B2.2 Fri. the 20th and Sat. the 21st SUMMARY

A great summary by Hicham from the Saturday group. It couldn't be more complete if it had been done by me!!!

Hi mates, here you have my Saturday 22th February's class summary.

Foremost and before all else, I want to apologize to Kate about the low rate I had in the last test. I’m astonished about the low level I have shown; it’s true that I did the test in solely 30 minutes just before handing it  in to Kate at the beginning of the class in the cafeteria without having reviewed either the vocabulary or the grammar, but it’s not an excuse at all. I thought I had much better level, but to my surprise, I don't. Anyway, I’ll have it into account for the next test.

1.       In a first moment, we had an interesting exercise which was a mix of writing and speaking, the exercise consisted of writing news about the following topics and tell them aloud to all the class:

·         Conflicts / Violence.

·         Economic News.

·         Political news.

·         Crime.

·         Climate and ecology.

·         Human interests / Sensational news (By the way, Kate told that the translation to the English of “prensa rosa” isn’t “pink press” but “sensational press/yellow press/gossip press”).

2.       The following task was the vocabulary exercise B in page 44 about ordering sentences relateds with conflicts starting by the ones in bold. It was an intriguing one, because to order the sentences in the right way, we had to understand them all.

3.       Listening exercises A, B, C, and D in page 45 about 4 stories:

·         Industrial espionage.

·         Harassment at work.

·         Full body scanner at the airports.

·         Protest about a pig statue at the entrance of a village.

4.       Break.

5.       Speaking 5.A in page 45. There was 7 sentences  to debate, but the most discussed one were:

·         We should never negotiate with a terrorist or not.

·         Wars are a necessity evil or not.

6.       Vocabulary A, in page 46 matching the nouns in the box with their collocations and finding out which ones are both nouns & verbs and which ones are nouns only and what’s their verb.

7.       Reading in pages 46 and 47: “Hope Springs Eternal” and “The truth & reconciliation commission”. At the end of this section, Kate launched a debate about whether the South African transition is comparable to the Spanish one… Personally, I have my profound and deep doubts if they are comparable or not. Normally comparINGe things is not more than highlighting the similarities/resemblances and the differences/contrasts/divergences; The Spanish and the South African transitions aren’t comparable, they have different figures/characters and different plots. The people who suffered during the years before are different, the Spanish ones suffered because of they thought oppositely and had A different ideology to the regime’s, and in the South African ones suffered because of the desire  and greed of the invaders (Germany and England) who wanted to control the riches of the country. The only similarity between them is the suffering although there have been more rapes cases in South Africa.

Learnt vocabulary:

Eyesore (noun)

Global warming (noun)

Money laundering (noun).

House arrest (noun)

OVERTURN (a verdict) (verb)

Bailout (noun and verb).

Junk Bond (noun).

Overthrow (verb).

Make amends (phrasal verb).

Cold blooded (adj).

The writing is on the wall (Idiom).