2017 March Flashcards
It’s Spring – Let’s Party!
Posted on Tuesday - March 7, 2017 by ESLPod.com
Spring is here, and in the next few weeks U.S. students will be getting one week of vacation from elementary (kindergarten to 5th grade) and secondary schools (middle school/junior high school and high school), and from colleges and universities.
For students, especially college students, spring break is a time to go on vacation with friends and to go to a lot of parties. Whether you’re partying for spring break, attending a friend’s birthday party, or going to a more formal gathering (social meeting), you might find these terms useful to talk about parties and the people who attend them.
Americans have many terms to talk about party-goers (people who go to parties). A guest of honor is the person for whom a party is held (organized and hosted). For example, at a birthday party, the person who is celebrating a birthday is the guest of honor. At a graduation party, the person who has completed his or her studies is the guest of honor. Often there are VIPs (an acronym for “very important people”) at a party. If your boss comes to a party, then he or she might be a VIP even if he or she isn’t the guest of honor.
Sometimes people come to a party without an invitation (a request to attend or go to an event). These people are called party crashers. In American movies, you sometimes see parties on college campuses (the buildings and land belonging to a college/university,) which are ruined by party crashers who drink too much alcohol and damage the home where the party is being held.
A party pooper is an informal term for a person who isn’t very much fun at a party–or any social event. A party pooper is someone who is sad or depressed and makes it difficult or impossible for other people to have fun. Often a party pooper is a person who doesn’t want to do what everyone else wants to do.
The opposite of a party pooper is a party animal or the life of the party. The term party animal isn’t used very often today, but you still hear people use it jokingly to refer to a person who really enjoys going to parties and has a lot of fun, often getting too wild (out of control). The life of the party is simply someone who makes the party more fun and is often the center of attention (the person other people notice because he or she is interesting).
Finally, some people who go to parties are known as wallflowers. A wallflower is a very quiet and shy person who doesn’t enjoy talking to other people and sits quietly somewhere and is not noticed. This is especially true at dances, where wallflowers sit and watch everyone else dance, but are too timid (shy) to dance themselves.
So the next time you throw (have) a party, let’s hope you don’t get any party crashers or party animals attending the party and upsetting the VIPs or the guest of honor (but don’t forget to invite me!).
~ Jeff
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- This post was adapted from “Culture Note” from Daily English 338. To see the rest of the Learning Guide, including a Glossary, Sample Sentences, Comprehension Questions, a Complete Transcript of the entire lesson and more, become a Select English Member.
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The Hello Project
Posted on Tuesday - March 14, 2017 by Warren Ediger
Few of my students had trouble with the first part of the assignment (work given to students):
Identify a kind of person you don’t like or makes you uncomfortable and describe what it is that you don’t like or makes you uncomfortable.
Everyone had trouble with part two:
Find someone like that. Spend some time with them – take them to lunch or have coffee with them – and talk to them for at least 20-30 minutes. Learn as much as you can about them.
The third part was always the best:
Look at your answer to part one, then write about what, if anything, changed.
Something always did. And when we talked about it in class, we discovered quickly that talking – and more importantly, listening – to someone can change ideas about other people that we had believed, often for many years.
During last year’s election campaign (political activity before a vote), reporter Yvonne Leow felt that too few people were talking – or listening – to each other. She believed that many people forgot that “we’re all humans at the end of the day trying to understand each other” and did nothing about it. That’s why she started the Hello Project.
Leow is a second-generation American – her mother was born in Cambodia – and the two of them have often had trouble understanding each other. Their relationship began to improve when they sat down to talk about themselves – Leow calls it storytelling. Her mother grew up in Cambodia, she in the U.S. They had had different experiences while growing up and, as a result, looked at life differently.
Leow wanted the Hello Project to help people connect with each other and to share their stories, like she and her mother had. In her invitation she wrote, “We know our country is divided, and we want to see if individual conversations can help” make a difference. We want to encourage “understanding, not necessarily agreement and . . . learn from each other.”
More than 100 people signed up to talk. One of them, a reporter from Washington, D.C., talked to a retired school teacher in Phoenix, AZ. Their backgrounds, their lives, and their hopes and fears were very different. But after they finished talking, they shared their email address and agreed to become pen pals (people who write each other). Others had similar experiences.
Leow is hoping to continue the Hello Project. She writes that we as people and the world we live in are complex (difficult to understand) and asks if we can accept and respect each other for that. The Hello Project’s answer seems to be, “Yes!” Especially if we continue to talk to each other.
~ Warren Ediger – ESL tutor/coach and creator of the Successful English website.
Photo by Steve Garfield used under Creative Commons license
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English is a Four-Letter Word
Posted on Tuesday - March 21, 2017 by ESLPod.com
When someone in the U.S. uses the term “four-letter word,” they are referring to those words in English that are considered “obscene” or “vulgar” – that is, bad language that you would not say in front of your mother, your teacher, or your boss. We call these “four-letter words” even though some of them have more or less than four letters.
We do this because many of the obscene words in English are one syllable, and many of them have four letters, including perhaps the most famous one which begins with the letter “f,” which we call the “f-word.” Some of the less vulgar ones are “hell,” which refers the very unpleasant place that some people believe bad people will go when they die (sometimes capitalized – “Hell”), or “damn,” something you would say to curse someone or if something bad happens to you.
From our common use of four-letter words comes the popular expression: “________ is a four-letter word.” This phrase means that this thing, whatever it is, is unpleasant, very bad, or causes you terrible problems and you want to express how much you dislike it or how much trouble it has caused you.
Some popular phrases are:
– “Love is a four-letter word.”
– “Work is a four-letter word.”
In these two examples, “love” and “work” actually have four letters.
But, we can also use this expressions with longer or shorter words, such as:
– “Trust is a four-letter word.” Trust is the belief in the reliability or truth of something or someone.
– “Rejection is a four-letter word.” Rejection, when used it to talk about love and relationships, refers to someone refusing the love and affection they are offered.
Of course, “trust” and “rejection” have more than four-letters, but the idea (and the joke) is that these things have the same meaning as four-letter words — they are bad and they make you want to curse them.
If you’ve been trying to improve your English for a long time, you might say: “English is four-letter word!”
~ ESLPod Team
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*This post was adapted from “What Insiders Know” from Cultural English 54. To see the rest of the Learning Guide, including a Glossary, Sample Sentences, Comprehension Questions, a Complete Transcript of the entire lesson and more, become a Select English Member.
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Things That Stick Out
Posted on Tuesday - March 28, 2017 by Warren Ediger
“Stick out” is an interesting little expression.
It describes something that is easy to see, or is noticeable, because it comes out farther than the rest. For example, “He’s so tall that he sticks out in a crowd (large group of people).” Or, “His legs stick out when he’s working under his car.”
If you studied geography in school, you learned about the countries, oceans, rivers, mountains, cities, etc. of the world. And you probably learned about peninsulas, those “almost islands” that stick out into a large body of water. In the U.S., the state of Florida is a good example. Like a large finger, it sticks out of the larger part of the U.S. into the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean.
If you had studied geography in the U.S., you might have studied something else that sticks out, called a panhandle (in other countries, they might be called a salient).
The word comes from the kitchen. Pans are what you cook food in. One pan – the frying pan that you might might use to cook eggs and bacon for breakfast – has a long narrow handle to use to pick it up.
In geography, a panhandle is a long narrow piece of land that sticks out from a larger area, like a state, into another. Ten U.S. states have panhandles, and some of them are well known.
The Alaska, Oklahoma, Florida, and Maryland (you need a larger map to see it) panhandles look like what you’d expect – long and narrow handles attached to one side of the state; Nebraska’s panhandle is where you’d expect it to be, but it’s short and fat. Idaho’s looks like a finger pointing up at Canada; the Texas panhandle is also at the top and, like Nebraska’s, it’s short and fat. West Virginia has two panhandles and Connecticut’s, at the bottom of the state, points at (to show with your finger) New York City.
Why talk about panhandles? Robert Reid recently wrote on the National Geographic website that some of the U.S. panhandles are interesting enough that people should think about visiting them. Here are his three favorites:
- Alaska’s panhandle is already a popular place to visit. You can cruise (travel on a boat) among the islands along the panhandle to see snow-covered mountains, glaciers (large sheets of ice), small villages, and bears and other animals. You can visit Sitka, an old historic village or Juneau, Alaska’s capital.
- When you think about Florida’s panhandle, think about 200 miles (320 km) of beautiful white-sand beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, sunshine, and . . . tourists.
- I wrote about Nebraska’s sandhills in Where Buffalo Used To Roam. The Nebraska panhandle is mostly sandhills, but they are broken up (interrupted) by 800 foot (~240 m) high rocks that have been carved (cut into shape) by years of wind and rain. Early Americans traveled through this rough but beautiful area on their way to the West.
If you’d like to learn more about America’s panhandles, take a few minutes to look at Reid’s article on the National Geographic website.
~ Warren Ediger – ESL coach/tutor and creator of the Successful English website.
Map photo from National Geographic.
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