WEEKLY PICKS - 9

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: Your vocal quirks could be costing you jobs, Video by Kat Sud, Maeve Burke and Bowen Li, research by Debbi McCullough. These vocal tendencies can cost you at a job interview, but is it fair to judge people based on these vocal habits? (Continue reading)

Article from BBC FUTURE: The dangerous diseases hidden in caves, by Zaria Gorvett. The rescued Thai boys faced infectious organisms underground and are now in quarantine – but which diseases could they have been exposed to, and how serious are they? (Continue reading)

🎬 VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS:

• London | British Museum (3:45 minutes)
• The neuroscience of imagination - Andrey Vyshedskiy (4:48 minutes)
• Learners' Questions: Verb Patterns - full and bare infinitives (2:42 minutes)
• Commonly confused words (2:38 minutes)
• Learners' Questions: Using 'suppose' and 'supposed to' (3:07 minutes)
• 'I' or 'me'? (2:05 minutes)
• DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AMERICAN AND BRITISH GROCERY STORES (UK VS USA GROCERY STORES) (4:39 minutes)
• Vulnerability with Brene Brown (3:02 minutes)

5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:

• BBC 6 Minute English | THE MEANING OF CLOTHES | English CC | Daily Listening (5:58 minutes)
• Visit France - 10 Things That Will SHOCK You About France (9:27 minutes)
• Flight attendants Cabin crew service training (7:01 minutes)
• 8 Confusing Word Pairs Native Speakers Get WRONG (9:16 minutes)
• Talk about food expertise in 6 minutes (6:26 minutes)
• NORTHERN vs. SOUTHERN accents | British English Pronunciation (6:47 minutes)
• Looking for a job? Highlight your ability, not your experience | Jason Shen (6:30 minutes)

A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!

• 5 Minute Biographies Season 2, Episode 1 - Theodore Roosevelt (12:42 minutes)
• How to Talk About Food - Adjectives to Describe Food in English - Spoken English Lesson (12:24 minutes)
• How language shapes the way we think | Lera Boroditsky (14:12 minutes)

💬 VOCABULARY PICKS:

• Vocabulary DRAG + DROP - FILL IN Exercise 1
• Vocabulary DRAG + DROP - FILL IN Exercise 2
• Vocabulary DRAG + DROP - FILL IN Exercise 3
• Text Completion DRAG + DROP Exercise 3
• Exercise on Accomodation
• Exercise on Eating Out
• Idioms - exercise 6
• Idioms - exercise 7

💡 GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:

• Gerunds and Infinitives Exercise 4
• Make or Do Exercise 2
• Would and used to – past habits and repeated actions (2 EXERCISES)
• used to/to be used to exercise
• Mixed Articles 1
• Mixed Articles 2
• Articles with idioms 2
• Articles with idioms 3
• Prepositions Exercise 2
• Phrasal Verbs with the verb COME – Exercise (Choose the correct preposition.)
• Preposition 'OUT' - Phrasal Verb Quiz (Choose the correct definition for each phrasal verb)

MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

WEEKLY PICKS - 8

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 CULTURE: The world’s most beautiful libraries, Cameron Laux. If like the writer Jorge Luis Borges you believe that Paradise is a library, fasten your seatbelt and prepare to be transported to heaven on earth. (Continue reading)

Article from BBC FUTURE: The ‘quiet eye’ of elite concentration, by David Robson. The way in which athletes can maintain their focus even under high pressure can help doctors, and it is of increasing interest to the military. (Continue reading)

🎬 VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS:

• Why English is so hard to learn: adjective order (2:49 minutes) ⇒ See also: Grammar Pills: Order of Adjectives
• Learners' Questions: Adjective order (2:17 minutes)
• Why do we feel nostalgia? - Clay Routledge (4:08 minutes)
• London | Tower of London (4:02 minutes)
• Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? (1:25 minutes)
• 5 American Words That Are Rude In Britain (3:48 minutes)
• Can You Erase Bad Memories? (3:32 minutes)
• Are You Normal? (3:17 minutes)
• Goleman Six Leadership Styles (3:54 minutes)

5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:

• Where do superstitions come from? - Stuart Vyse (5:10 minutes)
• The benefits of a bilingual brain - Mia Nacamulli (5:03 minutes)
• The 71 Most AMAZING Innovations of All Time (6:41 minutes)
• 6 Minute Vocabulary: How to use linking words (6:06 minutes)
• Telling someone what to do - 52 - English at Work shows you the ropes (6:06 minutes)
• Top 10 Best Airports in The World (9:29 minutes)
• The myth of Icarus and Daedalus - Amy Adkins (5:08 minutes)

A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!

• Visit Las Vegas - 10 Things That Will SHOCK You About Las Vegas (11:32 minutes)
• British Accents: MANCHESTER / MANCUNIAN (11:15 minutes)
• Humor and culture in international business | Chris Smit | TED x Leuven (14:42 minutes)
• How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed | Daniel Levitin (12:20 minutes)

💬 VOCABULARY PICKS:

• Idioms - exercise 4
• Idioms - exercise 5
• Health and Medicine - Words
• Health and Fitness - Collocations
• Collective Nouns (List of official names of groups of things) ⇒ Collective Nouns Game
• Synonyms Matching 1
• Antonyms Matching Worksheet 5
• Health Problems (List of common types of health problems)

💡 GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:

• EITHER/OR, NEITHER/NOR, TOO 1
• ARTICLE or NO ARTICLE? 1
• Articles with idioms 1
• First or second conditional? 1
• GERUND or INFINITIVE? 1
• Tag questions 1
• Quantifiers: More, most, the most 1
• Adjective or Adverb? (Are these sentences correct?)
• Time Prepositions 1
• Little / Few - Exercise
• A Little / A Few - Exercise 4
• Verb 'To Be' - Phrasal Verb Quiz (Choose the correct definition for each phrasal verb.)
• Quiz: Phrasal Verbs - Bring (Choose the correct answer.)

MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

The cost of ditching plastic, by Richard Gray (from BBC Capital)

What's the real price of getting rid of plastic packaging?

How much would it cost to switch to plastic alternatives? Richard Gray crunches the numbers.

Walking along a short section of stony beach, Claire Waluda stoops briefly to pick up something from between the rocks. It is a brightly coloured plastic bottle top – just one of hundreds of bits of plastic that she finds washed ashore on the remote, windswept island of South Georgia.

Located in the south Atlantic, on the fringes of the Antarctic, it is nearly 1,000 miles (1,500km) from the nearest major human settlement. Yet even here Waluda, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey, is finding worrying signs of our throw-away attitude towards plastic. Regularly she finds seals entangled in this debris or albatross chicks coughing up bits of plastic film.

These are just a few examples of the damage our throw-away relationship with plastics is inflicting on the environment. More than 78 million tonnes of plastic packaging is produced worldwide every year by an industry worth nearly $198 billion. Just a fraction of that is recycled while the vast majority is thrown away. Plastic litter now clutters every part of our planet, from remote parts of the Antarctic to the deepest ocean trenches.

WEEKLY PICKS - 7

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 TRAVEL: A country that doesn’t want to be happy, by Kate Leaver,
Finland came out on top in the 2018 World Happiness Report, but what if its people don’t agree? (Continue reading)

Article from BBC CAPITAL: The secret advantage of aiming low, by David Robson
Sports stars show us that it can sometimes pay to be a big fish in a small pond.
Watching nail-biting sports dramas play out this summer, you may struggle to see any parallel with your own career. What could a teacher, lawyer or engineer possibly learn from elite sports stars like a Raheem Stirling or a Simona Halep?
Yet some organisational scientists believe the rise of certain athletes – and footballers in particular – can offer success strategies for everyone, with some particular insights into a phenomenon known as the “Big-Fish-Little-Pond effect”. (Continue reading)

Article from BBC CULTURE: Five countries that set world culture, by Lindsey Galloway
Global influence is often measured by military, political or economic might. But for these countries, it’s their food, fashion or entertainment that most strongly impacts the wider world. (Continue reading)

🎬 VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS

• Plato’s best (and worst) ideas - Wisecrack (4:48 minute)
• You're Not What You Think You Are (3:15 minutes)
• The history of tea - Shunan Teng (4:57 minutes)
• Amazing Facts to Blow Your Mind Pt. 2 (2:23 minutes)
• Amazing Facts To Blow Your Mind Pt. 3 (2:19 minutes)
• BBC Masterclass: Formal and informal English (4:07 minutes)
• BBC Masterclass: Be polite - how to soften your English (4:25 minutes)
• Customs at PQ International Airport (2:49 minutes)
• English: At the airport (1:42 minute)
• You Have Arrived (4:14 minute)

5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:

• The myth of Cupid and Psyche - Brendan Pelsue (5:32 minutes)
• The great conspiracy against Julius Caesar - Kathryn Tempest (5:57 minutes)
• BBC 6 Minute English - "Brain Training" with English Subtitle (6:05 minutes)
• DIFFERENCES BETWEEN BRITISH AND AMERICAN CULTURE (UK VS USA) (5:06 minutes)
• How Did You Get Here? (5:55 minutes)
• The Four Love Types: Explorer, Builder, Director, And Negotiator (6:16 minutes)
• Visit Denmark - 10 Things That Will SHOCK You About Denmark (10:20 minutes)

A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!

• London Accents: RP | Cockney | Multicultural London English (12:10 minutes)
• The Economics of Airline Class (11:37 minutes)
• 20 MORE Words Brits and Americans Say Differently (12:43 minutes)

💬 VOCABULARY PICKS:

• Vocabulary related to education (List of vocabulary items related to education) ⇒ Practice: Education
• Idioms - exercise 2
• Idioms - exercise 3
• Vocabulary Fill in Exercise 2
• Someone / Anyone
• Something / Anything
• Somewhere / Anywhere

💡 GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:

• Prepositions of time Exercise 9
• Prepositions of time Exercise 10
• Articles with Geographical Names Exercise 1
• Articles with Geographical Names Exercise 2
• have to/must Quiz
• Relative Adverbs
• Participles
• Infinitive and Gerund
• Verb 'To Do' - Phrasal Verb Quiz – 1 (Choose the correct definition for each phrasal verb)
• Quiz: Phrasal Verbs – Do - 2 (Choose the correct preposition or particle for each phrasal verb)

• Random Phrasal Verb Quiz (Test your understanding of phrasal verbs with these random phrasal verb quizzes. Each time you 'start again', it will show you a new quiz generated from a phrasal verbs database.)

MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

WEEKLY PICKS - 6

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 TRAVEL: The Mysterious origins of Europe’s oldest language
When Francisco Franco banned the use of the ancient Euskara language, residents of the Basque Country fought to keep it alive. (Continue reading)

Article from BBC FUTURE: The people who cannot smile, by Neil Steinberg
Smiling is a fundamental part of how we interact with other people, but what if you were not able to do it? (Continue reading)

Article from BBC CULTURE: The Hitchcock film tooshocking to be made, by Nicholas Barber

Inspired by a real-life serial-killer case, Hitchcock’s vision for Kaleidoscope was deemed too gruesome and sexually explicit for its time.

For all of his phenomenal achievements, Alfred Hitchcock is probably best known for Psycho, and in particular the scene in which – spoiler alert – a man dressed in his dead mother’s clothes stabs a naked woman in a motel shower. Audiences in 1960 were traumatised. In a recent documentary about that one scene, 78/52, Peter Bogdanovich remembers the “sustained shriek” that filled the cinema when Psycho premiered in New York. But Hitchcock had an even more shocking film planned just a few years later. It would have been called Kaleidoscope. (Continue reading)

🎬 VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS

• Learn ways to say... it's very hot (0:43 seconds)
• Everything Wrong With Android, Explained (4:07 minutes)
• You Are Not The Majority (3:20 minutes)
• The Science of Love (2:53 minutes)
• Can Money Buy Happiness? (2:49 minutes)
• Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern (4:53 minutes)
• How to COOK in ENGLISH (4:51 minutes)
• Why can't you divide by zero? - TED-Ed (4:50 minutes)

5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:

• Customs & Border Protection - Entering the U.S. (7:06 minutes)
• Travel English: How to go through customs at the airport (8:21 minutes) ⇒ Then, take a free quiz HERE
• How to Order Food in an American Restaurant - Travel English (9:35 minutes)
• Lithuanian Superstitions -Superstitions from Around the World (5:57 minutes)
• Learn to talk about broken hearts in 6 minutes! (6:36 minutes)
• BBC 6 minute English   Coffee addiction transcript video (6:08 minutes)

A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!

• What British People REALLY MEAN with Joel and Lia (13:24 minutes)
• British Accents: MANCHESTER/ MANCUNIAN (11:15 minutes)
• How To Speak English Better| 10 Great Tips (11:46 minutes)

💬 VOCABULARY PICKS:

• Adverb Verb Collocation Games set 1 ⇒ Which adverb best goes with which verb? (When you finish, click on “Next Game” and get a full new set of pairs! There are 10 games.)
• Adverb Verb Collocation Games set 2 ⇒ Which adverb best goes with which verb? (When you finish, click on “Next Game” and get a full new set of pairs! There are 10 games.)
• Vocabulary Fill in Exercise 1
• Synonyms Matching Exercise 1
• Opposites Matching Exercise 1

💡 GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:

• Countable and uncountable nouns
• but vs. and
• Either/Or and Neither/Nor
• Prepositions Exercise 4
• Phrasal Verbs with GET
• Phrasal Verbs with the verb GET – Exercise
• Test on Relative Clauses
• Infinitive or Gerund after verbs
• Preposition collocations exercise 1
• Quiz on Prepositions
• Gerund or Progressive

• Random Phrasal Verb Quiz (Test your understanding of phrasal verbs with these random phrasal verb quizzes. Each time you 'start again', it will show you a new quiz generated from a phrasal verbs database.)

MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

The skill that will survive automation, by Livia Gershon (from BBC Capital)

Robots are poised to replace workers in many industries. But some professions can never be automated away, and require investment, writes Livia Gershon.

Disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data are changing the world of work. Retail jobs are disappearing in the US while the online sellers supplanting them fill their warehouses with robots instead of human workers. In China, manufacturing businesses that fled wealthy countries to find low-wage workers are now replacing those humans with machines. And on farms around the world, automated systems are beginning to take on backbreaking tasks like weeding lettuce. Studies have found that new technologies threaten around 40% of existing US jobs, and two-thirds of jobs in the developing world.

There is one kind of job though, that is both indispensable and difficult – perhaps impossible – to automate: the kind that requires emotional skills. Artificially intelligent software is being built that can recognise emotions in people's faces and voices, but it is a long way from simulating genuine empathy, and philosophers have been arguing for centuries that a machine with real feelings is impossible. Computers are nowhere near being able to compete with humans on the ability to really understand and connect with another human being.

WEEKLY PICKS - 4

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 Mind Tools: 10 Common Time Management Mistakes
Avoiding Common Pitfalls - How well do you manage your time? If you're like many people, your answer may not be completely positive! Perhaps you feel overloaded, and you often have to work late to hit your deadlines. Or maybe your days seem to go from one crisis to another, and this is stressful and demoralizing. (Continue reading)

❓ QUIZ from Mind Tools ⇒ How Good Is Your Time Management?
Discover Time Management Tools That can Help you Excel

Article from BBC CULTURE: The writers who defied Soviet censors 

Underground publishers in the USSR broke rules in ingenious ways – such as hiding books in fake binding and making records on X-ray film, writes Benjamin Ramm.

In anticipation of the poet’s arrest, his creations were concealed by inventive means – sewn into the insides of cushions and shoes, or hidden in mattresses and saucepans. The police confiscated most of his papers, but others were smuggled out, or hidden surreptitiously in obscure locations. The most important poems were inscribed where even the wiliest investigator could not find them – in the memory of a devoted reader, who would pass them on.  (Continue reading)

🎬 VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS

• Why Do We Blush? (1:46 minutes)
• Why Do We Get Nervous? (2:28 minutes)
• How Much Sleep Do You Actually Need? (3:23 minutes)
• The Science of Heartbreak (2:48 minutes)
• Introverts vs. Extroverts (4:17 minutes)
• Amazing Facts to Blow Your Mind Pt. 1 (2:08 minutes)

5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:

• Vocabulary - LIVE, LIFE, ALIVE, LIVING (7:53 minutes)
• Learn Vocabulary - look, look like, look alike, look as if... (6:43 minutes)
• English Grammar - comparing with LIKE & AS (9 minutes)
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery ► Animated Book Summary (5:35 minutes)
• ALL or WHOLE? (9:23 minutes.)

A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!

• How to increase your vocabulary (It only takes 13:29 minutes!)

💬 VOCABULARY PICKS:

• Verb + Adverb Games (1) ⇒ Which adverb best goes with which verb? (When you finish, click on “Next Game” and get a full new set of pairs! There are 10 games.)
• Verb + Adverb Games (2) ⇒ Which adverb best goes with which verb? (When you finish, click on “Next Game” and get a full new set of pairs! There are 10 games.)
• Sustainable development 
• Bed / Home / Work / Town Exercise 1
• Feelings and Emotions

💡 GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:

• Comparative and Superlative Quiz with Adverbs
• Question tags – Exercise 3
• Questions in Passive – Word order – Click Exercise 1 – MIX
• Questions in Passive – Word order – Click Exercise 2 – MIX
• Prepositions Exercise 7
• Prepositions Exercise 8
• If or Unless
• Conditional sentences type 2 exercise
• Conditional sentences type 3 exercise
• A Little / A Few Exercise 1
• Because or because of
• Although, even though, in spite of...
• Mixed Past Tenses Games 1-10 – Practise talking about time with past tense forms. These games practise 4 past tense forms from Past Simple to Past Perfect Continuous.

MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!