Extra Practice for Unit 1

Dear students,

I don't intend to overwhelm you at all, but as you are asking me for more materials for you to practise, there you go, a set of worksheets on Unit 1. So now, you don't have an excuse...

What's more, I promise I'll commit myself to uploading an extra practice set of worksheets for every unit. But, I want you to keep your end of the bargain and work hard.

See you around!


Worksheets:
Reading: Worksheet, Answer-key.
Listening: Worksheet, Audio1, Audio2, Answer-key, Tapescript.
Grammar: Worksheet, Answer-key, Worksheet2, Answer-key2.
Vocabulary:  Worksheet1, Answer-key1, Worksheet2, Answer-key2.
Writing:  Worksheet1, Answer-key1, Worksheet2.

Halloween and other festivals

Apart from Halloween, English-speaking countries also observe some other national festivals, among which I would like to tell you some lines about the below described. During this year we will be dealing with them all more in depth, in addition to others that are not mentioned in this post... but just take this as an advance.

Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. Independence Day is commonly associated with fireworks, parades, barbecues, carnivals, fairs, picnics, concerts, baseball games, family reunions, and political speeches and ceremonies, in addition to various other public and private events celebrating the history, government, and traditions of the United States. Independence Day is the National Day of the United States.

Bonfire Night or Firework Night, is an annual commemoration observed on 5 November, primarily in Great Britain, and especially in England where it is very deeply rooted. People commemorate Guy Fawkes’s failure to blow up the English Parliament in 1605 by burning effigies of Fawkes in bonfires and having fireworks displays. Children usually ask adults for ‘a penny for the guy’ which they set on fire in bonfire get-togethers.

Last, but not least, Thanksgiving Day is another US communal celebration marked as a sense of gratitude that people feel for all the good things in life. This is done by offering prayers, gifting your near and dear ones. The fourth Thursday in the month of November is marked for the yearly celebration. American families celebrate Thanksgiving by family reunion and feasting (they have a special meal based on roast turkey and pumpkin pie), parades and football matches.

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A Guide to PCSE English

The main objective of Post-compulsory Secondary Education (Bachillerato) in the subject matter of English is for the students to take advantage of all the grammatical contents that they were assimilating during the previous four-year Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO). Now it is not simply enough, however, to "fill in the gaps," "put the words in order" or "understand" texts  by means of matching sentences or just say "true or false". The students will need to go much deeper in what they have learnt so far, and make good use of their knowledge in order to produce texts, get along in a given conversation and understand texts which have not been seen in class. 

In order for the assimilation of information to turn out effective, the students must:

1) Write down all the vocabulary seen in class, homework or online practice (blog, twitter, etc.).

2) Develop their writing competence through sentences, paragraphs and essays.

3) Read all the texts in every unit and also those texts proposed by your teacher as homework, and practise reading comprehension throughout four different types of questions:

• True or False and sentence justification.
• Complete sentences using given words from a text.
• Identify synonyms or similar expressions in a text.
• Answer questions consulting the text without copying the exact words from the text.

4) Know how to distinguish the important thing from the secondary one in conversation recorded in English.

5) Be able to participate efficiently in class by :

•  Answering questions posed by your teacher.
• Giving brief opinions or joining in a class debate.
• Contributing examples to  grammatical structures or semantic groups seen in class.
• Refuting ideas proposed by other students (expressing disagreement) and argue their own opinions.

For all of the above, a set of guided activities will be ready for the students to willingly develop those aptitudes (reading, writing, listening, speaking) or contents (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, sentence making, question making and so on) needed.  
 

Halloween... revised

Ancient Origins of Halloween

Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honour Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practised today on Halloween.
On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honour of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III (731–741) later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the Church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honour the dead. It is widely believed today that the Church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English ''Alholowmesse'' meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Hallowe'en.

 

Halloween Comes to America

Celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups as well as the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbours would share stories of the dead, tell each other's fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland's potato famine of 1846, helped to popularise the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today's "trick-or-treat" tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.

In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighbourly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything "frightening" or "grotesque" out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.
By the 1920s  and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centred holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the 1950s baby boom, parties moved from town civic centres into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighbourhood children with small treats. A new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday only after Christmas.

 

Today's Halloween Traditions

The American Halloween tradition of "trick-or-treating" probably dates back to the early All Souls' Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called "soul cakes" in return for their promise to pray for the family's dead relatives. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the Church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as "going a-souling" was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighbourhood and be given ale, food, and money.

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognised by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

 

Halloween Superstitions

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world. Today's Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into cats. We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred; it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe. And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today's trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burnt to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl's future husband. (In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut that burnt away symbolised a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands' initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands' faces. Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.
Of course, whether we are asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the good will of the very same "spirits" whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.

Here I'm leaving a summary video for you. Enjoy it and have a happy, or maybe unhappy Halloween.

Present Simple vs Present Continuous

Hello students!

Last week we were talking about the differences between the Present Simple and the Present Continuous. We saw the main difference laid on the fact that the Present Simple is used for habits and daily routines whereas the Present Continuous is for things that are happening at the moment of speaking. But I also told you there were some other uses that I'm leaving for you in this post.

 Clic on the table to enlarge.
The Present Simple is used for:

(1) habits and daily routines:
I walk to school everyday; Tom always gets up early in the morning.
(2) permanent states and true facts:

We are Spanish; The sun rises in the east.
(3) future action set by a timetable or schedule:
The film starts at 7.25 pm.; The art exhibition closes on July 12.

The Present Continuous is used for:
(1) actions happening at the moment of speaking:
I'm walking to school now; She's having a shower at the moment.
(2) temporary actions:
We're learning French this year; They're building a new school here.
(3) arrangements for the near future:
I'm going to the cinema this evening; Anna's travelling to New Jersey next weekend.

Don't forget about stative verbs. These verbs are usually only used in the Present Simple, not in the continuous form. Examples of stative verbs are those denoting state (be, cost, mean, suit), possession (have, have got, own, possess, belong), senses (see, hear, feel, smell, taste), feelings (love, like, enjoy, hate, hope, want, regret, wish, prefer) and brain work (believe, think, understand, notice, realise, know).

For practice:

Exercise 1, Exercise 2, Exercise 3, Exercise 4



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