Second Conditional

Intro

1. Learn Vocabulary - Learn some new vocabulary before you start the lesson.

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• variations
• interval
• subtle
• stick with

• thriller
• alternate reality
• figure out
• premise

• fluent
• navigate

2. Read and Prepare - Read the introduction and prepare to hear the audio.

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Imagine if you could go back in time and change something about the past. What would you do differently? Would you study harder in school? Take a different job? Try living in a foreign country?

Now imagine how much a single change like that could affect your entire life. You could end up pursuing a different career, meeting different people, even developing different opinions and views of the world.

Filmmakers seem to love exploring questions like these in their movies. The latest example is Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s a thriller in which the main character keeps going back in time in order to try to stop a bomb from exploding on a train. Each time he returns to the past, he changes little things. And those small changes have huge effects not just on him, but also on others. Find out what Marni and Jason think about this film.

Dialog

1. Listen and Read - Listen to the audio and read the dialog at the same time.

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2. Study - Read the dialog again to see how the vocab words are used.

Marni

Jason

Marni:  So it seems like there’s been a lot of films lately that are like these crazy alternate realities, but you have to like figure out the right one to save the day. Seems like a big premise. I was thinking of the Source Code.

Jason:  You must also be thinking of Inception.

Marni:  Right.

Jason:  The Bourne Identity, stuff like that.

Marni:  All these sort of films.

Jason:  The Source Code is kind of like that. Do you know how it works?

Marni:  Tell me about the Source Code.

Jason:  Jake Gyllenhaal is a soldier who gets sent back in time, basically, for eight minutes, in order to stop a bomb from going off on a train. And naturally he doesn’t do it, so he has to keep going back in time to the same point over and over, and each time he learns a few more things, and a few more things look different.

Marni:  Interesting. So it’s not completely the same each time he goes back, so he has to navigate that as well as…

Jason:  Yeah, there’s variations based on what he did. But it makes for a neat movie because it has these sort of intervals. It just sort of resets every few minutes.

Marni:  It sort of seems like it works with that premise, like basically if you didn’t do this one action, how it would affect everything. So if you’re going back in time and changing something, even subtly, it’s gonna affect everything. So that’s an interesting premise.

Jason:  Yeah, it’s fun to think about. Like if you could go back and change one thing that would have like this huge effect, what would you change, if you could change one thing?

Marni:  If I could go back and change one thing?

Jason:  Or learn one thing.

Marni:  I wish that I really would’ve stuck with my Spanish so I’d be more fluent.

Jason:  Oh wow. And you think that might’ve taken you different places.

Marni:  Perhaps, yeah. Definitely.

Grammar Point

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