Laughter is the best medicine:
1. Do not insult my intelligence or I will turn on the TV
"In a quarrel with her husband in front of a switched off TV, but holding in her hand the remote control, she threatens him: I´m going to switch on the TV in Big Brother Brazil; if I've got to have my intelligence insulted I would rather it were done by experts "
2. I owe my mother:
a) My mother taught me and my brother TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE
"If you're going to kill each other, do it outside. I just finished cleaning."
b) My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS
"Shut your mouth and eat your supper."
c) My mother taught me IRONY.
"Keep crying and I'll give you something to cry about."
BASIC ENGLISH REVIEW
4. THE ARTICLES
• DEFINITE ARTICLE
• INDEFINITE ARTICLES
4.1 THE ARTICLE the: WHEN USED AND NOT USED
a) Used before a noun of which there is only one: ‘the earth’; ‘the sea’; ‘the sun’; ‘the weather’.
b)Used with definite specific reference: ‘where is the pen I bought’?; ‘the girl that I met’; ‘the man with the dog’.
c) Used before the noun which represents only one particular thing: ‘I went to the doctor’ [= my own doctor]; ‘please pass the dictionary’ [= the one on the table]; ‘what’s the climate like’? [= the one of the area being discussed].
d) Used before names of seas, rivers, chains of mountains, group of islands and plural names of countries: ‘the Atlantic (Ocean)’; ‘the São Francisco (River)’; ‘the Andes’; ‘the Malvinas (or ‘the Falklands’); ‘the USA’; ‘the Netherlands’.
e) Not used before the names of seasons: ‘in summer, the whales go to the North-east coast of Brazil’; ‘in autumn (BrE; or fall, AmE) the leaves become yellow’; but ‘after the winter is over, the birds will return’; ‘the population size increases in the spring’.
f) When the is used and not used before home, church, market, school, hospital ... : ‘She went home’, but ‘this was the home of her parents for many years’; ‘we go to church to pray’ but ‘I went to the church to see the priest’; ‘we go to hospital as patients’ but ‘he went to the hospital to talk to the doctor’; ‘she went to school’ [= the school as an institution] but ‘her mother went into the school’ [= the school as a building]. The following nouns take the: cathedral, office, cinema, theatre; ex.: ‘he is at the office’; ‘they went to the cinema/theatre’.
g) When the is used and not used: ‘at sunrise/sunset’ but ‘admire the sunrise/sunset’; ‘at dusk’ but ‘we see nothing in the dusk’; ‘at night/by night’ but ‘wake up in the night’; ‘at/before/after lunch/breakfast’: ‘I have breakfast at 7 am’ (BrE; AM, AmE) but ‘I enjoyed the lunch/breakfast’.
h) See the other uses and not uses: ‘from beginning to end’ but ‘from the beginning of the day to the end of it’; ‘from right to left’ but ‘keep to the right/left’; ‘from north to south’ but he lives in the south’.
i) Definite article is used before newspapers: ‘the New York Times’; ‘the Observer’, ‘the Economist’; but not before magazines and periodicals / journals: ‘Scientific American’; ‘Time’; ‘Newsweek’.
j) In unique meaning and partitive meaning: ‘during Easter’ / ‘during the Easter of that year’; ‘in England’ / ‘in the England of Queen Victoria’; ‘in London’ / ‘in the London I like’.
4.2 THE INDEFINITE ARTICLES a AND an :WHEN USED AND NOT USED
a) The form a is used before a consonant or a vowel sounded like a consonant: ‘a man’; ‘a woman’; ‘a hat’; ‘a university’; ‘a useful thing’; ‘a young woman’.
b) The form an is used before words beginning with a vowel: ‘an hour’; ‘an honourable man’; ‘an egg’; ‘an elephant’.
c) The indefinite is used before certain numerical expressions: ‘a couple’; ‘a dozen’; ‘half a dozen’; ‘a thousand’; ‘a million’; ‘a lot of ...’; ‘a great many’. It is used also with few (a small number) ‘a few friends’ and with little (a small amount) ‘a little time’.
d) In expressions of price, speed, ratio ...: ‘ten pence a kilo’; ‘sixty kilometres an hour’; ‘four times a day’; ‘a pound a metre’.
4.3 EXERCISES
A or an ?
1 .....elephant 7 .....half-hour lesson 13 .....hand
2 .....university 8 .....one-hour lesson 14 .....underpass
3 .....umbrella 9. .....useful book 15 .....unit
4 .....ticket 10.....SOS 16 .....CD
5 .....VIP 11.....X-ray 17 .....exam
6 .....honest man 12.....European 18 .....school
N.B. Notice that some of the words above are pronounced as if they start with a consonant. Examples: a university (the letter u sounds like y, a consonant); an SOS (the letter S is pronounced “es”).
Put a/an or one
.....day last year, it was ..... very hot afternoon in June and I was hurrying to get home. I was about ..... hour late; well, to be precise, exactly ..... hour and ten minutes: I had taken the train that arrived at the station at 6:15. Anyway, there was ..... woman standing under the trees, and there were several children with her. I saw ..... child clearly and she was ..... lovely dark-haired girl, but I only heard the others. Suddenly ..... strange thing happened. The girl took some stones and leaves out of her pocket, and threw ..... stone after another into the air.
Put the where necessary
There must be something wrong with me. ..... people usually think that ..... babies are sweet and ..... teenagers are annoying. Not me. I think ..... babies are boring. For me, ..... children are only interesting from about ..... age of two, when you can understand ..... things that they say. But ..... time between ages thirteen and twenty are ..... years that I like best. Oh, it’s difficult at times, but I still prefer talking about ..... money with a teenager to cleaning a baby’s bottom.
SCIENTIFIC TEXT
Most of today’s cities don’t even come close to being self-sustaining; they survive only by importing food, water, energy, minerals, and other resources from nearby and distant farmlands, forests, mines, and watersheds. They also produce enormous quantities of wastes that can pollute air, water, and land within and outside their boundaries.
Urban areas generally have relatively few trees, shrubs, or other natural vegetation that absorb air pollutants, give off oxygen, help cool the air, muffle noise, provide wildlife habitats, and give aesthetic pleasure. ‘Most cities are places where they cut down the trees and then name the streets after them’.
Urbanization alters the local climate. Cities are generally warmer, rainier, foggier, and cloudier than suburbs and nearby rural areas. Tall buildings and paved streets and parking areas absorb heat and obstruct cooling winds. Rainfall runs off so fast that little standing water is available to cool the air through evaporation. This combination of effects creates an urban heat island. Cities can save money and counteract the heat-island effect by instituting tree-planting programs, requiring lighter and more reflective paints and building materials, adding light-colored sand to asphalt to increase reflectivity.
As cities grow and their water demands increase, expensive reservoirs and canals must be built and deeper wells drilled. The transfer of water to urban areas deprives rural and wild areas of surface water and sometimes depletes groundwater faster than it is replenished. Large unbroken expanses of concrete or asphalt can also prevent precipitation from entering the soil to renew groundwater.
Urban residents are generally subjected to much higher concentrations of pollutants than are rural residents. Litter and garbage are abundant in slums and squatter villages, where solid-waste pickup services often don’t exist. These conditions invite the spread of disease.
N.B. The title of this text is: URBAN RESOURCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS
4.1 QUESTIONS
1. Use the appropriate word (on the left) to the sentence:
pleasure ‘Urban areas generally have relatively few trees, shrubs, or other wildlife natural vegetation that ............... air
pollutants,.........oxygen, help
cool .........the air, ..............noise,
provide...........habitat and give
muffle aesthetic ......................’.
give off
absorb
2. What would happen to temperature if reflective paints and building materials were utilized in urban areas?
3. The adjectives of the comparative forms, below, are: warmer..................; rainier..................; foggier.................; and cloudier...................... .
4. Why rural and wild areas might be deprived of water?
5. Match the questions and answers:
1) Why do urban areas have higher temperature? A) Food, water, minerals are
imported from surroundings.
2) Are heat islands created in urban and B) Because water demand
rural areas? increases in cities.
3) Why are rural and wild areas deprived of C) A tree-planting program.
water?
4) Which kind of resources are not provided
by cities? D) Because buildings,paved
streets, parking areas,
absorb heat and obstruct
cooling winds.
5) What would be necessary to absorb
pollutants, cool the air and muffle noise?
E) In urban areas only.
ANSWERS TO QUESTION 5:
1D
2E
3B
4A
5C
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