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Traditional end-of-year news quiz for the first lesson of the new year Photo by Katherine Cheng [CC BY-ND 2.0] via Flickr  Just as I finished working on this, a thought crossed my mind: perhaps it should have been an end-of-decade news quiz this time? Ah well... Anyhow, in keeping with the tradition, here's an end-of-year quiz based on the hottest news stories of the past year. It's a usual mix of politics, sports and entertainment - but no mention of Brexit whatsoever! And as usual, it's packed with lots of lexical chunks and other vocabulary items for your students to explore. The quiz is available in two levels: - Intermediate (B1+/B2-) including a multiple choice version - Advanced (B2/C1 or higher) Both versions can be downloaded in Word format if you wish to adapt them. Some questions are adapted from  News Quiz: 2019 in review  in The New York Times The Intermediate level quiz has been checked using  English Vocabulary Profile  (EVP) and  VocabProfi...

by Andrew Glikson Earth and climate scientist Australian National University No one knows how to impose 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius limits on the mean global temperature, unless drawdown/carbon sequestration of atmospheric CO₂ is attempted, nor are drawdown methods normally discussed in most political or economic forums. According to Kevin Drum (2019) ,  “Meeting the climate goals of the Paris Agreement is going to be nearly impossible without removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere” . The release of some 910 billion tons of carbon dioxide is leading human society, indeed much of nature, to an existential impasse. The widest chasm has developed between what climate science is indicating and between climate policies and negotiations controlled by governments, politicians, economists and journalists—none of whom fully comprehends, or is telling the whole truth about, the full consequences of the current trend in the atmosphere-ocean-land system. The evidence for future projection...

The Conservative candidate Boris Johnson has recently won the general elections in the UK with a big majority. The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) has also made important gains, and the Labour Party, on the other hand has suffered a crushing defeat, as it has lost several safe seats in its traditional heartlands in the North of England. Here you can read a report on the key points of the election results. And here you can find all the election results and a map to see where each party won their seats.  A very interesting, interactive page by the BBC News. Both these texts and the video with subtitles should be accessible to B2 students.

Above image depicts how humans could go extinct as early as 2020. The image was created with NASA LOTI 1880-Nov.2019 data, 0.78°C adjusted to reflect ocean air temperatures (as opposed to sea surface temperatures), to reflect higher polar temperature anomalies (as opposed to leaving out 'missing' data) and to reflect a 1750 baseline (as opposed to a 1951-1980 baseline), with two trends added. Blue: a long-term trend based on Jan.1880-Nov.2019 data. Red: a short-term trend, based on Jan.2009-Nov.2019 data, to illustrate El Niño/La Niña variability and how El Niño could be the catalyst to trigger huge methane releases from the Arctic Ocean. How was above image created? Let's first look at the baseline. The NASA default baseline is 1951-1980. The added trend in the image below shows early 1900s data to be well below this 1951-1980 baseline. In this analysis, a 0.28°C adjustment was therefore used to reflect this, and to reflect a 1750 baseline, a further 0.3°C was used, adding...

I first mentioned Quizlet in a blog post in 2013 . Over the past six years it has become a staple in many EFL/ESL classrooms. These days whenever I ask participants of my workshops to indicate by a show of hands whether they are familiar with Quizlet, almost every hand in the room goes up. That is with a rare exception of my recent session at TESOL Italy, where, to my utter surprise, none of the 10  or so participants had heard of this wonderful online tool. But even those who do actively use Quizlet are not always aware of the 'offline' opportunities it affords. In this post I'd like to share 10 'offline'  (i.e. paper-based) activities you can do in the classroom using your Quizlet sets. The activities below require printing Quizlet sets using various layouts - mostly small cards. At the moment of writing this, the Print function was nested under the More button (three dots). Printing instructions (for activities 1 - 7) In the More menu click on Print, then follow ...