A Tiny Apartment

Apartments in Hong Kong are small and expensive. Gary Chang, an architect, decided to design a 344 square feet apartment to be able to change into 24 different designs, all by just sliding panels and walls. He calls this the "Domestic Transformer."  This is the video we watched in our class. Please watch it again to get more details.



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Education: The Intelligence Test.

These are the activities related to the video about the IQ test carried out in 1932 and the present days in Scotland.
You also have a True/False activity about different educational systems in the world.

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Comparatives and superlatives

In this pdf document, you can see how comparatives and superlatives are used in English.  Please, study it since the explanation offered in the textbook is very vague.

To download the document, click here.

Advice on Job Interviews

A job interview is usually seen as a hard, even traumatic experience, but mastering the art of the job interview isn't as hard as you might think.

In this video, oration and career experts share some advece for job interviews. The lessons given aren't your "run-of-the-mill" interview suggestions; these tips focuses on both verbal and non-verbal communication techniques to achieve your dream job.

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Concessive clauses

Concessive clauses -also known as clauses of contrast- are subordinate clauses that are used to express the opposite of the main clause. The main connectors expressing this meaning are:

- Although
- Even though
- Despite
- In spite of

To find out more, Click here

Reported Speech

There are two ways of reproducing people's words: direct speech and indirect (or reported) speech.

- When we use direct speech, we reproduce the exact words that somebody previously said.

- When we use indirect speech, we change the perspective trying to keep the basic meaning.  There are some changes that need to be done.  For further information about indirect (reported speech), Click here.


Do these activities to practise with reported speech.  Click here

Relative Clauses

A relative clause gives more information about someone or something referred to in a main clause.

There are two kinds of relative clauses:

- Defining relative clauses: used to specify which person o thing we mean, or which type of person or thing we mean.
e.g. The couple who live next to us have ten grandchildren.

- Non-defining relative clauses: used to add extra information about a noun, but this information is not necessary to explain which person or thing we mean.
e.g.  Valerie Polkoff, who has died aged 90, escaped from Russia in 1917.

For further information, Click here


For activities about relative clauses, Click here

  

Shakespeare's World

Willam Shakespeare was born and died on April 23rd. To honor his memory and what it involves in English literature and culture, I suggest you to do this activities at home.

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Animals

These are two videos related to the topic we are dealing with: Animals. Please, watch them to have some extra practice. They are the trailer for "Project Nim" and the other the trailer for "Rise of the Planet of the Apes".
To practice, try to describe them (either by speaking with a partner or writing it by yourself) and find things they have in common and things that make them different. Which of the films do you think is most interesting?

Project Nim

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Quantifiers

Here you have two documents to review quantifiers. Click here to get some general information about them. For some extra activities that we will check in our class, click here.

Quiz: how is Easter celebrated around the world?

Here is a quiz to learn some things about Easter. Do it if you can. I will publish the answer key next week.

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To check the answers, Click here

Reading on holidays

Easter Holidays are here and we will be back on April 8th. During these days, I advise you to take a book you like (one in English, of course) and try to enjoy it as you learn new words. Obviously, it is better to read while you listen because, in that way, you can improve two skills instead of only one.
If you are not into whole books and you prefer magazines, you can borrow either Speak Up (with CD-rom)or Think In English (with CD) from the library. Check the list that you have on the "library's" door and fill in a form in conserjeria. They are very interesting, too.

Enjoy reading these holidays!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Some information about the origin of St. Patrick's celebrations in Ireland.

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Physical Descriptions

This worksheet will help you review some useful vocabulary we tipically use to describe people. 

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Dear Mr. President

Here is the song we worked with when we dealt with politics in class. I hope you can practice you're pronunciation as you sing along!

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The History of English in 10 minutes.

This is an interesting video that I found on YouTube as I was doing a little research. It is the explanation of the evolution of the English Language with the different contributions from other languages and cultures along history. The narrator speaks a little fast, but you will understand many things with the help of the pictures and the words they write.
I hope you like it as much as I do!

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Politics: 10 strategies of manipulation, by Noam Chomsky.

This is an article written by Noam Chomsky on how media can manipulate people for political purposes. Renowned critic and always MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, one of the classic voices of  intellectual dissent in the last decade, has compiled a list of the ten most common and effective strategies resorted to by the agendas “hidden” to establish a manipulation of the population through the media. Historically the media have proven highly efficient to mold public opinion. Thanks to the media paraphernalia and propaganda, have been created or destroyed social movements, justified wars, tempered financial crisis, spurred on some other ideological currents, and even given the phenomenon of media as producers of reality within the collective psyche. But how to detect the most common strategies for understanding these psychosocial tools which, surely, we participate? Fortunately Chomsky has been given the task of synthesizing and expose these practices, some more obvious and more sophisticated, but apparently all equally effective and, from a certain point of view, demeaning. Encourage stupidity, promote a sense of guilt, promote distraction, or construct artificial problems and then magically, solve them, are just some of these tactics.

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Car Stories

This worksheet will help you with the vocabulary related to cars and road trips. Read it and learn the vocabulary included here.

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