Clinton on second leg of European tour

legsIt’s been a busy weekend for lots of people. President Obama was busy accepting his Nobel Prize, I was busy looking for interesting vocabulary in the news, and Hilary Clinton was busy travelling around Europe. This article on the BBC website has an good summary of her tour.

There’s some useful vocabulary in the article, too, starting in the first paragraph:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has arrived in the UK on the second leg of a five-day tour of Europe.

People only have two legs, but tours can have more. In this situation, a ‘leg‘ just means a ‘stage’ or ‘part’ of the tour.

In the second paragraph, the author mentions that the war in Afghanistan and Iran’s nuclear programme are going to be ‘high on the agenda‘. An ‘agenda‘ is a list of topics to be discussed in a meeting and when we say a topic is ‘high on the agenda‘ we mean it is important and will probably be discussed at the beginning of the meeting.

The third paragraph contains some interesting vocabulary, too. A historic ‘pact‘ is mentioned, meaning a historic agreement or promise.

There is a great expression in this paragraph slightly later in the article:

She is expected to press the Russian leader for a strong commitment for tough new sanctions on Tehran.

When we ‘press‘ a person for commitment we try to persuade him or her to commit to something by putting him or her under pressure.

What did you do this weekend?

Today’s image is by Agata K.