Reduced Infinitives, Synonyms, The world of Work and a lot of Work!

Week 13^th -15^th May

Hi! It’s been ages!

There’s an old British adage that says “No news is good news”, but I prefer to hear from you rather than not having news!

We had very good news indeed last week. Gabi restarted the lessons and he told us that he had passed his First Certificate Test “With flying colours!” (Successfully; with good marks).Well, first goal, achieved! Now let’s focus on CAE!

On the other hand, there was a bit of an annoying fact, his knee. We expect you get better soon and thanks for coming, even though you came in crutches! Be patient.

What did we do in the last weeks?

We worked on a “Use of English” paper with the following headings:

“Phobias”, “Stress”, “Turn a hobby into a business” and of course, gapped sentences and word transformations.

You can do this test again online if you wish to practise.

            http://www.flo-joe.co.uk/cae/students/tests/   Test 1

We tried to widen our vocabulary with synonyms or near synonyms expanding our thesaurus (a dictionary of synonyms). Can you think of synonyms of faith, skilled, persuade, to lie, tactics, carefully, annoying, very important, dangerous, scared?

Remember:

·         Little girls giggle when they think something is funny, with their hands in front of their mouths.

·         Little boys snigger, laugh unpleasantly, when they are laughing at someone who has done something they think is stupid.

·         To chuckle is a nice way of laughter.

·         You burst out laughing when you suddenly laugh very loudly.

·         When you laugh so much that it starts to hurt, you are in stitches.

And also:

·           If you really hate something, you loathe it or detest it.

·           Abhor is quite formal.

·           When you despise someone, you dislike them strongly because you have absolutely no respect for them.

Reduced infinitives.         

Don’t forget to use reduced infinitives so as to avoid repetition:

·         “Haven’t you done the washing up yet?” “No, I’m just going to.”

·         “Are you coming for a walk?” “No, I don’t want to.”

“To be” is not reduced to “to”.

·         She’s less moody than she used to be. She’s less moody than she used to.

·         I wasn’t as impressed as I expected to be. I wasn’t as impressed as I expected to

We also learnt vocabulary related to the world of work.

A challenging job tests your abilities and keeps you motivated. It can also be stressful at times; especially if you have to meet deadlines and you feel under pressure. On the other hand, a monotonous, repetitive, dull, tedious job isn’t rewarding at all. You just feel bored! There are highly demanding (they require a big effort) jobs that take up most of your time and don’t allow you to have a work-life balance and that ends up in working overtime and not seeing your family.

We went through the list of questions related to job interviews, ‘Building your answers’

They are split into several sections: motivation, interpersonal skills, decision-making and creative or practical?

We did an exercise that consisted of finding a suitable job for the possible candidate. Each student had a list of three or four jobs. They had to make questions related to skills, abilities or experience that matched the requirements of those jobs. After the job interview, they had to offer the job which better fitted the candidate’s skills.

           

It seems that Gabi is going to start working as a conference organizer, although he isn’t  very organised. (A white lie at the interview!)

And Chus will be a shop manager. She seems to be better organised!

We ended the week listening to a poem called ‘Hints on English Pronunciation’

It just was an excuse to practise the pronunciation of the group “ought”

Do you remember how to pronounce tough, bought, cough, dough, thorough, plough, enough, through?

I’ll check it this evening! See you!