Show someone they’re loved this Christmas
The two-minute clip shows a six-year-old called Lily trying to reach an old man who lives alone in a hut on the moon.
She spies him through the family telescope.
Lily watches on as our man goes about his chores, all alone up there.
She becomes determined to get something to the moon, to send him a message and show him that someone down here is thinking of him.
But nothing – bow and arrow, paper aeroplane or snail mail – can reach him.
When Christmas Day comes around, a tree is plonked in the living room, presents are promptly unwrapped, and Lily is surrounded by family.
The old man gets a gift of his own: a classic telescope, delivered to him in a cloud of colourful helium balloons.
There are tears when they finally lock eyes.
The music is ‘Half the World Away’ performed by Aurora, the original song was by Oasis.
The advert is a bit of a tear-jerker, the company has teamed up with the charity Age UK to raise awareness of loneliness and the aged at Christmas in particular – this is the reason we are showing it here.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1u9Lid9E3E[/embedyt]
Modern communication problems
I guess there is quite a lot of irony in sharing a video that damns modern communication on mediums which are being criticised for the isolation of people and modern communication problems.
The thing is, we all have these excellent tools, but just how good are they?
Well, the tools are excellent, as most would agree, but what about the way we use them?
You, reading this post, wherever in the world you are, is proof that the tools are fantastic – opening up avenues that only a generation ago, people would never have dreamed of existing.
When Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “Global village” in the 1960s there was little indication of the plethora of technologies that would, three decades later, make the world a “global city”.
The main issue is that many have substituted these marvelous technologies for any real human contact and communication, to varying degrees.
Have you ever tried to speak to your Internet or mobile phone provider, just to iron out an issue?
I don’t mean by email or instant messaging or chat – I mean actually talking to a human being.
Have you ever been on a car journey with teenagers?
Communication isn’t just about words.
I wonder if these tools contribute to the decline in writing and reading skills, of memory and attention spans.
Vincent Mosco argued that there are problems with the “death-of-distance” and “end-of geography” metaphors in modern communication technology – we can send multiple messages all over the world, quicker than ever.
Although social and cultural values and connections cannot be completely recreated through virtual reality.
We can [almost] certainly say that the utopia promised by new technologies comes with significant and interrelated physical and cultural challenges that need further investigation – maybe only time will tell, as the great Bob Marley so aptly put it.
Although, I’m sure that a lot of us will agree that not all is bad.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tyJUCYSFE8[/embedyt]
Should you trust your first impressions?
You can’t help it; sometimes, you just get a bad feeling about someone that’s hard to shake.
So, what’s happening in your brain when you make that critical (and often lasting) first judgment?
Peter Mende-Siedlecki shares the social psychology of first impressions — and why they may indicate that, deep down, people are basically good.
After watching the video, have a look at this activity that you can do with other learners or with friends. Primacy and Recency Memory activity.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK0NzsGRceg[/embedyt]
Phrasal Verbs with Across, down and get
A phrasal verb is an idiomatic phrase consisting of a verb and another element, typically either an adverb, as in break down, or a preposition, for example see to, or a combination of both, such as look down upon.
They are notoriously difficult for foreign language learners to grasp and to learn, usually because second language learners do one of two things, both of which are futile :
- They try to translate the phrasal ver back into their own language.
- They try to look for some form of logic or pattern in phrasal verbs.
The term phrasal verb is commonly applied to two or three distinct but related constructions in English: a verb and a particle and/or a preposition co-occur forming a single semantic unit.
This semantic unit cannot be understood based upon the meanings of the individual parts in isolation, but rather it can be taken as a whole.
In other words, the meaning is non-compositional and thus unpredictable.
Phrasal verbs that include a preposition are known as prepositional verbs and phrasal verbs that include a particle are also known as particle verbs.
Additional alternative terms for phrasal verb are compound verb, verb-adverb combination, verb-particle construction, two-part word/verb, and three-part word/verb (depending on the number of particles), and multi-word verb.
In this crossword, we will be looking at Phrasal Verbs with Across, down and get – you may also find some alternative meaning to some of the phrasal verbs in the crossword – if you do, why not post your definitions in the comments?
The lights went out
Last week I turned off the light in my room and jumped into my bed that was 3 meters away from the switch before the room got dark.
How can it be true?
The Fork in The Road
You are travelling down a country lane to a distant village.
You reach a fork in the road and find a pair of identical twin sisters standing there.
- One standing on the road to village and the other standing on the road to neverland (of course, you don’t know or see where each road leads).
- One of the sisters always tells the truth and the other always lies (of course, you don’t know who is lying).
- Both sisters know where the roads go.
You are allowed to ask only one question to one of the sisters to find the correct road to the village.
What question do you ask?
