13.

5 Changing weather
Describing weather changes.

[00:00:02] The weather can change season to season, day to day and from morning, to
afternoon, to evening.

[00:00:07] *One thing to mention here is the “times of day”. This isn’t related to weather, it’s
how dark or sunny it is because of the predictable position of the sun. The sun ‘rises’ in the
morning, that’s when it first becomes visible. Before it rises, it’s ‘dark out’. After it rises, we can
say “it’s light out”. But the sun does eventually go away at night! That’s when the sun ‘sets’ and
it becomes dark again!*

[00:00:30] Anyways, the most common way to describe all of these weather changes is to say
“It’s getting … out”, the … is where you put your adjective. Put your adjective in the comparative
form if you want to make a comparison! The “comparative form” of an adjective is usually just
adding an -er at the end of it. But if you just want to describe how the weather is in that
moment, then don’t change the adjective at all. Like these examples.

[00:00:57] “It’s getting warmER out. Before it was quite chilly!”

[00:01:01] “When I woke up it was pretty sunny, but this afternoon it’s really getting cloudy!”

[00:01:05] Past and future weather.

[00:01:06] We mostly talk about the weather in the present tense, but we also describe previous
weather and upcoming weather. For the past, “it’s” becomes “it was”.

[00:01:15] It’s sunny today. It WAS sunny yesterday.

[00:01:19] It’s freezing cold this winter. It WAS freezing cold last winter.

[00:01:23] It’s cloudy this morning. It was cloudy yesterday morning.

[00:01:27] To talk about future weather, use “going to be” or the future simple using “will be +
an adjective” or “will be + a verb”.

[00:01:35] It’s freezing today.

[00:01:36] It’s going to be freezing tomorrow, it will be freezing tomorrow

[00:01:40] It’s raining right now. It’s going to rain later, it will rain later.

[00:01:44] Ask questions about the weather.

[00:01:46] So you know all the ways we describe weather, but how to ask someone about it?
When talking about weather, using “it’s” and then a description is the most popular way. And to
turn this into a question we just change the order of the subject and verb.

[00:02:01] In “it’s” you might not have noticed the subject because it’s contracted, shortened.
What we really have is “it is”. “It” is the subject and “is” is the verb, this is one conjugation of
the verb “to be”. So to make a question, we just put “is” first and then “it” followed by the thing
we’re asking about. Turn the following statements into questions.

[00:02:21] ‘It’s raining’ becomes.

[00:02:22] ‘Is it raining?’

[00:02:26] ‘There will be a blizzard’ becomes.

[00:02:31] “Will there be a blizzard? So again, we just change the order of the subject and verb.
“There” is our subject and “will” is our verb here. ‘Be” still comes after the subject.

[00:02:42] ‘It’s going to be cloudy and windy tomorrow’ becomes.

[00:02:48] ‘Is it going to be cloudy and windy tomorrow?’

[00:02:51] But when talking about climate, we tend to talk about things that happen habitually
and regularly, things that are characteristic of a region and don’t change much. They’re
expected. So to ask questions in these situations we often don’t use the verb “to be” in our
questions.

[00:03:06] Most weather verbs are like this, like: to rain, to blizzard, to snow, to flood, to
thunder, to lightening. Thankfully, they are very easy to turn into questions. For the present
tense, just put “does” in front of the verb if the subject is he, she and it.

[00:03:22] Use the question word “do” if the subject is I, we, you, they. When talking about
weather, the subject will almost always be “it”. And for the past simple tense, always use ‘did’.

[00:03:34] After the question words ‘do, does and did’, don’t conjugate the verb! Leave it in its
infinitive form, also called the base form. That’s the verb’s natural state.

[00:03:44] I’m going to give you some statements with these verbs and I want you to change
them into questions.

[00:03:49] ‘It rains a lot in spring’ becomes.

[00:03:55] ‘Does it rain a lot in spring?’. So you can see that I didn’t conjugate the verb “rain” to
agree with the subject. “To rain” is the base form and we always use the base form after the
question words “do, does and did”.

[00:04:07] ‘It snows and hails a lot where you come from’ becomes.
[00:04:13] ‘Does it snow and hail a lot where you come from?’

[00:04:15] ‘They like playing in the snow’ becomes.

[00:04:20] ‘Do they like playing in the snow?’

[00:04:22] ‘There is a severe drought in California’ becomes.

[00:04:28] ‘Is there a severe drought in California?’ Here we change the order of the verb and
subject again, because “is” comes from the verb ‘to be’, and with this verb we just change the
order! This is called ‘inversion’.

[00:04:39]