Skip to main content

What Would Kids Do If They Were Rich?

That is the question that some BBC reporters asked a few children back in 1979 for the programme Junior That's Life. The answer is this funny video clip about the perception of wealth by innocent children that can be found on BBC Archive. 

Some of the most interesting words you can come across in this video are: cabbages, lettuce, carrots, a platinum ball, a display cabinet, a pistol, miserable, a piggy bank, a booby, jolly [rich], to polish, silly me! This video with subtitles can be watched by B2 students and above.

This video can be used to end a class about the topic "Money" with a touch of humour.  Here you can find a speaking task to discuss "Attitudes to Money",  and you can add a split reading task about two historical figures of Capitalism in the USA, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, which come with a simple vocabulary matching task with a key entitled "The Birth of Capitalism (... and Philanthropy)".  All these tasks are suitable for C1 students and even for B2 students.

Some of the most interesting words you will find in the Rockefeller biography are: a business trust, a partnership, [wealth] to soar, targeted [philanthropy], the hookworm, a trustee, a clerk, a janitor, [to feel] righteous, [transportation] rebates, pitiless, a grasping [monopoly], the boom and bust [of the business cycle], to rack up [profits], a well, a pipeline, to top out, a breakup, stock, to be broken up, [the companies' combined net worth rose] fivefold.

And in the Carnegie text: steel [industry], parlance, a bobbin [factory], a bill logger, [two companies] to merge, a pension fund, an oil derrick, a bond, a rags to riches [story], a dispute, unrest, to peak, staunch [anti-union sensibilities], to lock [the union] out, a lockout, to crush, a pivotal [demonstration], strikebreakers, to be tied in [for an assassination attempt].


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Benefits Of Healthy eating Turmeric every day for the body

One teaspoon of turmeric a day to prevent inflammation, accumulation of toxins, pain, and the outbreak of cancer.  Yes, turmeric has been known since 2.5 centuries ago in India, as a plant anti-inflammatory / inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and also have a good detox properties, now proven to prevent Alzheimer's disease and cancer. Turmeric prevents inflammation:  For people who
Post a Comment
Read more

Women and children overboard

It's the  Catch-22  of clinical trials: to protect pregnant women and children from the risks of untested drugs....we don't test drugs adequately for them. In the last few decades , we've been more concerned about the harms of research than of inadequately tested treatments for everyone, in fact. But for "vulnerable populations,"  like pregnant women and children, the default was to exclude them. And just in case any women might be, or might become, pregnant, it was often easier just to exclude us all from trials. It got so bad, that by the late 1990s, the FDA realized regulations and more for pregnant women - and women generally - had to change. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) took action too. And so few drugs had enough safety and efficacy information for children that, even in official circles, children were being called "therapeutic orphans."  Action began on that, too. There is still a long way to go. But this month there was a sign that
Post a Comment
Read more

Not a word was spoken (but many were learned)

Video is often used in the EFL classroom for listening comprehension activities, facilitating discussions and, of course, language work. But how can you exploit silent films without any language in them? Since developing learners' linguistic resources should be our primary goal (well, at least the blogger behind the blog thinks so), here are four suggestions on how language (grammar and vocabulary) can be generated from silent clips. Split-viewing Split-viewing is an information gap activity where the class is split into groups with one group facing the screen and the other with their back to the screen. The ones facing the screen than report on what they have seen - this can be done WHILE as well as AFTER they watch. Alternatively, students who are not watching (the ones sitting with their backs to the screen) can be send out of the classroom and come up with a list of the questions to ask the 'watching group'. This works particularly well with action or crime scenes with
Post a Comment
Read more