Game on Grammar (eslgamesplus)

Hi all~~!

This is an interesting grammar practice site for ESL student.

http://www.eslgamesplus.com/past-simple-irregular-verbs-esl-grammar-interactive-activity-online/

It also has many other games for practicing different grammars or vocabulary learning activities. check it out!

NOTE: If you find other interesting English learning sites, please post in the links! Much appreciated!! ^^


from Jerry-sir

The Hospital Window

Warm-up question:
If your best friend becomes blind because of an accident, what will you do to help?
A. Buy him or her a pair of sunglasses
B. give him or her a walking stick
C. send him or her to a special school for the blind
D. get him or her a guide dog
E. keep him or her company 24 hours a day
F. others

Activity:
Take out a pen and paper. Draw out what the view is like outside the window according to the old man's description.


Reading:

A young man and an old man shared a hospital room. The young man was recovering well from eye surgery, but the old man was still quite ill. The two men talked for hours every day, and they became good friends.

Every morning, a nurse would bring them breakfast and open the window of the room. The young man always turned away from the window sadly because he couldn't see anything. The old man realized this, he he would try to describe all the things outside the window to his friend.

"It's a lovely day. Young couples are walking arm in arm around the lake. Some ducks and swans are swimming on the water. The kids are playing with their model boats. They are jumping up and down with joy. You'll get to see those beautiful things very soon," the old man encouraged him.

Day after day, the old man described the view in detail. The young man would then imagine the colorful world. Sometimes, he even smiled in his sleep.



Check point:
Now compare your drawing with your classmates. What are the differences and similarities between your drawing and the others?



Reading: (continued)

Days and weeks passed. It wad time for the young man to remove his bandage. He would finally be able to see the world again. Before he was wheeled out of the room, he turned around and said to the old man, "I will be right back. Let's enjoy the view together!" The old man gave him a smile.

When the young man returned, he was shocked because the old man was not there. He padded sways during his nap. The young man walked over to the old man's bed and looked out the window. Surprisingly, he saw nothing but a wall. "The old man couldn't even see this wall," the nurse said. "He was blind."

Tears fell from the young man's eyes. "Thank you," he whispered.


Question:

What is the main idea of "The Hospital Window"?
A. A white lie is always needed.
B. It is important to have an old friend when you are sick.
C. Love and care give people hope.
D. A wall is always there among modern people.

True or false?
____ The old man could see everything outside the window.
____ After eye surgery, the two enjoyed the window view together in the hospital.
____ The young man was pleased to find the wall behind the window.
____ The old man described things, such as couples, ducks, swans, and model boats. But none of them were real.


Reflection:
Write a reflection paragraph after reading this story. Also, write about what you think regarding the following passage:

The late world superstar Michael Jackson said: If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happen in between can be dealt with. What is the power of love and caring?

(Text source: 龍騰高職英文第ㄧ冊，龍騰文化出版，2013）

To find out what Jerry-sir saw when he opened the Hospital Window, click on the link:
media3.handmadecharlotte.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/spiderman-window-washer2.jpg

Shakespearean Thor from BBC Culture

BBC Culture:

Finding Shakespeare in Thor: The Dark World

8 November 2013
By Solvej Schou

There is more in common between the Bard and blockbusters than men in tights, says Solvej Schou.

“You are a vain, greedy, cruel boy,” snarls Sir Anthony Hopkins as the white-haired and bearded god Odin to his rebellious son in 2011’s Marvel Studios film Thor.

“You are an old man and a fool!” howls Thor, played by toned, blond Chris Hemsworth, before he and his mythic hammer are cast out of their celestial home to the doldrums of Earth.   

That blistering exchange, ripe with Freudian father-son tension, disappointment and bravado, could come straight out of Shakespeare, from a tragedy like King Lear or Hamlet. And Tom Hiddleston’s quest for power in the film and in last year’s Marvel box office hit The Avengers is pure Macbeth.

Opening in US cinemas this weekend, Thor: The Dark World is filled with sibling rivalry, hubris and paternal frustration. Once again it shows the lasting influence of William Shakespeare in superhero films and in other big budget fantasy and adventure movies that dominate the big screen.

“Stan Lee, who edited and wrote most of the early Marvel comics, was heavily influenced by Shakespeare,” says Stuart Moore, co-author of the Marvel tie-in book The Art of Thor: The Dark World. “It's evident in everything from the language the gods use to the larger themes behind the stories.”

The playwright’s the thing

In multiplexes aroundthe world, Marvel Studios’ franchises rub shoulders with the X-Men, Hobbit and James Bond films. And increasingly, these genre movies attract classically-trained, heavyweight British actors like Anthony Hopkins, and also Royal Shakespeare Company alumni Sir Kenneth Branagh, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Patrick Stewart, Dame Judi Dench and Dame Helen Mirren, to name a few.

“I guess great Shakespeare actors like McKellen, Dench, Mirren, Branagh and company have the capacity to scale the heights of human emotion that Shakespeare charts in roles like Lear, Hamlet, and Cleopatra,” notes Gregory Doran, artistic director of the UK’s Royal Shakespeare Company. “He challenges an actor to go to the limits of human experience, and find the surprising elements of humor and pathos, the absurd and the pathetic, at the very edges of catastrophe. Perhaps that’s why they have the ability to play the almost superhuman scale that science fiction and fantasy demand.”

Genre roles exist on a superhuman scale. They are made for movie-going masses who love high drama and strong heroes with cracks underneath their skin. And the Shakespearean backgrounds of the actors involved add respectability to material often dismissed as lowbrow.

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, both Shakespearean juggernauts who have taken the title role in Macbeth on stage, battle against each other as Magneto and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men series, including the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past. McKellen will also reprise his Lord of the Rings turn as the wise wizard Gandalf in December’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

Helen Mirren is best known to film buffs for her stately Oscar-winning role in 2006’s The Queen, but Shakespeare aficionados might first recall her work on stage in Troilus and Cressida and As You Like It. She vamps it up as an assassin in the comic book film RED (2010) and this year’s sequel RED 2. Judi Dench, with Shakespeare stage credits including Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Lady Macbeth, has played steely British secret service boss M in seven popular James Bond movies.

It might be tempting to think these theatrical heavyweights take on pop culture roles just for the money. But that is not so, says Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. “There’s a lot of resonance with Shakespeare in these stories, and it's probably a comfortable, perhaps even nostalgic, mode for the actors. I would never accuse those fine women and men [of being] cash-grabbers, but let's say that these movies are cost-effective for them. They're not big budget romantic leads. It's probably the biggest possible payday they can enjoy. And they're in the company of other great actors.”

Of gods and monsters

Shakespeare loved to map a hero’s upward and downward journey and show how a tragic flaw or moral weakness makes them come unstuck. His tragedies, based on Greek, Roman, Danish-Nordic and English history and legends, are stuffed with elements of betrayal, lust, sibling and parental rivalry, supernatural beings, witches and ghosts.

Still, there is comedy too, with a royal fool or clever commoners as silly yet truthful commentators. Writer-director Joss Whedon added some saucy dialogue worthy of a fool to his superhero ensemble piece The Avengers, and followed it up with this year’s black-and-white version of the Bard’s tart romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing.

The first Thor film was directed by Kenneth Branagh, who has starred in and overseen a slew of Shakespeare film adaptations, including Henry V, Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost and his own version of Much Ado About Nothing. In Thor he sets up the Shakespearean motif of brother versus brother, vying for and defying their godly father’s approval to take his throne.

Its follow-up, Thor: The Dark World, directed by Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor, places Thor at the center of a epic fight to save Earth from the marauding Dark Elves. For help he enlists the untrustworthy Loki, a role taken by Hiddleston, a fan favourite bred on Shakespeare. He told told GeekExchange.com and other outlets that he and Branagh discussed the similarities between cheeky, scheming Loki and the illegitimate son Edmund in King Lear. In Shakespeare’s play, Edmund grows up in the shadow of the Earl of Gloucester’s legitimate heir, Edgar, just as Loki, Odin’s adopted son, the bastard offspring of a Frost Giant, was raised alongside Thor – and like Edmund, Loki plots to betray his brother. Thor himself takes after Prince Hal, the young, petulant heir to the throne who is a letdown to his royal father but later matures to become King Henry V.

“Thor: The Dark World features kings, commoners, family betrayals, invading armies, and troops dispatched in defense of the realm,” says Moore. “Despite the low-culture trappings of comic book films, they're the closest thing in modern entertainment to the kind of grand-scale melodrama that Shakespeare trafficked in.”

original post from BBC: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20131108-shakespeare-and-superheroes

Grimm's stories are not ordinary fairytales (BBC Culture)

 1 August 2013

Are Grimm’s Fairy Tales too twisted for children?

by Stephen Evans

Stephen Evans explores the twisted world of Grimm's Fairy Tales – bedtime stories complete with mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest.

On the covers are the most innocent of titles: Grimm’s Fairy Tales in their English version or Children’s and Household Tales in the original German editions published two hundred years ago. Nice tales for nice children.

But behind the safe titles lie dark stories of sex and violence – tales of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest, as one academic puts it. They are far from anything we might imagine as acceptable today. If they were a video game, there would be calls to ban them.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were writing in a different world. They lived in the town of Kassel in Germany and studied law and language as well as writing more than 150 stories which they published in two volumes between 1812 and 1814.

Some stories have fallen out of favour but some – Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White – seem eternal. They have morphed into countless adaptations; Disney disneyfied them and new filmmakers and novelists continue to rework them. Comics from Japanese Manga to the erotic and ‘adult’ depict the characters of the Grimm brothers’ tales.

But even in their original, they are far from saccharine, according to Maria Tatar, professor of Germanic folklore and mythology at Harvard University: “These tales are not politically correct. They are full of sex and violence. In Snow White, the stepmother asks for the lungs and liver of the little girl. She's just seven years old and she's been taken into the woods by the huntsman. That’s pretty scary.

“And then the evil stepmother is made to dance to death in red-hot iron shoes. In Cinderella, you’ve got the stepsisters whose heels and toes are cut off.”

Adult themes

These tales of gore and sexuality – John Updike called them the pornography of an earlier age – are still going strong. “I can't even keep track of the number of new versions of Snow White,” says Professor Tatar. “And these aren't just Disney productions – you have film-makers making very adult versions of the fairy tales, drawing out the perverse sexuality of some of these tales.”

They are tales of right and wrong. There are clear morals to be drawn – deception and dishonesty are punished; honest hard work is rewarded; promises must be honoured; beware of strangers – and especially the forest. 

But that can’t be the enduring appeal. Moralistic lectures never entertained anyone – but gory tales of suspense are a different thing. They do have an eternal following. As Professor Tatar puts it: “They give us these ‘what if’ scenarios – what if the most terrible thing that I can imagine happened? – but they give us these scenarios in the safe space of ‘once upon a time’. I'm going to tell you the story and I'm going to show you how this hero or this heroine manages to come out of it alive.” And not just alive, but also ‘happily ever after’.

It’s clear that many children love the gory bits. And it’s clear that many parents don’t. A survey last year found that many reported that their children had been left in tears by the gruesome fate of Little Red Riding Hood. Some parents wouldn’t read Rumpelstiltskin to their children because it was about kidnapping and execution. And many parents felt that Cinderella was a bad role model for daughters because she did housework all day.

Some pop culture versions of the tales have sugar-coated their more unpalatable aspects. It’s true that the Cinderella made by Disney in 1950 is a work of schlock – the titles of the songs (A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes”, Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo and Sing Sweet Nightingale) give the flavour. But Disney’s older animated versions of Grimm Fairy Tales are much darker.

“In Snow White which was made in 1937,” says Professor Tatar, “the Wicked Queen goes down into the basement where she's got a chemistry set which she's going to use to turn the apple into a poisoned apple. There are ravens down there and skulls and mysterious dusty tomes.

“And then she transforms herself into an old hag. She goes from the fairest of all to the ugliest of all. 

“I think that's really an adult moment which enacts our anxieties about aging. First, her voice changes and then her hands begin to change and there she is a decrepit old woman.

“I think Disney picked up on the scariness of fairy tales as something which appeals to both children and adults”.

Evil thoughts

You get a flavour of these debates and nuances in the town of Kassel in Germany at the moment. It’s where the two brothers grew up and lived (in the same house, Wilhelm married to Henriette; Jacob single until his death). 

There have been productions of some of the tales in the Botanical Gardens and a thought-provoking exhibition in the city’s documenta-Halle. It displays the original publications of the tales and the dictionaries and other works produced by the brothers. 

But the most interesting exhibits are the ones designed to make people think. There are videos of glossy perfume adverts featuring a radiant Little Red Riding Hood taming the wolf with her fragrance. There is a section marked “No Access for Minors?” where, behind a thick curtain, you can  read the most violent extracts from the tales through slits in the wall.

One of the curators, Louisa Dench, said these extracts show that good triumphs over evil and that the bad get punished. There are clear choices. “There is good and there is bad and you know what’s good and what’s bad and there’s no question about it. And that’s very understandable for children. It’s very clear, and good always wins. That’s important”.

She thinks the secret of the enduring appeal is that much is left to the imagination.  “You have only limited characterisation so there’s a lot you can imagine yourself,” she says. “If someone reads them to you, your mind can build up its own picture.  That’s part of the magic”. 

It is a magic based on fantasy and that may be what protects the tales from the unmitigated wrath of parents. Children – some children – do seem to like the darkness of horror but, perhaps, not if it becomes too realistic. Some parents feel uneasy about tales for children where a child's hands are cut off (The Girl without Hands) or where a man is pushed down stairs (The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was) – but children know it is fantasy.

Their fantastical darkness may have protected today's video games from the wrath of tougher laws. Two years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down a lower court's ruling that video games should be banned. Justice Scalia ruled that depictions of violence had never been regulated. “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,” he wrote, referring to the gory plots of Snow White, Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel.

Grim, indeed. And exciting, too, to generations of children and adults for two hundred years – and perhaps for another two hundred.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20130801-too-grimm-for-children

Reading: Seattle

Read the article in the link, and then aswer the questions. Type in the answers below. Good luck!

I. Introduction
http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-West/Seattle-Introduction.html

1. What is the nickname of Seattle?

2. What kinds of services does Seattle offer now and then?

3. How is the weather in Seattle?


II.  Geography
http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-West/Seattle-Geography-and-Climate.html

3. What rivers and mountains surround Seattle?

4. What are the weathers like in winter and in summer?

5. How is the weathe rusually like in Seattle?


III. History
http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-West/Seattle-History.html

6. When the European settler first came here in 1851, they stayed Alki Point and then moved on to another place. Where is this place called?

7. Why did they name the city "Seattle"?

8. In 1889, what happened?  And how did this event change the look of the city, especially to the building?

9.  In the last decade of the 19th century, why did Seattle become the main port for both land and sea?

10. Which company, estalished in 1916, become an important industry for Seattle?

11. Which international event took place in Seattle in 1962 and made Seattle a tourist and entertainment center?

12. Which Canadian city is Seattle close to?