Hi everyone:
First of all, I'd like to congratulate you for the gorgeous queues you did last Thursday.
Second, it's my duty to inform you of the importance and significance of forming queues in England. To do so, nothing better than George Mikes' words from his book How to Be an Alien. I highly recommed this reading.
Some parts of the chapter have been skipped. And if you go to 'comments' you'll find a vocabulary exercise (I'm sorry that it's so primitive, but I don't have a web space right now and I can't create more sophisticated exercises).
I hope you enjoy it!
THE NATIONAL PASSION
On the Continent, if people are waiting at a bus stop they loiter around in a seemingly vague fashion. […] An English man, even if he is alone, forms and orderly queue of one.
[…]
At weekends an Englishman queues up at the bus stop, travels out to Richmond, queues up for a boat, then queues up for tea, then queues up for ice cream, then joins a few more odd queues just for the sake of the fun of it, then queues up at the bus stop and has the time of his life.
Many English families spend lovely evenings at home just by queueing up for a few hours, and the parents are very sad when the children leave them and queue up for going to bed.
3 comments:
VOCABULARY EXERCISE
Match the following words and expressions to their meanings
WORDS/EXPRESSIONS
1. otherwise
2. rather
3. shy
4. deny
5. loiter around
6. seemingly
7. fashion
8. odd
9. for the sake of
10.to have the time of your life
MEANINGS
a. for the benefit of
b. quite
c. strange
d. apparently
e. on the contrary
f. to have a lot of fun
g.nervous, not confident, embarrassed
h. way
i. say 'no'
j. stand or wait with no special order
1. otherwise - e. on the contrary
2. rather - d. apparently
3. shy - g. nervous, not confident
4. deny - i.say 'no'
5. loiter around - to have a lot of fun
6. seemengly - quite
7. fashion - way
8. odd - stand or wait with no especial order
9. for the shake of - e. on the contrary
10. to have the time of your life -
I don't know
Hi anonymous:
There are some ways to check if your solution works.
One is just using the dictionary (I bet you haven't :] ).
Other method is matching words with the same category, e.g. verb to verb, adjective to adjective... the problem with this is that you have to know word categories very well and not everybody is really good at language description (which may help, but it's not a matter of high priority in second language learning).
A third way to check if your solution works would be substition.
Let's see 'odd' for example. According to you, it means 'stand or wait with no special order'.
The sentence in the text is:
"An Englishman [...] then joins a few more ODD queues"
What happens if we replace 'ODD' by 'stand with no special order'? Does the sentence make sense?
--> "An Englishman [...] then joins a few more STAND WITH NO SPECIAL ORDER queues?"
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