Some students cheat in their exams, and teachers either know it or suspect it. Metacafé has a collection of school cheat videos that will make your life easier (or more complicated?). The most shocking, for me, was the Coca-cola cheat. Enjoy:
What do you think about this word? Is it one of the forbidden words in English like the f-word or the c-word?
One of the commonest toads in Catalonia is the natterjack. However, this year’s lack of abundant rain will make it difficult for this animal to reproduce. At home, my small colony of nattejarks have laid their eggs. This is a picture of a string of eggs laid on the 24th March. At that time, they were five days old and you can see a small layer of algae covering them.
Some four days ago, the little embryos left the eggs and now they’re fully grown miniature tadpoles. I will keep posting pictures of them to see how they grow. If you want to know a bit more about this interesting amphibian, visit the web site for the Societat Catalana d’ Herpetologia.
In the eventual case that more than one of you had chosen the same number of corrects verbs, I will assign a number to each of the winners and then select a random winner.
In order to make it as impartial as possible, I will use a random-number web site to choose the winner. If you want to know how it works, you can visit it yourselves.
… is the following game.
The game is entirely in English and it comes with 6 CD-roms. The game is not brilliant, but it’s always nice to have a look at how PC games were 10 years ago, so…
Who’s gonna be the winner?
According to the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999) the list of the top 10 verbs of the English language is:
Can you guess these three verbs? Send me your comments and see if you win this little competition. Oh, one clue: it’s not ‘to be’ nor ‘to have’ and they are all irregular verbs!
The BBC’s ‘bitesize’ offers revision for most subjects at different stages. Today, I would like to highlight their history articles.
Check them out, listen to them and read the scripts:
Past simple or present perfect? That’s a difficult situation in some sentences. In the introduction to unit 7 I gave you a list of words that can immdediately tell you if you need a past simple or a present perfect. They are the following:
| PAST SIMPLE |
PRESENT PERFECT |
| AGO (… 5 years ago = fa cinc anys) | FOR (… for two months = durant dues setmanes) |
| IN + time reference (… in August, in 2004, in winter) | SINCE (… since 2005 = des del 2005) |
| YESTERDAY (ahir) | YET (encara no) |
| LAST (… last week = la setmana passada) | JUST (tot just, acabar de) |
| ALREADY (ja) | |
| EVER? (algun cop?) | |
| 0 (cap paraula) |
However, as you learn more and more English, you might find examples of sentences that contradict this rule. Don’t worry. Languages are complex and full of exceptions.
Practice what you know with these activities: