BBC: Heatwaves speed up ageing process-2

The next headline is about this. This is from Simax, an Australian science news site. Reported heat waves may accelerate aging. 

And that headline again, repeated heat waves may accelerate aging, and that is from Cymex.

Accelerate means to get faster. Here in the headline, it's talking about how heat waves make the process of aging get faster. 

We often use accelerate like this with processes or systems to talk about how they get faster. It can also talk about intensity. If the economy accelerates, then it improves. In the same way, if something like an illness accelerates, it can mean to get worse. 

It's also very common to use it to talk about vehicles, like cars, again, to mean get faster. The pedal that you press to make a car go faster is called the accelerator. 

You sometimes hear the opposite of accelerate, which is decelerate, and that means to get slower. 

Yes, now these words can be quite technical. In every speech, we're more likely to use speed up and slow down. 

We've had accelerate. Get faster or more intense. 

For example, as time went on, his illness accelerated. 

This is Learning English from the News, oru podcast about the news headlines. Today we're talking about a study that suggests that heat waves can speed up the aging process. 

The study suggested that manual workers, those are people who work with their hands, people living in rural areas, and those living in communities with less access to air conditioning are most at risk from heat waves. 

And that's what our next headline is about. This is from the Independent, a newspaper in the UK. The demographics at risk of ageing due to heat waves. 

And that headline again from the Independent: the demographics at risk of ageing due to heat waves. 

This story is about groups of people who are particularly at risk from heat. We're going to learn the noun demographic. 

Yes. A demographic is a group of people who share a particular characteristic. So things like age, gender, type of job, Social class. 

Here, it's referring to groups of people who may be particularly vulnerable to heat waves. 

Now this noun comes from demographics, the study of statistics about he human population. 

Demographic is often used in marketing and politics. A product or policy might be designed to appeal to or to support a paticular demographic. That's a particular group of people. For example, boy bands are often targeted at the teenage demographic. 

We've had demographic, a group of people who share a characteristic. 

For example, w hope our new product will allow us to appeal to a new demographic. 

That's it for this episode of Learning English from the News. We'll be back next week with another news story. 

Now, if you want to practice what you've learnt, go to our website, bbclearningenglish.com, to see more example sentences ans to try our free worksheets. 

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