WEEKLY PICKS - 3

This post offers you a selection of recommended free online exercises, games, videos and resources so that you can improve your English language skills while having fun! ENJOY!

📜 READING PICKS – Articles, blog posts, quizzes and more:

Article from BBC CAPITAL: The science of being charming, by Tiffanie Wen
From the first moment you walk into a room people are making judgements about how much they like you. Fortunately, there are ways to improve your chances.
Charmers. What makes these lucky individuals so effortlessly likeable when many of us have to work so hard at it? While many would have you believe social grace or winning people over is something of an artform, there is a surprising amount of science behind it, too. (Continue reading)

Article from BBC TRAVEL: We may have cracked the mystery of Stonehenge, by Vivien Cumming

The more archaeologists study Stonehenge, the more mysteries unfold. But a coherent story is beginning to emerge. (Continue reading)

🎬 VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS

• Born to Learn (4:55 minutes)
• Why Do We Cry? (2:29 minutes)
• Should You Trust Your Gut Instinct? (4:25 minutes)
• Susan Cain on Introversion (2:48 minutes)
• Where Do Your Texts Go? (3:43 minutes)
• Early Birds vs Night Owls (3:08 minutes)
• Can Money Buy Happiness? (2:49 minutes)
• An untranslatable word (2:03 minutes)

5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:

• EITHER, NEITHER, SO, TOO - How to agree and disagree in English (7:39 minutes)
• Do you dare to dream? (7:34 minutes)
• Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman ► Animated Book Summary (7:28 minutes)

A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!

• The Passive: When, why, and how to use it (It only takes 11:37 minutes!)

💬 VOCABULARY PICKS:

• Synonym Adverbs Games ⇒ Can you find the adverbs that mean the same? (When you finish, click on “Next Game” and get a full new set of pairs! There are 10 games.)
• Opposite Adverbs Games ⇒ Pair up the adverbs with opposite meanings. (When you finish, click on “Next Game” and get a full new set of pairs! There are 10 games.)
• Science and technology
• Feelings /emotions
• 'Say' and 'Tell'
• Make or Do Exercise 4
• Make or Do Exercise 3
• Make or Do Exercise 2
• Make or Do Exercise 1

💡 GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:

• Embedded Questions in Statements
• Adjective or Adverb
• Adjective or Adverb-2
• Superlatives with The and No ArticleExercise 1
• Prepositions Exercise 1 
• Prepositions Exercise 2 
• Prepositions Exercise 3 
• USED TO: Affirmative-Interrogative-Negative
• USED TO or WOULD
• BE USED TO
• Word order in English sentences – Mixed Exercise
• Phrasal Verbs in English – Fill-in Exercise
• Gerund and Infinitive – Exercise 1
• Gerund and Infinitive – Exercise 2

MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

Can you train yourself to be a risk-taker? by Vivian Giang (from BBC CAPITAL)

Business leaders say taking risks is an essential part of getting ahead in today's world. If that's not your style, how can you become more comfortable with leaping into the unknown?

It took Binta Niambi Brown several years to walk away in 2013 from the comfortable life she had built for herself as a corporate lawyer. She was going to start her own business, in a tough market that was already flooded. (Continue reading)

The secrets of learning as an adult, by David Robson (from BBC Future)

It’s never too late to learn – if you go about it in the right way.

If you ever fear that you are already too old to learn a new skill, remember Priscilla Sitienei, a midwife from Ndalat in rural Kenya. Having grown up without free primary school education, she had never learnt to read or write. As she approached her twilight years, however, she wanted to note down her experiences and knowledge to pass down to the next generation. And so, she started to attend lessons at the local school – along with six of her great-great-grandchildren. She was 90 at the time.

We are often told that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” – that the grizzled adult brain simply can’t absorb as much information as an impressionable young child’s. Many people would assume that you simply couldn’t pick up a complex skill like reading or writing, at the age of 90, after a lifetime of being illiterate.

The latest studies from psychology and neuroscience show that these extraordinary achievements need not be the exception. (Continue reading)

The common words that companies are banning, by Mark Johanson (from BBC Capital)

Can banning some corporate terms and replacing them with buzzier or more positive-sounding alternatives do any good?

Apply for a job at Davio’s, a small chain of Italian-style steakhouses in the US, and you’ll never hear one extremely common workplace term: employee. That’s because CEO Steve DiFillippo has banned its use.

“I think ‘employee’ is an awful word,” he says. “Who wants to be an employee? It just isn’t something you strive toward.” Instead, those who work for DiFillippo are known as ‘inner guests.’

“A lot of servers and cooks go from restaurant to restaurant trying to find their way; we stop that,” he explains. “They come here and realise they’re in a different place where they’ll be treated differently.”

For DiFillippo, banning the word is both a way of empowering his ‘inner guests’ and explaining the company’s core values to its ‘outer guests’ (the diners). (Continue reading)

The secret to working overseas, by Maddy Savage (from BBC CAPITAL)

Is cultural knowledge more important than language skills?

Does cultural knowledge trump language ability in international companies and start-ups where English is dominating?

Learning the local language might seem an obvious goal for anyone moving abroad. But in an increasingly globalised world, whether this is an effective use of time is increasingly up for debate.

Growing numbers of multinationals and start-ups are adopting English as their official company language, even if they’re not based in an English-speaking nation. And internationally, millennials seem to have a much higher tolerance for using the global language than older generations, meaning it’s potentially easier to socialise with young locals by speaking English than in the past. The British Council estimates that by 2020, two billion people will be using it, well over a quarter of the world’s population.

Plus, while the idea that millennials are job-hopping much more than their parents is something of a myth, being able to work flexibly in different locations remains a core goal for many. In 2017, the Global Shapers Annual Survey, funded by the World Economic Forum, showed that 81% of respondents aged 18 to 35 from over 180 countries said they were willing to work abroad. The “ability to work and live anywhere” was one of the most important factors they identified in terms of making them feel freer in their society. (Continue reading)

PARALLEL UNIVERSES

Published by BBC Two 9.00 p.m. Thursday 14 February 2002

Everything you're about to read here seems impossible and insane, beyond science fiction. Yet it's all true.

Scientists now believe there may really be a parallel universe - in fact, there may be an infinite number of parallel universes, and we just happen to live in one of them. These other universes contain space, time and strange forms of exotic matter. Some of them may even contain you, in a slightly different form. Astonishingly, scientists believe that these parallel universes exist less than one millimetre away from us. In fact, our gravity is just a weak signal leaking out of another universe into ours.