Read the NEWS in English 🌐 Advanced Vocabulary and Grammar from CNN

In today's English lesson, we're going to read a CNN news article together.

ADVANCED LESSON

This advanced lesson will focus on the essential vocabulary and grammar you need to know, not only to fully unterstand this article, but to participate in the culture of the English-speaking world.

We will analyze each paragraph.

I will take detailed notes, and you can download a free PDF of these notes by clicking the link in the description.

Finally, at the end of the lesson, I will read the article one more time a little faster at a natural speed so you can focus on my pronunciation and intonation.

Let's get started.

Here's the title of today's article.

Sonny to lay off 900 at PlayStation as tough times for the video games industry persist.

Here we have the phrasal verb lay off.

This means to stop employing someone because there's no work for them to do.

This is different than when someone gets fired.

Usually, you get firet because you've done something wrong.

You get laid off if a company decides to close or downsize to reduce costs.

We have a grammatical structure that's very common in news articles.

Sony to lay off 900.

It's ver common to omit the verb "be" in the titles of news articles.

This is a reduced form of "Sony is to lay off900."

This sentence uses "be" plus the "to" infilnitive as a formal way to announce that something is planned to happen in the future.

It sounds more offcial and profesional than just saying, "Sony will lay off 900."

Some more exples would be, "The president is to make an announcement this week," or "The author is to publish a new book next month."

Tough times is an adjective noun collocation.

A collocation is a group of words that are frequently used together.

In this case, the adjective "tough" and and the noun "times" create a very common phrase.

Tough times usually refer to a difficult economic period.

"Persist" is a very usful verb, which in this context means that something bad continues to exist or happen.

If you're a fan of video games like me, then you are aware that tough times persist for many companies in this industry right now.

Let's read the first paragraph.

Eletronics giant Sony announced on Tuesday that it will be cutting 900 jobs, or 8%, in PlayStation's global workforce.

The layoffs will impact all regions for Sony interactive entertainment.

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