English and American English

Hi everyone,

How's your Sunday going? Here you have the usual summary after each week, plus some extra material. On Tuesday we corrected the unit on Indirect Speech -only two exercises left to correct-, and we worked with a handout about the differences between British (BrE) and American (AmE) English. We saw two different phenomena:

• Two words, same meaning: underground vs. subway
• One word, different meaning: bill exists both in AmE and BrE, but the meaning is different. 

Finally, I gave you a copy on the use of punctuation. Make sure you read it carefully at home, and, most importantly, check it if you have a doubt when writing a composition.





On Thursday we had one hour with Leah, where we talked about going to the doctor's -below you have the handout she worked with, in case you don't have a copy-. Surfing the Internet I've found this listening about making an appointment at the doctor's. Click here to listen to it and do a multiple choice exercise. If you prefer completing gaps, try this exercise instead. Finally, I leave you with the transcription and a vocabulary exercise.
Going to the doctor's

After that, we did a listening about differences in tipping in the US and the UK and we saw some pronunciation features of both accents -click here for a revision of the aspects we commented on in class-. Sometimes, it might be a bit difficult to calculate a 15% tip in your head, but I found this easy trick to do it relatively quickly (click on the image to enlarge it):

Does any of you have any better ideas?

In 4ºA, Leonor and Mª Carmen did their presentations about eating disorders and vegetarians, respectively. Thanks both of you for your effort.

For homework, I'd like you to do exercises 1, 4 and 8 on pages 36 an 37.