnotize other passengers. Other passengers try to hypnotize me.

Billboard sky. Billboard cloud. Billboard sea. 

With each improvement the city gets worse.