One Headlight by the Wallflowers

Remember singing along to an English hit song was another good strategy to work on our fluency in English? Well, your classmate Paco sent me this song to kick off the karaoke season. Not only did he send the link to the video,  he also prepared and intro to the song, and edited the lyrics. You will find everything below. Thanks Paco for all this! Great song!

One Headlight Lyrics

One Headlight Intro

More on puzzling science tricks

Here I suggest a new listening task for you guys: it consists in catching the expressions the experimenter uses to describe some of the actions that he's carrying out in this video. They all involve an action verb. You just have to listen out for the sentence where this action verb appears, and write it down. Find the lists of verbs below. Then click on the key to the listening practice at the bottom of this post to find out how accurate you were with this information filling practice.
1) fill -->
2) place over -->
3) invert -->
4) support & remove -->
5) pour -->
6) overflow -->
7) place & turn upside down -->
8) come out -->
9) tip -->
10)cause the water to come out -->

PS: Didn't you just love his goggles?? Hey, maybe that blue coloring is totally radioactive!

key to the listening practice

Spoken Word

Following up on rhymes, I'd like to present to you one of the latest version of this entrenched form of popular culture in English: Spoken Word. This is a word-based performance art, which generally consists of story-telling or poetry. The link that follows was sent to me by one of your fellow students,where you can see Sulibreaks, a British spoken word artist telling us why he hates school but loves education... Thanks, Miguel, for the videolink!

I will not let an exam result decide my fate. Spoken word

Ok, most of us had to agree, after the debate we held in class, that money does make the world go around, right? Just like Liza Minnelli sang in this very famous musical play Cabaret, back in 1966... Yet, it can't be all that matters to be happy and enjoy life, can it? And even though economists nowadays seem to be ruling our lives with their technical mumbo-jumbo, we should go back to a grass-roots understanding of economy, our economy.
For the time being, and to make sure we know our whereabouts when dealing with business matters in English, here follows a nice link to a set of listenings all devoted to practicing business-related words and expressions in English. Please, since we have no time to work on this in class, could you just click on those you may find more interesting for your career? Good, thanks. By the way, the transcripts come in very handy too.

Business Language to Go, by the BBC

Britart: Banksy is back!

Banksy is a pseudonymus England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humor with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique. Such artistic works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world. To see a slideshow of his best creations, click on the link below, and then watch the video to hear more about his last exhibit in the Bristol City Museum, and complete the quiz questions to test your understanding.

The slideshow: Best of Banksy

Banksy at the Bristol City Museum

Listen again

Dear all,

Find in these links below the audio tracks you heard this week in your listening test. Remember we listened to three different tasks. You may want to do them all again, with your exam sheet, but do not look at the answers I gave you in class until you're done with the listening questions.

Part 1: Feng Shui

Part 2: Charles Duke

Part 3: Headings

An interview with pianist Keith Jarret

Listen to this interview with pianist Keith Jarrett and relax... The speakers speak slow, the interview is accompanied by music, and the questions I'm posing below shouldn't be too difficult for you to answer, so this exercise is meant to make listening comprehension not a stressful but a relaxing experience ;-)

1. On April 9th 2011, Jarrett presented the album he had been working on for two years. True or false?

2. What factors does the pianist mention as guiding his compositions?

3. What does the pianist mean by having "an out-of-the-body experience"?

4. What's the disadvantage of playing solo, according to Jarrett?

5. The story Jarrett is telling in his last album is the story of his divorce. True or false?

6. Having played for so many years makes it easier for the pianist to perform in front of an audience. True or false?

7. According to Jarrett, it was the atmosphere in Rio that determined the success of his concert. True or false?

Click on this link to read the transcript