Hello again, welcome back to Lulu's happy hour.
Busy Monday. Are you still at work or are you stuck in traffic? When you are stuck in traffic, especially when you are with your kids or when you are taking a long road trip with your kids. What do you do to pass time? In English speaking countries, if you are traveling with kids, you get stuck or you are on a very long trip,the kids will probably start to sing a song to pass time and it goes something like this. sing a song. Did you get it? It says 99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around,98 bottles of beer on the wall. The beauty of this song is that it goes on forever. Because after 98 is 97,it goes 98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, 97 bottles of beer on the wall. And it goes on and on from 99 bottles of beer to 0, to kids sometimes do this to pass time on a long car journey. Have I told you another trick and how to pass time in traffic? Or I just have done something really bad, and the reason why I mentioned this, yes you are right, the topic of today's episode, and also a couple of episodes in the near future will be numbers.
We back to the basics we're gonna talk about numbers.

I notice something was people no matter how advance you are as a language learner, when you are counting in generally you tend to count in your own mother tongue, in your native language.
You want to challenge? Quick,tell me your cell phone number in English. If you have to think, that proves my point. But numbers can be fascinating, because in each number hides a lot of stories and lots of interesting expressions that you can use in everyday life. So let's start from some of the basics. Today we are only going to talk about half and one and you will be amazed at how much I can tell you about these numbers. First of all, let's look at point 5 or half. We start with some prefixes. Knowing all these prefixes, you will be able to guess the meaning of words that you don't even know. With half, we have two common prefixes. The first one is semi. 表示半个的前缀Very common word would be semi-circle, you know what circle, and semicircle is half of the circle. And think about sports, you have final and you have semi-final,the other prefix for half is hemi, if semi is more 2D, then hemi is more 3D, three dimensional, for example, the earth we talk about hemisphere, we are living in a northern hemisphere, in a same way, our brain, we have left and right hemisphere of the brain. Talking about the word half itself, I'll share with you two very interesting expressions. The first one is my better half. Better half, when you introducing someone as your better half, you are introducing your wife or your husband, your life partner, the reason why you say half, is we believe they complete us, the reason we called them better half, is jokingly saying that they are better than us, my husband or my wife. So you can say this is my better half, it will surely make them happy. The other common expression with half is when you are paying the bill, you can say let's go halves on this. To go halves on something with someone means you're paying half of the bill. For instance, after dinner, your friend wants to pay the bill, then you can say, no I can't let you pay, let's go halves, let's go halves on dinner, we'll each pay half. A fun way to learn expressions and to put expressions into use, so every time you learn these expressions, you can try to put all the expressions you've learned together to make a mini story. So for instance, I can say even though he is my better half, I would still like to go halves on dinner. Of course you can make your own versions of the story. Moving on from "half" to "one", again we start with prefix, common prefixes for one would be mono and uni. Mono, perhaps the one that you see very often is a game called monopoly. Monopoly originally means垄断，so one person controls everything in the industry, and this comes from mono and poly, mono means one, or the only one, so it means the only person who has the right to sell. Monopoly. The other commonly seen words with mono is the word monogamy or monogamous as the adjective. Monogamy means one man and one woman. 一夫一妻制或者单一配偶制 In today's context when we say, are you monogamous meaning are you only with one person, or are you seem someone on the side. And then with uni, there are so many words with uni, think of if you work for certain company or you are a student, then you probably need to wear uniform. If you think about it uniform, one form, everyone looks the same, wearing the same clothes. And the other word you see very often these days, is this the word unicorn, unicorn, uni means the one, corn use to mean horn. It's a mythical animal, but lately we see a lot of unicorns in business world. 独角兽公司，这是风投的一个术语，估值超过十亿美元的创业公司 A unicorn is a start-up company valued at over 1 billion dollars. Many of these unicorns you probably have heard of like Uber or airbnb and Chinese companies like Xiaomi or Didi, though unicorns. The other commonly seen uni is unisex, if you buy a sweater that says unisex, that means it can be worn by men and women. We also see unisex bathroom in some bars or restaurants. Now let's look at some of the idioms with the word "one". First of all, to describe someone who is very unique, you can say one of a kind, one of a kind, a very different from other people. You are one of a kind. If something goes back to the original stage, we can say, back to square one. Think of the board game you played when you were little, you start at square one, that's why the expression back to square one means everything starts from the beginning. For instance, my application was rejected, back to square one again. The last expression we are going to look at today is one of those things. One of those things, we use the word one of those things to talk about things that were happening in life that you don't want them to happen but they happen anyway. It's a little bit like 人生不如意事常八九，when bad things happen, we shrug and we say, well, what you are gonna do, it's just one of those things. Again we play that game we try to put one of a kind, back to square one, and one of those things into one story. Can you do that? I would say, even though I think I'm one of a kind, I still got rejected, now it's back to square one again. Well, it's just one of those things. If you know more stories and expressions and fun facts about other numbers, tune in for the following episodes. A little homework for you to do, try to make your own mini story with the expressions we have learned today. If you like my show, don't forget to follow and subscribe and feel free to share my program with your friends. I will see you next time, bye.

更多英语资讯，获取节目完整文本，请关注微信公众号：璐璐的英文小酒馆。每天大量英语干货更新！