Business English Reading Comprehension

BUSINESS ENGLISH READING COMPREHENSION http://www.businessenglishsite.com/readingcomprehension/ There are ten texts. 1. Read the text and try. (Artikkel on STEP1 . Kontrolli vastused ja tõlgi sõnad) Try and comment later. Note down interesting words for you. Send me a letter with your comments on results, personal opinion.

Weather vocabulary + video

Weather vocabulary: Severe Weather Conditions There has been lots of snow in the UK lately. It has made travelling very difficult and even dangerous for many people. Read the post and check the words about severe weather conditions in bold with the definitions below. Then, try our quick weather vocabulary quiz to see if you can use some of them properly. London is known for red buses, black cabs and the underground. All of them have had problems in January because of the heavy snow. People who normally drive to work have also experienced difficulties. The bad weather has affected people across the country and made travelling impossible in some remote places. The roads have been covered in packed snow and black ice so driving anywhere has been very hard. Local councils have tried to grit major roads but there has been so much snow that it has been a hard task. The number of car accidents has increased rapidly. During one weekend in January, almost £3.5 million of damage happened to cars and about 8,000 cars were written off in just 5 days. Many of the collisions were with walls and parked vehicles. Drivers simply lost control of their cars. There have been a number of cases of parked cars sliding down roads and hitting others and even pedestrians. In some cases, car and bus drivers have tried to avoid incidents by staying at home, at work or even abandoning their vehicles in poor visibility. One newspaper said that a group of English people hid in their local village pub until the snow stopped. Another problem is that when the ice and snow melts it turns to slush and can make it challenging for drivers to break. Pilots can also have problems taking off when there is a lot of slush on the runway. The best advice has been to stay at home and only go out if it is really necessary. Then you should wear snow boots or wellies and avoid slippery areas. The government also advised drivers to clear snow and ice from their cars to prevent damage and possible accidents when they drive. Even though we’re not very good at dealing with the snow in the UK, it doesn’t usually last for long and everything gets back to normal pretty quickly. For example, Heathrow cancelled flights last weekend, but they are back on schedule now. Severe weather conditions vocabulary heavy snow - lots of snowfall packed snow - snow that has been compacted together and is more solid black ice - a thin layer of ice on a pavement which you can’t see but is very dangerous grit - (verbb/noun)when a machine or a person puts very small stones or sand on roads to destroy the snow and make it better to drive on to be written off - when a car is damaged so badly that it can’t be used again collisions - when 2 or more things hit each other lost control - the person wasn’t able to change the direction of their car any more sliding down - moving down slowly like an ice cube moves down a glass pedestrians - people walking in the street incidents - accidents abandoning - leaving something where it is like when you are in a car accident and you leave your car to go and get help poor visibility - when you cannot see well because the weather is bad slush - a mix of ice and water wellies - rubber boots children wear when it rains or farmers for working in the field slippery areas - places where you could fall over Watch any video typing: severe weather conditions Write about and it to me. the original text is : http://www.stgeorges.co.uk/blog/weather-vocabulary-severe-weather-conditions/

Family tree

Family Tree vocabulary family treea record of the people in your family going back in historylineageyou family line through history going back to an ancestorgreat great grandfatherIn English we don’t have different names for different past generations. If you are talking about your grandfather’s father, this is the great grandfather. You add another ‘great’ to the name for every other generation that you go back toto have a likenessto physically look the same as someone elsemum’s side of the familyyour mother’s familyfamily traitscharacteristics that are the same amongst people in your family, like red hair or blue eyesto be the black sheep of the familyto be the one person in your family who is considered to be different (in a negative way) to all the other family membersdistant relativesomeone who is not in your immediate family, like a cousin twice removed, or a great, great uncle three times removedheritageobject or qualities that have been passed down from previous generationsbranch of the treeone side of the family (mother or father’s)public recordshistorical official documents that anyone can look atto traceto find/discover or describe the origin of something by investigatingancestorsa person, from before your grandparents generation, that you are descended fromcensuspublic record taken every 10 years giving lots of details about all the people in a countrycause of deathhow a person diedpredecessorsa thing/person that has been followed by another Looking into your family’s past Why is it that people only start getting interested in their family tree once they get older? Do they want to look back into their lineage to see if their great, great, great grandfather was someone famous or important? Perhaps it’s because people want to understand if they have a likeness to someone from their mum’s side of the family. Or maybe they have noticed that some family traits have been passed down to their own children and they want to discover if that characteristic has appeared before in their family history. It could even be that they have a suspicion that they are the black sheep of the family and they want to prove that there was someone further back, maybe some distant relative, who was definitely more of a misfit than them. As you can see in the video below, there is a BBC TV series called Who Do You Think You Are in which famous people (famous in the UK, that is!) investigate their heritage with the help of genealogical experts. Quite often, the celebrity ends up in tears when they find out that something sad or tragic happened to one or more of their family. The experts go through various public records to trace the ancestors and of course, find a lot of information from the census. In the clip here, the actor Martin Freeman, who has the starring role in The Hobbit movie finds out about his previous generations. He is very interested in finding out about his Dad’s side of the family because his father died when he was only 10, so he doesn’t know much about that branch of the tree. However, for me, the problem with constructing a genealogical record is that the official documents only give you basic information like the date of birth, occupation, husband’s/wife’s name and maybe the cause of death. There is quite a lot of imagination and guesswork involved in making assumptions about your predecessors, so that you can make the story interesting. Also, recently I spoke to a student who has an uncle that traced her family tree all the way back to the 16th Century. That’s very impressive of course, but one thing worried me (and her) about it all: she said that her uncle had got her date of birth wrong. He had put 1984 as her date of birth, not 1983. Well, if he couldn’t even get the current generation’s details correct, then how can anyone trust the other ‘facts’ that he found going back four centuries!

Kapital

TV programme that deals with economics in several ways. It covers different sides of economics and is interesting to watch: the topics are different and interviews catchy and make you think. You can choose any item. Wacth it, get the general understanding, point out interesting words and write about it : 0,5 p. Do not forget to add a link.

Focus On: is a set of lessons which contain themes, words, expressions chosen by the students. I try to follow the ranking that you completed in the first lessons. Focus on women in management. The text has three parts. Read all of them, do the exercises and translate the words if necessary. Get your general undestanding and write about it. To get credits: show the handouts send your piece of writing. Be ready to discuss these short texts and find statements to argue with.