Hi there,
CAE students – click here and here
FCE students – click here and here
Would you like to receive more exercises like these? Follow myenglishexam on twitter. If you want to learn what else you can do to follow flo-joe, click here.
Check out this nice article from The Guardian. This is how it starts:
The power of tweets
What have Jan Moir, AA Gill and Jimmy Carr got in common? They have all provoked storms of protest on microblogging website Twitter. But is this a new age of democracy, or a danger to free speech?
You may click here to go to the full article.
What is your answer to the question above? Is Twitter a symbol for democracy, or is it a way to diss someone you don’t like and/or do not agree with?
Hi there,
So, what happened to all those people who missed the class today? We did a whole bunch of things today.
Homework:
- Coursebook: page 118 & 119
- Coursebook: page 121
- Coursebook: page 122 & 123 (Grammar 2 – Introductory IT)
Enjoy the holiday!
Hello there,
I’ve learned about this video from Roberta, and since she still hasn’t posted it here, I’ll do so. 
I believe this is a clear demonstration of what can be accomplished through the use of social media tools we have available on the Internet these days. The event has been called a flash mob, and more than 20.000 people participated in the dance. Watch it till the end. It’s definitely worthwhile!
Hello guys,
What happened to most of you? I know it’s test week and all that, but you can’t simply vanish like that!
Anyway, the lesson today was fairly different from our usual lessons, huh?! I guess I could talk some people into joining twitter.
If you don’t know what twitter is, this video will help you:
And after you’ve created your twitter account, you’ll need to find people to follow. Searching in twitter is also explained here:
As we had some responses even from people in Scotland, we didn’t really do much (other than this).
Your homework for our next lesson is the same as it was for today. Make sure you check the previous post!
Oh, and make sure you add me as your friend on Twitter. My username there is hoprea. Look for Splendid Speaking as well.
Dear students,
Yesterday we corrected the homework and worked with an extra handout (given to you in class).
Homework:
- Extra handout – Exercise 3
- Coursebook – Page 79
- CD-ROM – Unit 6 (in case you haven’t done units 1 -5, do them!)
So,
If you think the best way to travel ecologically is by bike, think again.
Did you like it? Unfortunately, it’s not for sale. 
Check out their website clicking here.
Five mysteries of the universe
Michael Brooks
The Guardian, Monday 2 February 2009
Dark matter ring in galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17. Some 96% of the universe is dark energy or dark matter. Photograph: Johns Hopkins University/Esa/Nasa
Even today, there are scientific phenomena that defy explanation. If history is anything to go by, resolving these anomalies could lead to a great leap forward, so what are the greatest mysteries, and what scientific revolutions might they bring?
1 The missing universe
Everything in the universe is either mass or energy, but there’s not enough of either. Scientists think 96% of the cosmos is missing. They have come up with names for the missing stuff – “dark energy” and “dark matter” – but that doesn’t really tell us anything about them. And it’s not as if they’re not important: dark energy is continually creating new swaths of space and time, while dark matter appears to be holding all the galaxies together. No wonder cosmologists are searching for clues to their whereabouts.
2 Life
I know you think you’re more than a sack of molecules, but why? Next time you see a tree, ask yourself why that is alive when your wooden dining table is not. The phenomenon we call life is something that biologists have almost given up trying to define – instead they’re investigating ways to make different combinations of molecules come alive. Bizarrely, the best hope is similar in chemical terms to laundry detergent.
3 Death
Here’s the flip side: in biology, things eventually die, but there’s no good explanation for it. There are hints that switching genes on and off controls ageing, but if our theory is right, those switches shouldn’t have survived natural selection. Then there’s the argument that an accumulation of faults does us in. However, there are plenty of whales and turtles who seem to age ridiculously slowly – if at all. Of course, if we can work out why, that could be great news for future humans (if not for the planet).
4 Sex
Charles Darwin might have fathered 10 children, but he couldn’t understand why almost everything in biology uses sexual reproduction rather than asexual cloning – sex is a highly inefficient way to reproduce. We still don’t know the answer. The suggestion that sex’s gene shuffling makes us more able to deal with changing environments seems plausible, but the evidence is scarce. At the moment, sex only seems to exist to give males some role in life.
5 Free will
If you want to keep your sanity, look away now. Neuroscientists are almost convinced that free will is an illusion. Their experiments show that our brains allow us to think we are controlling our bodies, but our movements begin before we make a conscious decision to move. Some researchers have already been approached to testify in court that the defendant is not to blame for anything they did. A scary legal future awaits.
• Michael Brooks is a consultant for New Scientist and the author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, published by Profile on Thursday
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/02/science-mysteries
This is how you are going to post things on the blog.
And you may still write after the video.
Hello there students,
We did a lot of things in class today, huh?! Lots of songs, videos, and we also studied a bit (I guess).
As we couldn’t calculate our carbon footprint in class, here goes a nice link for you to do it at home. Oh, it’s in Portuguese, but anyway… CARBON FOOTPRINT
And here’s the video we watched today: Grocery Store Wars
Homework:
- Coursebook: page 117 (Grammar 1)
- Maximiser: Finish unit 9 (in case you still haven’t done that)
- CD-ROM: All units from 1 – 9 (in case you haven’t done it)
Have a great weekend!
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