Pronunciation: Consonants and vowels

HOW TO PRONOUNCIATE CONSONANTS

Consonant Sounds are produced by completely or partially stopping the breath. Consonant Sounds can be voiceless (VL, no vibration of the vocal cords) or voiced (VD, vibration of the vocal cords) and often come in sound pairs.

The symbols used for consonants are shown in the following table. Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the left is voiceless, the one to the right voiced. 

Writing: Essay

Essay Structure

Writing an academic essay means fashioning a coherent set of ideas into an argument. As it is a text about an idea, the essay must be a clear well-structured text and make clear for the reader what are the important points of it.

The focus of such an essay predicts its structure. It dictates the information readers need to know and the order in which they need to receive it. Despite of the existence of guidelines to construct certain kind of essays, there is not a set formula to suit all of them.

Answering Questions:  The Parts of an Essay

A typical essay contains many different kinds of information, often located in specialized parts or sections. Introductions and conclusions have fixed places, but other parts don't. Counterargument, for example, may appear within a paragraph, as part of the beginning, or before the ending. Background material (historical context or biographical information, the definition of a key term) often appears at the beginning of the essay, between the introduction and the first analytical section, but might also appear near the beginning of the specific section to which it's relevant.

To help yourself out you can ask to your essay these three following questions, if it can answer them, then your essay is correct, if not it could be seen as a simply observation of a fact.

"What?" 

To answer this question you should give an evidence demostrating that your argument is true. Normally you should put this directly after the introduction. As you are writing about your observations, in this part is where you should write more, but be aware that this part should not occupy more than a third of your finished essay or it will lack balance.

Listening Comprehension: Muhammad Ali's speech

Grammar: Passive Structures

Passive Structures

FUNCTIONS OF THE PASSIVE VOICE

The passive voice is used to show interest in the person or object that experiences an action rather than the person or object that performs the action. In other words, the most important thing or person becomes the subject of the sentence.

EXAMPLES

• The passive voice is used frequently. (= we are interested in the passive voice, not in who uses it.)
• The house was built in 1654. (= we are interested in the house, not in who built it.)
• The road is being repaired. (= we are interested in the road, not in the people who are doing the repairs.)

Sometimes we use the passive voice because we don't know or do not want to express who performed the action.

EXAMPLES

• I noticed that a window had been left open.
• Every year thousands of people are killed on our roads.
• All the cookies have been eaten.
• My car has been stolen!

The passive voice is often used in formal texts. Switching to the active voice will make your writing clearer and easier to read.

Writing: Newspaper Article

Newspaper Articles: Learn How To Nail Them!

There is nothing better than doing something knowing how to rock it, that's why you are going to learn how to become the ultimate journalist, having in mind not only the content but also the way you do it, as you would not take serious any article which has been written in comic sans, for example.

Let's start from the very beginning: decide what to write about! First of all, you must know what topic would you be talking about and, when you have chosen it, you must become an expert, in that way, you will be able explain and tell something you have to understand everything about it.

Once you have decided what to write about, try to write it down as clear as possible, your reader will appreciate it. Write at the beginning a little summary to introduce the rest. Then, tell the main idea and develop it further. Finally, close it up with the main idea of your paper.

Up till now, you have done most of the work, but the content is not everything, the shape is of great importance as reaching your audience is firstly done with an eye-catching appearance, and to do so, you need a catchy title and the right format. The title must be bold,  at least twice bigger than the size of the content of the article, and, something many people do not realize, every first letter of every word has to be Capital. Remember that you can also have a subheading which size will be a bit bigger than the article but smaller than the one of the title, nonetheless, also in bold.

Vocabulary: Technology and Progress

Technology and Progress

From the moment we are born we have no other choice but to to deal with technology, therefore, some basis vocabulary is something really useful for our survival in real life, hence, here we go:

Progress Words

When you write and speak about computers and technology, very often you will be asked to say how technology has changed or progressed.

notes

Progress is an uncountable word, while advance is countable. So you say that "digital technology is an advance" but you cannot say that "digital technology is a progress".

Impact Words

Another common topic is to talk about what effect computer technology has had on our lives.

Quizz: Airbus crisis over

Quizz: Airbus Crisis Over

Grammar: Reflexive verbs

REFLEXIVE VERBS

Reflexive verbs are notional/link verbs with their activity doer/agent and recipient/patient/addressee being the same and expressed by subjects and direct objects correspondingly. 

We use a reflexive pronoun after a transitive verb when the direct object is the same as the subject of the verb. E.g: He blamed himself for the accident.

Some verbs change their meaning slightly when they have a reflexive pronoun as direct object: amuse, apply, busy, content, behave, blame, distance, express, find, help, see.

Reciprocal Reflexives

Reciprocal reflexives denote mutual doer/addressee activity. They are mostly transitive. E.g: She and I kissed [each other].

Autocausatives

Autocausative reflexives denote animate doer passivity. E.g: She got depressed.

Anticausatives

Anticausative reflexives denote inanimate subject passivity. E.g: The door (was/got) opened.

Impersonals/Mediopassives

Impersonal/mediopassive reflexives are intransitive verbs with doers implied. E.g:[They] relax well here. It’s thought that…

Proper Reflexives

Proper/inherent reflexives lack corresponding non-reflexives from which they can be synchronically derived. These are pure intransitive reflexive verbs. Eg:They laugh.

Exercises

Pronunciation: Irregular Verbs

IRREGULAR VERBS

How to pronounce some of these irregular verbs

Infinitive	Simple Past	Past Participle
A
arise	arose	arisen
awake	awakened / awoke	awakened / awoken
B
backslide	backslid	backslidden / backslid
be	was, were	been
bear	bore	born / borne
beat	beat	beaten / beat
become	became	become
begin	began	begun
bend	bent	bent
bet	bet / betted	bet / betted
bid (farewell)	bid / bade	Bidden
bid (offer amount)	bid	Bid
bind	bound	Bound
bite	bit	Bitten
bleed	bled	Bled
blow	blew	Blown
break	broke	Broken
breed	bred	Bred
bring	brought	Brought
broadcast	broadcast / broadcasted	broadcast / broadcasted
browbeat	browbeat	browbeaten / browbeat
build	built	Built
burn	burned / burnt	burned / burnt
burst	burst	burst
bust	busted / bust	busted / bust
buy	bought	bought
C
cast	cast	cast
catch	caught	caught
choose	chose	chosen
cling	clung	clung
clothe	clothed / clad	clothed / clad
come	came	come
cost	cost	cost
creep	crept	crept
crossbreed	crossbred	crossbred
cut	cut	cut
D