Ever wondered why purple doesn’t appear on flags, or why there are always four strawberry flavoured yogurts in a packet of eight? I can’t explain the second question, but here’s a really interesting video that explains the reason why countries traditionally didn’t use purple on their national flags. The video is from After Skool Youtube channel. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.
Hi! Here’s a speaking activity for holidays and travel made by using Genially.
What do you do? or… What do you do for a living?
Here’s a little quiz on job occupations for Basic levels of English.
Think or thinking ? Have or having? When dealing with stative verbs, we basically mean those verbs that describe a state instead of an action, but this can be a tricky thing and sometimes a verb belongs to both categories depending on context. When can we use these verbs in the progressive form? Here are a few tips along with a quiz.
ADJECTIVES THAT GIVE INFORMATION ABOUT A NOUN (NOUN MODIFIERS)
We can give information about something by using adjectives.
These adjectives can come before a noun although they can also come after a verb. Here we are going to see them in front of a noun. (predicative position). Look at the boxes and after do the grammar activity.
We can use a lot of adjectives but in the English language we usually have a pattern of preference for which adjectives come first.
… But which one comes first? There is a general rule according to the type of information the adjective is giving.
| ARTICLE/QUANTIFIER/NUMBER | SIZE | SHAPE | COLOUR | NOUN |
| – | long | curly | dark | hair |
| Two | big | – | yellow | scarves |
Or…
| A/Q/N | OPINION | AGE | SIZE | SHAPE | COLOUR | ORIGIN | MATERIAL | NOUN |
| – | long | curly | dark | hair | ||||
| Two | big | – | yellow | scarves | ||||
| An | ugly | old | square | grey | British | concrete | block of flats | |
| A | lovely | new | big | round | white | Spanish | wooden | table |
the more adjectives we add, the more complicated the things gets. We might have to give very long descriptions which would look something like the box above. Luckily, we don’t usually use this in speech because our interlocutor might start yawning.
When learning a language we frequently translate from our own native tongue. This can be helpful on some occasions, but on many others it can lead us to make mistakes. One of the most typical mistakes made by Spanish speakers is to use Spanish structures like ‘Tengo veinte años’ instead of the English ‘to be _____ many years old’. Here’s a short grammar activity to give a little help with this common error. Hope it results useful.
