[MUSIC] English For Teaching Purposes. Expressing Cause and Effect. >> Well, first came an action. And then a reaction. But you can't switch around for your own satisfaction. Because that wouldn't make sense now, would it? What we do in class is identify what causes push phenomena into existence. Or we examine situations, data, phenomena and trace back their cause. Knowledge generation relies very heavily on this relation. But our concern here is the turns and bends of the language used to express cause and effect. On this video we will explore of the use conditional sentences and also of some linkers that are the classic encoders of cause and effect. Establishing a condition and its result is basically identifying a cause, real possible or imaginary and draw its real possible or a real effect. We will examine these very mysterious and extremely useful structures. Let's start with the real conditionals. The ones that predate an effect that is indeed possible. If you heat a block of ice with a blowtorch, it melts and becomes water. We know this to be true because we have verified that every time the condition is met, the result is the same. We could express the same idea using a first conditional. One that combines a present condition with a future outcome. If you heat a block of ice with a blowtorch, it will melt. When I was a young student we called this conditional future possible because it actually expresses a real, possible situation. Real conditionals express ideas that are also verifiable that we can use when, instead of if, to introduce the condition. If you want to emphasize the fact that the result has been verified so many times it can bet your life on it. You could use, whenever, or every time, or each time, instead of if. This is what you would get. Whenever you heat a block of ice with a blowtorch, it melts. And that will be it for real conditionals. If real conditionals express conditions that can be met, unreal conditionals do the opposite. Second conditionals, or present unreal conditionals, as they were called in the past, express a condition whose outcomes would have been verified in the present moment. Clearly now is already too late to make the now change. We formulate them by expressing the condition in the past simple, and the outcome in the conditional present. If you heated a block of ice with a blowtorch, it would melt. Perhaps we didn't use a blowtorch, or maybe we couldn't find that block of ice. The truth is, there's nothing we can do about it now. The same happens when you express conditions that should have been met in a much more remote past. So a more recent past had been changed. Yes, we're talking about third conditional, the conditional of regrets, the one we used to call past unreal. It combines the condition expressed in the past perfect whose effect should have been felt in the past. If you had heated the ice block with a blowtorch, it would have melted. Way too late to think about that now. The block of ice is hard as a rock and still as frozen as last year. You must be thinking, this is quite a lot of grammar for such a small point. It is, in fact. But lecturers quite often dwell on the hypothetical because they need to explore factors that could have changed the outcome of a process. Or that could change the result of an experiment, or a trial, or a model. The simplest way to express cause and effect though, is by using common expressions that link both parts. If you start by expressing the effect, you can introduce the cause using because or since. As a result, due to and owing to are used for expressions as well. Remember, you can combine different tenses for different effects. The block of ice melted because we heated it using a blowtorch. The block of ice will melt due to the heat emitted by the blowtorch. Now, if you wish to present the cause before the effect, you can use because of. So, hence, thus, or therefore. You'd then produce sentences that would look like the following. Because of the heat produced by the blowtorch, the block of ice melted. We heated an ice block with a blowtorch, so it melted. Since cause and effect is a matter of pure logic, the only thing you really need to make sure of is that the causes and effect are indeed causes or effects. Remember, as White stated in 2007, you can't just take the effect and make it the cause. See you next time. [MUSIC]