| Back to Back Issues Page |
 |
|
Issue #039 -- Week 01/02/15-07/02/15 February 10, 2015 |
Hello,Greetings and General InformationA warm welcome to our new subscribers! I wish you will find My English Club fun and instructive and I look forward to welcome you as a new valued member soon. Read, learn and communicate around the world! Please feel free to contribute to these pages when you have a minute. They are meant to be a platform for exchanging ideas, stories and opinions - an ideal medium for practicing your English, which should be used to the full. Together, let's bring it alive, let's make it the welcoming community you wished for, when you joined. A new and valuable addition to the website is the comments feature that can facilitate your communication 24/7 from now on. Your messages will be monitored and accepted or denied, depending on the content and the attitude, but NOT on the grammar, spelling and overall correctness of your input. I have offered the service of correcting messages retrospectively, as a constructive contribution to your continuous improvement. Do participate and make this place feel like a community. You and your friends can always subscribe individually through the form on My English Club. If anybody mentions to you that they are interested in receiving it, please tell them this - many thanks. Also, they can read the previous issues on Back Issues for English Corner E-zine. Month 6 ~ Lesson 23We started studying three subjects back in September 2014: pronunciation and grammar for improving your communication skills, as well as website design and development, for applying your English in practice once you get skilful in English and website building. Once we covered the basics of pronunciation, we started a new course in reading. You can find our past lessons as follows: Pronunciation: Reading ~ Understanding Negative FactsReading Skills for TOEFL [6] Very similarly to the last reading skill we looked at, understanding negative facts, you will be asked to find facts from your reading passage, but this time you will have to find information that is i) not stated, or ii) not mentioned, or iii)not true in the passage. This is easy again, as the question means that out of 4 answers, only three are stated, or ii) mentioned, or iii)true, therefore the correct answer will be the one that’s none of the above. You should also note that there are only TWO kinds of questions: a) the one that asks you to find facts that are not true or facts that are not stated/mentioned in the passage. Let’s see an example: ”Moonbows” “Many people are quite familiar with rainbows, but few are as familiar with moonbows. Rainbows are caused by sunlight hitting raindrops and bouncing back. You can see a rainbow when the Sun is low in the sky behind you and it is raining ahead of you. Light from the Sun reflects off the inside surfaces of raindrops and is bent as it travels through them. It appears as a band of colors because each of the colors in sunlight is bent to a different angle. Moonbows are far less common than are rainbows, but they are formed in much the same way. They require a very specific set of circumstances to occur. When they do occur, they occur just after a full Moon, a Moon at its brightest, has risen in the east and just after the Sun has set in the west, and it must also be raining in the west. In this situation, a moonbow may be visible to you if you are facing west and if the Moon is behind you. Light from the bright Moon reflects off the inside surfaces of the raindrops in the west and bends the colors to create a moonbow.” Question 1: According to paragraph 1, it is
NOT true that you can see a rainbow when The question asks you to determine which of the answers is NOT true according to the information in paragraph 1, which means that three of the answers are true according to the first paragraph and one is not true. It is stated in the first paragraph that "you can see a rainbow when the Sun is… behind you". This means that it is NOT true that you can see a rainbow when "the Sun is in front of you". To answer this question, you should select the second answer: B). Question 2: It is NOT indicated in paragraph 2 In paragraph 2 of the passage it is stated that "Moonbows … occur just after a full Moon… has risen in the east", which indicates where the Moon must be in the sky for a moonbow to occur in the first answer. The passage states that "moonbows… occur… just after the Sun has set in the west", which indicates at what time of day moonbows occur in the second answer. The passage states that a moonbow may be visible to you if you are facing west which indicates which direction you must be facing to see a moonbow in the third answer. The last option is the one that is NOT indicated in the passage and is therefore the correct answer here – D). What do you need to know, to succeed with questions testing negative facts? 1) How to identify the question: (According to paragraph X…: it is NOT stated/ NOT indicated/
NOT mentioned/ NOT discussed/ NOT true/ NOT indicated in paragraph X…; All of the following are true EXCEPT… 2) Where to find the answer: they are generally found in order in the passage, and the paragraph where the answer is found is generally indicated in the question; 3) How to answer: Grammar ~ Expressing Moods, Emotions and AttitudeIf we’re going to consider ways of splitting sentences into tone units any longer, we’re going to get into too much detail and I don’t think this interests any of you to that extent. Instead, I’m turning my attention onto something that is a pressing problem for my students nowadays and I’m sure many of the readers of this e-zine will find this aspect useful to know. I shall remind you of the classification of the “ingredients” of a communication into A) the concepts we are talking about, B) the type of information we impart in our communication, C) the mood, emotion or attitude we undertake when imparting that communication and D) meanings in connected discourse. Introduced these items in Issue 024 , which was published on 27th October 2014. We dealt with item D on that list ever since – we looked at meanings and sections of communication based on the meaning we want to put across to the reader/listener. Let’s work on item C for a while – the mood and emotion that accompanies our message and ways of expressing our feelings, because I realise that many times learners don’t even want to speak, because they don’t know how to express not only their ideas, but also their related feelings. You see, whereas the English language is not just a means of giving and receiving information. It is communication between people, i.e. it often expresses the emotions and attitudes of the speaker. Moreover, the speaker often uses the language to influence the attitudes and behaviour of the hearer, as we shall see in this section. This is not a big part of communicative grammar, and we’ll take it easily, step by step until we can look back and realise that we’ve explored all the avenues. So, let’s start. After this lengthy introduction, I shall only deal with the simplest form of expressing emotion – one that everybody knows and it doesn’t cost you any effort in glancing over it again, namely the simple interjections. These are words whose only function is to express emotion. Common English interjections are: Oh /oƱ/ = surprise; Examples of the above, in sentences: Oh, what a beautiful present! Now, there are other ways of giving emotions emphasis, but we shall look into these next time. Try to use these in your verbal communications in the meanwhile. Website Design ~ Monetizing Forum TopicsSo, we said that we were going to look at the Monetization Forums in this issue. Showing you how awesome our forums are is nothing, compared to actually using these forums! The following are only the titles of the posts on the FIRST OF 73 pages of titles in the monetization forum for DAY 4, which is the chapter we're finishing at the moment. I will not go into details about them - you can see how varied the topics are, but just imagine they have tens and hundreds of views and usually between a couple to a dozen answers, but some threads even have over 100 answers and in fact count as discussions. However many or few answers there are for each question, the fact is that nobody leaves our forums without resolving their problems. Can't get into AdWords That was the part of our forums about the introductory lesson on monetization (Day 4), dealing with the planning stage. There is a more in-depth lesson in (Day 10), which is concerned with the implementation of various monetization strategies. The forum for day 10 includes topics like those below, where you can find the number of answers (the first figure in brackets) and views for each question (the second figure in the same brackets). Monetization Day 10 - Forum Topics How To SELL - Wide open forum that discusses how to sell vs. PREselling. Includes general discussions on monetization (for specific discussions, see the forums immediately below). [682 / 6565] I personally, can't find the time to learn as much as I should from these forums right now, but they certainly give me the confidence that I'm in good hands, when it comes to finding solutions to these matters. All the people who contribute to these forums are like a big family, spread all over the world, and this is another unbeatable aspect of using the SBI system for my website. I could never find such camaraderie in any paid job! This Is It, Folks!I hope you find this information useful and not too confusing. Even though you're in the stage of building on it, have patience at this point in your learning and you'll be able to reap the fruit of your work later on, whichever aspect of our lessons you are concentrating on. Please feel free to comment and suggest your ideas by replying to this email - I look forward to hearing from you. If you wish to chat either with me or with other members worldwide, go to My English Club ! OK, I wish you all a great week ahead. Have fun, as always! My best wishes, Lucia da Vinci Founder of My English Club |
| Back to Back Issues Page |