Australia Network Study English Series 2 Episode 1 "Eye Testing"

Hello. I’m Margot Politis. Welcome to Study English, IELTS preparation, where we look at the skills you’ll need to write, read, speak and listen to formal, academic English.
In today’s episode, we’re talking about pronouns. We’ll also have a quick look at homonyms and then take some time to practise using suffixes.
But first, we’re going to watch a clip about people who suffer from eye problems. The people in this community live far from the city, so it’s hard for them to get medical treatment.

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They have no access to specialists at all, and they cannot travel because they are poor, and most of them have cataract and they are blind because of cataract, which is preventable.
The resources aren’t here really to take care of them. It would mean a major upheaval if they got to the stage where they couldn’t be taken care of here. They would have to leave their home, their friends, their family and go somewhere where they could be cared for, which is miles away in remote communities.
—

The professor is talking about the access of residents in the Moora community to eye specialists.
He talks about the residents by using the pronoun ‘they’.
Pronouns are words that can take the place of nouns. They’re words like ‘I, you, they, who or what’.
We can use pronouns in a number of different ways, and they take several different forms.
They can act as subjects, objects or possessives.
If we look at ‘they’, the subject form is ‘they’, the object form is ‘them’, the possessive form is ‘their’.
Listen to the professor talk about the residents.

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They have no access to specialists at all, and they cannot travel because they are poor, and most of them have cataract and they are blind because of cataract, which is preventable.
—

Here, ‘they’ is used as the subject of the sentence.
Did you notice that the subject and verb agree in number? They’re both plural.
The professor always says ‘they have’, or ‘they are’.
Let’s listen to the clip once more.

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Most of them have cataract and they are blind.
The resources aren’t here really to take care of them.
—

Both the speakers use the pronoun ‘them’ after the preposition ‘of’ – ‘most of them’, ‘take care of them’.
Let’s see how we can use ‘them’ with other prepositions.
We can say:
‘of them’,
‘to them’,
‘by them’,
‘for them’,
‘in them’,
‘on them’,
‘with them’,
or, ‘at them’.
Now listen for the possessive form of ‘they’ ‘their’.

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They would have to leave their home, their friends, their family and go somewhere where they could be cared for, which is miles away in remote communities.
—

Here, ‘their’ functions as a possessive adjective. It describes ownership.
‘Their’ is used to talk about things that belong to the eye patients.
The patients’ homes ‘their homes’. The patients’ friends ‘their friends’. The patients’ families ‘their families’.
So there are three forms pronouns take:
the subject form, like ‘they’,
the object form, ‘them’,
and the possessive form, ‘their’.
The word ‘their’ is a homonym.
Homonyms can be words that sound the same but have different meanings, like ‘their’ and ‘there’, /ðɛə/.
Julie is talking about ‘/ðɛə/ home, /ðɛə/ friends, /ðɛə/ family’.
Is that ‘their’ or ‘there’?