Fake or Real? I

... I know you guys were all heart broken the other day in class... But believe me, it's always better when we see and face reality as it is, and are not deceived by the appearances, don't you think? Now you can tell your friends that the poor lemmings never commited suicide. It's been a ubiquitous myth, but we buy it no more. And where does that myth come from? In 1958 Walt Disney produced White Wilderness, part of the studio's True Life Adventure series. This documentary featured a segment on lemmings, detailing their strange compulsion to commit mass suicide. But this was all fake! In fact, it was staged: the lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off the cliff by Disney filmmakers! The epic "lemming migration" was staged using careful editing, tight camera angles and a few dozen lemmings running on a snow covered turntable.
As Karl S. Kruszelnicki puts it in his article, considering a company like Disney, where one rodent, namely Mickey Mouse, was Royalty, it's rather odd to think that Disney could be so unkind to another rodent, the lemming...

Read more about the lemming suicide myth here

¡Este jueves hacemos huelga!

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

Mayday!

This is a very short video to cheer you up, guys: It will help us realize that Spanish speakers are not the only ones struggling to catch what British say... and terribly missing the point sometimes!

German Coastguard Sinking

And remember: the only way to make progress is actually putting the foot in it, hopefully not in such dire circumstances as the poor German coastguard above!

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

Food for Thought: TV Series Made in America

A few weeks ago we were discussing  parenthood issues in class, remember? We actually watched one episode of Modern Family, in which we saw three  intertwined families dealing with their garden-variety family life, from the most stereotypical one to the gay couple and their adopted Vietnamese girl. Well, after watching it we had a class-discussion on the different issues depicted, and one of your fellow students wrote up a review which brings up one issue we didn't comment on but it's certainly important. Please, click on the link below to find out more about this. Thanks, Garasi, for your work and for sharing your opinion with us.

Garasi's review of Modern Family