The blog that should have been posted last week and I forgot to!

Week 18^th – 20^th March

Hi everybody!

Well, after these hectic (frenetic) weeks racing towards the CAE test, it seems to me we can take it a bit easier. I don’t mean, Gabi, who now faces the countdown towards his own FCE test!

By the way, Daniel, we would like to hear from you! How did you get on with your test? Everybody here thinks that you passed it with flying colours (you had great success) and… so do I!

As mentioned above, Tuesday was a bit more relaxed, although Eduardo felt rather stressed because he’s taking in his university exams at the moment! We also think you’ll pass them. Don’t worry!

We checked exercises that had fallen into oblivion (we forgot about); I feel rather poetic today; it may be the spring.

 We checked the reading paper from Test 1.

The reading had these headings, ‘Orchestra on Tour’, ‘Maser of the Deep’, ‘When E-mail Becomes E-nough’ and ‘My Children don’t Go to School’.

Don’t forget to:

·         Read the instructions and questions.

·         Read through the text quickly to get a general idea of what it’s about and how it’s organised.

·         Underline the key words in each question and find the parts of the text where these ideas are discussed.

·         The words used in the questions are unlikely to appear in the text. Look for parts of the text containing related ideas and vocabulary. Highlight names and key words in the text.

·         Read carefully the parts of the text where the answer is likely to be found.

·         Note: the text contains information you will not need.

After that, we checked different exercises on grammar related to distancing (using seem, appear and passive constructions) and past habits (would, used to) or states (used to).

We also checked vocabulary related to prefixes, suffixes, idioms and phrasal verbs. (For these parts you can consult the blog entries for February)

Besides, we corrected an exercise on nouns from phrasal verbs.

Have you ever had a break-in (burglary)? I hope not. Fingers crossed!

Last time we had a pic-nick there was such a heavy downpour (rainfall) that we had to ran for shelter!

Many bands make a comeback (an attempt to become popular again) just because they have run out of money!

It seems that in the last years there’s been an outbreak (epidemic) of diseases that we thought had been eradicated.

Eventually, we started listening to a song called “An  Lady of a Certain Age’ by Divine Comedy.

I find it quite interesting, so I would like to go though it because it has quite a few metaphors. It’s more to it than the shallow (superficial) fact of the lady taking away (subtracting, decreasing) years from her real age!

Good Luck for your CAE Speaking test!

Week 4^th – 6^th

Hi!

I see you’ve taken to (develop a liking for) the “use of English” paper of the CAE exam!

We did another one of this kind of exercises.

We have a new classmate: welcome Gabi! We hope not to frighten you with the speed of the lessons. We are in a bit of a hurry because it’s the countdown for Daniel’s test!

Apart from that, we did a listening focus on “Time and Technology”

·         The speaker mentioned:

·         The negative effect of remote controls.

·         TV when he was a child.

·         TV in Iceland in 70s and 80s.

·         A technological meltdown.

·         The new heroes.

And we also listened to some people being asked in the street questions related to technology.

We finished the week focused on the “Speaking” part of the exam.

We tried to rehearse the interview for Daniel’s sake. But I don’t think he really needed because he has worked very hard and has watched all the video recording of this part of the CAE test.

We wish you the best of luck! Let us know how you got on!

 http://www.examenglish.com/CAE/index.php

http://www.examenglish.com/CAE/cae_speaking.html

Listening, Use of English and Picture description

Week 25^th – 27^th

We indeed needed the energy!

This week we did a listening:

Part 1: a woman who works as a tour guide talked about her work.

Part 2: a radio announcement about two events happening later today.

Part 3: a woman who works as a casting director in the film industry is interviewed.

Part 4: five short extracts in which various people talk about holidays where they                     

          studied as a group.

We also did another “Use of English” test paper.

By now you already know that it consists of five parts:

Part 1- Multiple - choice text

Part 2- Gapped- text

Part 3- Word building

Part 4- Homonyms

Part 5- Rewriting

And we started comparing and describing pictures for the Speaking part.

Chus had the pictures of two different boats.

Daniel had the pictures of two different masks

And Eduardo had two women feeding the birds in different places.