Humor4u

  Australian social media celebrity  Supercar Blondie  shows us round a luxury villa in Dubai with a snow room in the extreme heat of the desert. Check it out! If you have $24 million, you may consider buying it! This short video below (9':15") can be watched with subtitles and it is suitable for B2 students and above. The language is cool and informal, and you will find few difficult words: to hang out, a desalination plant, sustainable, an irrigation system, stitching, the hustle and bustle, I feel like a million dollars, soak it up!, an infitity pool, tidal, super VIP, to wave [hello], inspirational [neighbours], a villa, solar power, the groceries, the mainland, make it happen!, a [Swedish] bunker, a sauna, a gym, a massage room, no way!, "glitzer" (a German word which means "glitter" or "purpurina"), ridiculous, layers.

Orbital changes are responsible for the Milankovitch cycles that make Earth move in and out of periods of glaciation, or Ice Ages. In line with these cycles, July insolation has slowly decreased over the last 12,000 years. While insolation was at a peak some 12,000 years ago, temperatures rose only slowly at first, as the ice receded that was formed during the most recent Ice Age. Some previous temperature reconstructions did suggest that a peak on temperature was reached around 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, followed by a decrease in temperature that continued until the industrial age. However, Samantha Bova and colleagues found that most of the records used in such reconstructions represented seasonal temperatures rather than annual ones. They developed a method of evaluating individual records for seasonal bias and after adjusting for this, they found that the mean annual sea surface temperature has been rising steadily for the past 12,000 years, due to retreating ice sheets during the p

Dating is an art, a communication game where you want to show your feelings, but you do not want "to seem too eager".  In this post you can find two articles from The List, a "women's news and lifestyle site with a twist": Texts to Send After a First Date and Things You Should Never Do on a First Date . These two texts are recommended for C1 students, as the vocabulary is very rich in colloquial American slang.  Some of the less frequent words you will find in the dating and texting article are:  nerve-wracking, to feel a spark, super cheesy, flirty, cute, to ghost your date, to hang out with friends, to hit it off, to get the hint , whereas in the second story you will read  frazzled, tardiness, phubbing  (which is a new coinage),  a self-fulfilling prophecy, to feel upbeat/ over-the-top, to moan about, to whine, to brag, a faux-pas, daunting  etc. A full list of the most interesting words in these two articles can be found in the "Glossary of the Blog&qu

by Andrew Glikson It is hard to think of a more Orwellian expression than that describing the increase in toxic atmospheric methane gas as “ gas-led recovery .” Several of the large mass extinctions of species in the geological past are attributed to an increase in atmospheric methane (CH₄), raising the temperature of the atmosphere and depriving the oceans from oxygen. Nowadays a serious danger to the atmosphere and for the life support systems ensues from the accelerated release of methane from melting Arctic permafrost, leaks from ocean sediments and from bogs, triggered by global warming . As if this was not dangerous enough, now methane is extracted as coal-seam-gas (CSG) by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) of coal and oil shale in the US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Methane-bearing formations, located about 300m-1000m underground, are fracked using a mixture of water, sand, chemicals and explosives injected into the rock at high pressure, triggering significant amounts of

NASA data show that 2020 was the hottest year on record. The image below shows that high temperature in 2020 hit Siberia and the Arctic Ocean. In above images, the temperature anomaly is compared to 1951-1980, NASA's default baseline. When using an earlier baseline, the data need to be adjusted. The image below shows a trendline pointing at an 0.31°C adjustment for a 1900 baseline.  Additional adjustment is needed when using a 1750 baseline, while it also makes sense to add further adjustment for higher polar anomalies and for air temperatures over oceans, rather than sea surface water temperatures. In total, a 0.78°C adjustment seems appropriate, as has been applied before, such as in this analysis . For the year 2020, this translates in a temperature rise of 1.8029°C versus the year 1750. Three trends: blue, purple and red Will the global temperature rise to 3°C above 1750 by 2026? The blue trend below is based on 1880-2020 NASA Land+Ocean data and adjusted by 0.78°

Activities for reviewing and recycling the language  from News Quiz 2020 Image credits: Frankie Fouganthin  [CC BY-SA 4.0],  TenAsia  [CC BY 3.0],  U.S. Secretary of Defense   [CC BY 2.0] - via Wikimedia Commons The traditional news quiz has changed its format this year so the follow up, which usually consists of paper-and-pen activities, had to follow suit. I've created a series of interactive online activities on WordWall and LearningApps, which you can adapt if necessary and share with your students. There are also 'traditional' worksheets in Word and PDF, which those of you teaching remotely can display via ScreenShare on Zoom or Teams or simply send to students by email. If you haven't seen News Quiz 2020 - click HERE . See also this Jeopardy version (Advanced level) kindly shared by a colleague of mine, Marlene Saban Accompanying Quizlet sets ( work in progress ):  https://quizlet.com/leosel/folders/news-quiz-2020/ The activities are grouped by level according to

" I Have a Dream ", Dr. Matin Luther King's speech, has inspired several generations of civil rights activists to fight peacefully but unyieldlingly for justice and against any kind of discrimination. American Rhetoric.com ranks " I Have a Dream " as number one in the list of the most influential speeches in the USA, it is powerful, moving, rich in literary and biblical references and very rhythmical -a well-crafted mixture of political speech and Baptist sermon.  You can also watch the whole speech on the YouTube video below.  The speech needs a certain historical introduction, as it contains numerous references to the struggle against segregation laws in the 1950's and 60's, which students will problably miss otherwise. This lesson plan for a two-hour C1 class includes some reading, speaking and vocabulary tasks  (1h 30'), based on extracts from the  Wikipedia's page on the Civil Rights Movement , with a slide presentation to illustrate the

Photo by Victor He on Unsplash Here's the delayed 2020 edition of my traditional news quiz with apologies to my friends and followers. I hope it still arrives in time for your first lesson of the new year. This year's quiz is heavily influenced by the pandemic, which shouldn't come as a surprise! Still it has a considerable dose of non-Covid related new stories from the world of sports, science and entertainment. The unprecedented events of the year call for a slight change in the format of the quiz. As most of you are probably teaching remotely (using Zoom or MS Teams), the quiz is made with Google Slides and Quizizz (which is similar to Kahoot, but better!) and can be used in both traditional and remote teaching scenarios. Another change is that the questions are all multiple choice this time. As usual, the idea is to get through the quiz part of the activity as quickly as possible - and multiple choice helps keep this part short - and devote sufficient time to the langu