Wednesday, April 09, 2008

MORE HASTE, LESS SPEED




I had planned to do so many things in just one session that I nearly went crazy, more than usual.As the proverb above goes, things should be done in a thoughtful,gradual way, but I´m afraid this time I sped up more than usual ending awfully stressed and you too.Sorry.
Well, we checked some exercises in your grammars on page 90 and I went on to review the structure "have something done", also related to the passive voice and did activities 13 and 14. After that ,we focussed on vocabulary related to character.Books, page 84 ,a little more sophisticaded adjectives , simple and compound,with their synonyms, eg: warm-hearted, down-to-eath,seff-centered.... Some of these adjectives were made into abstract nouns by adding the suffixes -ity and ness: lively>liveliness, generous>generosity. We also saw how the stress shifted in the process and their pronunciation.
The following activity was a rather silly one called Blind Date on pages 85 and 86 ,where men and women ,hidden behind a screen,ask each other questions and according to the answers, they choose one of the contestants for a date. We went through a small reading, the questions and did two listenings: one during the context and the other after it with the couple giving totally opposed opinions about the experience.
Homework : You were asked to finish your grammar exercises on the passive voice and also do the glossary activities related to unit 9.I told you to skip the workbook vocabulary and only learn a few compound adjectives I wrote on the blackboard , so when you come across a statement you don´t know, don´t do it. This is to be checked on Wednesday 16th, because, as you know ,there´s no class next Monday.
Please, have a look at the information about the party the student of Italian are organising. , it´s going to be fun.
YOU CAN´T MISS IT

ITALIAN PARTY

Today´s photograph is the same shipwreck I showed you last time, the Thistlegorm . You can see some of the motorbikes that were being carried for the British troops in Africa during WWII. If I say it´s impressive, I´m not accurate . It´s a lot more than that because practically everything is lying on their original location . You can dive inside the vessel and get a clear idea of what life was like before the bombing feeling the drama the crew must have undergone.