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Showing posts with label BBC POSTS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC POSTS. Show all posts

WEEKLY PICKS - 10

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 EARTH: The river that runs through the dawn of life, by Vivien Cumming. Every river has a story to tell and this one covers 500 million years.
Rocks sculpted by the Coppermine River took us on a journey through 500 hundred million years of Earth’s history, starting over 1.5 billion years ago when the earliest multicellular life was beginning to emerge. By studying and sampling the rocks along the riverbanks, and hiking into the wilderness using drones to map the area, we hoped to expand our understanding of early life on Earth.
The Coppermine River winds its way through the high Arctic landscape, cutting the easiest path through a remote part of the world until it reaches the Arctic Ocean and the Inuit settlement of Kugluktuk, where we ended our journey. (Continue reading)

Article from BBC FUTURE: How your age affects your appetite, by Alex Johnstone. Our relationship with food changes through our lives, and there are seven stages of life that affect how we eat.
Do you eat to live or live to eat? We have a complicated relationship with food, influenced by cost, availability and even peer pressure. But something we all share is appetite – our desire to eat.
While hunger – our body’s way of making us desire food when it needs feeding – is a part of appetite, it is not the only factor. After all, we often eat when we’re not hungry, or may skip a meal despite pangs of hunger. Recent research has highlighted that the abundance of food cues – smells, sounds, advertising – in our environment is one of the main causes of overconsumption. (Continue reading)

🎬 VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

 LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS:
5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:
A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!
💬 VOCABULARY PICKS:
💡 GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:


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The US island that feels like Russia, by John Zada (from BBC Travel)

Unalaska Island in the remote Aleutian archipelago was part of an epic, but now mostly forgotten, military campaign during World War II.
(Credit:John Zada)
⇒ A slice of Russia in the US

After Danish explorer Vitus Bering and his Russian colleague Alexei Chirikov became the first known Europeans to visit the Aleutian Islands in 1741, waves of Russian fur traders flocked to the archipelago to hunt sea otters and fur seals. In the late 1700s, the islands became a colony of the Russian Empire. Today many inhabitants still have Russian surnames.

The Russian Orthodox Church followed the fur hunters, building small houses of worship across the islands and converting many Unangax to their faith. Although the US gained control of the Aleutian Islands when it purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, the Russian Orthodox legacy has survived. Unalaska’s Church of the Holy Ascension (pictured above) is one of a few Russian Orthodox houses of worship that remain. Built in 1896, it is the oldest cruciform-style cathedral in North America and contains original icons and interior sections from earlier churches built on the same site in 1808 and 1825. (Credit: John Zada)

🔗 Go to FULL ARTICLE ⇒ The US island that once belonged to Russia


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RECOMMENDED: NEWS REVIEW (From BBC Learning English)

💡 How to use the language from the latest news stories:

Check out the videos below and click on the links above for more!

(New videos on YouTube every Tuesday)






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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:
5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:
A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!
💡 GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:


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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:
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💬 VOCABULARY PICKS:

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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.
Read more »
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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
5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:
A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!
💬 VOCABULARY PICKS:
💡 GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:
  • 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!
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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
5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:
A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!
💬 VOCABULARY PICKS:
💡 GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:
  • 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!
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