DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?

ENGLISH VOCABULARY IN USE ELEMENTARY LEVEL TEST

1 I _________________ in my English lessons.

A got a good time B have got a good time C have a good time

2 You can _____________________ skiing, swimming, dancing and shopping.

A make B do C take D go

3 ‘What _______________________?’ ‘I’m listening to music’.

A are you doing B do you do C do you like doing

4 ________________________this morning.

A I did a coffee B I made a coffee C I’m doing a coffee

5 What time did you _____________________last night?

A come home B come to home C come back to home

6 How ______________________to get to the airport?

A long it is B much C long does it take D far

7 Please can you turn the TV ______________________? I can’t hear it!

A off B on C down D up

8 I ____________________ very well with my sister.

A get out B get on C get up D get over

9 He ____________________ goodbye.

A told B said me C said

10 You can ______________________train, plane and bicycle.

A catch B miss C go by

11 ______________________is the sixth month of the year.

A July B June C January D May

12 Laura’s _______________________at the moment but she’ll be back in ten minutes.

A out B abroad C here

13 The driver sits at the ______________________of the bus.

A side B beginning C middle D front

14 She drives _______________________.

A good B well C slow D fastly

15 ‘The weather’s nice today’. ‘Yes, it’s _________________________ .’

A terrible B lovely C dreadful

16 ‘Jacek is so easy-going’. ‘Yes, he’s always ________________________.’

A happy B lovely C relaxed D kind

17 This house is ______________________.

A very quite B very quiet C very quietly

18 ‘Kate has a husband now’. ‘Yes, she’s _______________________.’

A single B widowed C divorced D married

19 This is my niece– my _______________________.

A brother’s son B brother’s daughter C aunt’s sister.

20 Your ________________________is not part of your leg.

A thumb B toe C knee D foot

21 I’m ________________________a green shirt.

A wearing B having C carrying

22 He’s _________________________. He should eat more.

A too thin B slim C handsome

23 Take an aspirin for ________________________.

A headaches B asthma C hay-fever D vomiting

24 ‘Sad’ is the opposite of ______________________.

A hot B happy C ill D well

25 ‘I passed my exam!’ ‘_______________________ ’

A Bless you! B Good luck! C Cheers! D Congratulations!

26 Steffi is Swiss. She’s from ___________________________.

A Switzerland B Holland C Sweden

27 We saw some lightening, then we heard loud _______________________ .

A thunder B fog C snow

28 You can borrow books from the _______________________.

A post offi ce B bookshop C library D town hall

29 A _______________________has lots of trees.

A village B field C forest D river

30 ______________________live on a farm.

A Snakes B Sheep C Elephants D Fish

31 You see the word ________________________at the train station.

A check in B platform C boarding card D flight

32 ‘EXIT’ means ______________________.

A go out B go in C go up

33 _______________________is red and soft.

A A banana B An orange C An apple D A strawberry

34 You find _____________________in the kitchen.

A shampoo B saucepans C wardrobes

35 You find an alarm clock, wardrobe and chest of drawers in the ________________________ .

A bathroom B kitchen C bedroom

36 You keep books on a ______________________.

A bookshelf B sofa C armchair D dining table

37 A doctor works ______________________.

A in a shop B in an offi ce C in a factory D at the hospital

38 When you finish university you ______________________.

A give a lecture B do a course C get a degree D take notes

39 ________________________is not part of a computer.

A An email B A screen C A mouse D A keyboard

40 We want to take the car with us so we’re going by ______________________.

A plane B ferry C train

41 You go to the _____________________to buy lipstick, aspirin and toothpaste.

A book shop B butcher C toy shop D chemist

42 ‘Have you booked a room?’ ‘Yes, I _______________________.’

A have a reservation B would like a double room C checked in

43 ‘___________________________ ’ ‘Yes, I’ll have fish and salad’.

A What do you want? B Are you ready to order? C Is everything all right?

44 She plays _________________________everyday.

A swimming B karate C running D tennis

45 A _______________________is about ghosts or dead people.

A horror film B musical C comedy D western

46 Shall we ______________________a DVD tonight?

A see B listen to C watch D look at

47 A _______________________ attacked me in the street and stole my bag.

A terrorist B mugger C vandal D robber

48 A _________________________ is often on TV every day and is about people’s lives.

A talk show B cartoon C documentary D soap opera

49 Can you repair my TV? _________________________.

A It’s untidy B It isn’t working C It’s out of order D It’s crashed

50 A ________________________is a type of natural disaster.

A strike B hurricane C car crash D war

Check answers at: http://shimansky.biz/dl/pdf/english_vocabulary_in_use_elementary_level_test.pdf

ADJECTIVES

Got home from camping last spring.
Saw people, places and things.
We barely had arrived,
Friends asked us to describe
The people, places and every last thing.
So we unpacked our adjectives.

I unpacked "frustrating" first.
Reached in and found the word "worst".
Then I picked "soggy" and
Next I picked "foggy" and
Then I was ready to tell them my tale.
'Cause I'd unpacked my adjectives.

Adjectives are words you use to really describe things,
Handy words to carry around.
Days are sunny or they're rainy
Boys are dumb or else they're brainy
Adjectives can show you which way.

Adjectives are often used to help us compare things,
To say how thin, how fat, how short, how tall.
Girls who are tall can get taller,
Boys who are small can get smaller,
Till one is the tallest
And the other's the smallest of all.

We hiked along without care.
Then we ran into a bear.
He was a hairy bear,
He was a scary bear,
We beat a hasty retreat from his lair.
And described him with adjectives.

}} {Whoah! Boy, that was one big, ugly bear!}

{You can even make adjectives out of the other parts of speech, like
verbs or nouns. All you have to do is tack on an ending, like "ic"
or "ish" or "ary". For example, this boy can grow up to be a huge
man, but still have a boyish face. "Boy" is a noun, but the ending
"ish" makes it an adjective. "Boyish": that describes the huge
man's face. Get it?}

Next time you go on a trip,
Remember this little tip:
The minute you get back,
They'll ask you this and that,
You can describe people, places and things...
Simply unpack your adjectives.
You can do it with adjectives.
Tell them 'bout it with adjectives.
You can shout it with adjectives

THE CONVENIENCE SOCIETY, OR CON FOR SHORT (by Bill Bryson, Notes from a Big Country)

OUR SUBJECT today is convenience in America, and how the more convenient things supposedly get, the more inconvenient they in fact become.

I was thinking about this the other day (I'm always thinking, you know - it's amazing) when I took my younger children to a Burger King for lunch, and there was a line of about a dozen cars at the drive-through window. Now, a drive-through window is not, despite its promising name, a window you drive through, but a window you drive up to and collect your food from, having placed your order over a speakerphone along the way; the idea is to provide quick takeaway food for those in a hurry.

We parked, went in, ordered and ate, and came out again, all in about 10 minutes. As we departed, I noticed that a white pickup truck that had been last in the queue when we arrived was still four or five cars back from collecting its food. It would have been much quicker if the driver had parked like us, and gone in and got his food himself, but he would never have thought that way because the drive-through window is supposed to be speedier and more convenient.

You see my point, of course. Americans have become so attached to the idea of convenience that they will put up with almost any inconvenience to achieve it. It's crazy, but there you are. The things that are supposed to speed up and simplify our lives more often than not have the opposite effect, and this set me to thinking (see, there I go again) why this should be.

Americans have always had a strange devotion to the idea of assisted ease. It is an interesting fact that nearly all the everyday inventions that take the struggle out of life - escalators, automatic doors, passenger lifts, refrigerators, washing machines, frozen food, fast food - were invented in America, or at least first widely embraced here. Americans grew so used to seeing a steady stream of labour-saving advances, in fact, that by the Sixties they had come to expect machines to do pretty much everything for them.

I remember that the moment I first realised that this was not necessarily a good idea was at Christmas of 1961 or '62, when my father was given an electric carving-knife. It was an early model, and rather formidable. Perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me, but I have a clear impression of him donning goggles and heavy rubber gloves before plugging it in. What is certainly true is that when he sank it into the turkey it didn't so much carve the bird as send pieces of it flying everywhere in a kind of fleshy white spray, before the blade struck the plate with a shower of blue sparks, and the whole thing flew out of his hands and skittered across the table and out of the room, like a creature from a Gremlins movie. I don't believe we ever saw it again, though we used sometimes to hear it thumping against table legs late at night.

Like most patriotic Americans, my father was forever buying gizmos that proved to be disastrous - clothes steamers that failed to take the wrinkles out of suits but had wallpaper falling off the walls in whole sheets, an electric pencil sharpener that could consume an entire pencil (including the metal ferrule and the tips of your fingers if you weren't real quick) in less than a second, a water pick (which is, for those of you who don't know, a water-jet device which "blast-cleans" your teeth) that was so lively, it required two people to hold and left the bathroom looking like the inside of a car wash.

But all of this was as nothing compared with the situation today. Americans are now surrounded with items that do things for them to an almost absurd degree - automatic cat-food dispensers, refrigerators that make their own ice cubes, automatic car windows, disposable tooth-brushes that come with the toothpaste already loaded. People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: the more labour-saving appliances they buy, the harder they need to work; the harder they work, the more labour-saving appliances they feel they need. There is nothing, no matter how ridiculous, that won't find a receptive audience in America so long as it promises to provide some kind of relief from effort. I recently saw advertised, for $39.95, a "lighted, revolving tie rack". You push a button and it parades each of your ties before you, saving you the exhausting ordeal of making your selection by hand.

Our house in New Hampshire came replete with contraptions installed by earlier owners, all of them designed to make life that little bit easier. Up to a point, a few really do (my favourite, of course, being the garbage disposal unit), but most are just kind of wondrously useless. One of our rooms, for instance, came equipped with automatic curtains. You flick a switch on the wall and four pairs of curtains effortlessly open or close. That, at any rate, is the idea. In practice what happens is that one opens, one closes, one opens and closes repeatedly, and one does nothing at all for five minutes and then starts to emit smoke. We haven't gone anywhere near them since the first week.

Something else we inherited was an automatic garage door opener. In theory this sounds wonderful, and even rather classy. You sweep into the driveway, push a button on a remote control unit and then, depending on your sense of timing, pull into the garage smoothly or take the bottom panel off the door. Then you flick the button again and the door shuts behind you, and anyone walking past thinks: "Wow! Classy guy!"

In reality, I have found, our garage door will close only when it is certain of crushing a tricycle or mangling a rake, and, once closed, will not open again until I get up on a chair and do something temperamental to the control box with a screwdriver and hammer, and eventually call in the garage door repairman, a fellow named Jake who has been taking his holidays in the Maldives since we became his clients. I have given Jake more money than I earned in my first four years out of college, and still I don't have a garage door I can count on.

You see my point again. Automatic curtains and garage doors, electric cat-food dispensers and revolving tie racks only seem to make life easier. In fact, all they do is add expense and complication to your existence.

And therein lie our two important lessons of the day. First, never forget that the first syllable of convenience is con. And second, send your children to garage-door repair school.