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Hello, this is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I'm Neil.

And I'm Sam.

Predicting the future is not easy, but that's exactly the job of opinion posters.

Researchers who ask people questions to discover what they think about certain topics.

Often their aim is predicting which political party will win in an election

by asking members of the public how they intend to vote.

But predicting the future is never 100% accurate,

and opinion polls don't always get it right.

In 2016, few pollsters predicted a victory for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the US

presidential election.

And in the 2020 US elections, most polls predicted Trump

would lose to Joe Biden by a much larger amount than he actually did.

These mistakes, sometimes called misfires, when things do not work in the way intended,

have damaged the reputation of opinion pollsters.

In this programme, we'll be taking a look into the opinion polling industry.

And of course, learning some useful vocabulary as well.

But first, I have a question for you, Sam.

And it's about another time when the opinion polls got it wrong.

Few pollsters predicted that Britain would vote to leave the European Union

in the 2016 Brexit referendum, which in the end, it did.

...