6-minute vocabulary from BBC learning English.com.

Hello and welcome to 6-minute vocabulary. I'm Neil.

And I'm Catherine.

And today we're talking about hyphenation.

Hyphens. Those little signs like dashes that we use in writing to join two words together.

Yes, like in old fashioned. There's always a hyphen between old and fashioned.

So let's start with a clip from Brian. He's a news reporter and he's reporting from a high school about an election.

Think about this question while you're listening.

How does Brian describe the young people at the school?

Here's Brian.

I asked some 18-year-old students at this secondary school

how they're voting in this year's election.

They're all hard-working young people.

22 of them are undecided and are likely to make a last-minute decision.

But a sizeable group say today's politicians are not well respected

and their attitudes are out of date.

Back to the studio.

So we asked you, how does Brian describe the young people at the school?

And the answer is he says they are hard working.

That means they work hard. Now there are lots of compound adjectives like hardworking that we make with an adjective or

adverb like hard plus a present participle like working.

And we always write them with a hyphen, so hard hyphen working.

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