The Festive Season in a Part of Africa

Two days after Christmas a Zulu woman and her schoolboy son sat waiting for me to finish my morning's clinic in Ondini. She wanted me to visit her old mother's cow, which had a calf waiting to be born. But for two days now the calf would not come out, and the poor cow was getting very tired. 'We have heard that you are a good vet,' the woman said to me.

So off we went. The schoolboy in the front of my pick-up, to show me the way, and the woman and my assistant Mbambo in the back.

Download this story

http://www.oup-bookworms.com/teachers-only.cfm

Activity

Use the lesson plan provided with last month's free story. Once students have listened to the Audio Hook, ask them how many of these things they think will happen in the story:

http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.com/pdf/elt/promo/bookworms/teaching_notes1.pdf

The cow dies	The cow has a calf
The vet is very expensive	The vet agrees a good price

After your students have read the story, put them in pairs and ask them to discuss why the vet said that half of 2,000 rands was 750, not 1,000. When they have finished their discussion, ask them to look at these two ideas, and decide which one they agree with:

1. He made a mistake because he was not good at numbers.
2. He did not really make a mistake; he wanted to give Granny a good price because it was the festive season.

Your students can also read an interview with the Author of this story on our website.

Reading tip

Include DEAR time in your lesson plans (Drop Everything And Read). Make sure that students always have a book with them in class, and from time to time announce 15 or 20 minutes DEAR time. Everybody reads, including the teacher, which demonstrates the value of reading and helps to establish a reading community. Oxford Bookworms Series Editor Jennifer Bassett For more tips visit our ask the experts web page.

Don't miss next month's free story at oup.com/bookworms
http://elt-marketing.oup.com/q/12hMXEFcSrOo7/wv

Blind Masseurs

This week, we find out about an interesting challenge to an employment law in South Korea. The law was passed in 1963 and stops people who aren't blind from taking jobs as massage therapists. Is this law absolutely crucial to one group of people whilst being unfair to others? Yvonne Archer is joined by William Kremer as she looks at a very difficult issue.

This week's question: Approximately how many people in the world are living with a disability of some kind?

a) 2%
b) 10%
c) 12%

You'll hear the answer at the end of the programme!


Vocabulary from the programme

a massage therapist
someone who uses his or her hands and fingers to rub different areas of the head, limbs and body to help stop pain or increase movement

masseurs
male massage therapists, but also used for females

masseuses
female massage therapists, never used for males

decades
tens of years ? a decade is ten years

cannot cope with demand
is unable to manage and complete all the work there is to do on time

awash with
literally, covered in water, but here, used as an adjective to describe a place where there are lots of people

Example sentence:
"During the summer months, the streets are awash with people."

barbers' shops
a place where people, usually men, pay to have their hair cut

sighted
able to see

practitioners
people who do something that's practical

non-visually impaired
able to see, having no problems with eyesight

constitutional court
a legal court where laws are made or changed

a monopoly
an exclusive right to do something

patronising
treating people as though they are children, have little intelligence or are of little importance

---

Extras
Download this programme (mp3 - 2.8 MB)
Programme script (pdf - 40K)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/specials/144_6minute/

This month's Free Story

She watched him pack his clothes and his wedding suit into his old suitcase. She could smell his cologne. When did he last wear cologne? Ah, at their wedding. It smelt strange then too. She never wore perfume. What use was perfume to a working woman like her? And married women who wear perfume are looking for lovers, trying to catch other men. That’s what people say. She already had a good, hardworking husband with a shop of his own. What more can a woman want? Download this story Use the lesson plan provided with last month's free story. This time, as you play the Audio Hook, give your students a copy of the picture on page 3 of the free story. Then ask them these questions about the picture: How do the people in the picture feel? Whose wedding is the husband going to? Can you guess? Ask your students: Why do you think the author wrote this story? How long did she take to write it? Encourage students to find out by reading the interview with the author. http://www.oup-bookworms.com/teachers-only.cfm

Millions tune in to find out who shot J.R.

On this day in 1980, 350 million people around the world tune in to television's popular primetime drama "Dallas" to find out who shot J.R. Ewing, the character fans loved to hate. J.R. had been shot on the season-ending episode the previous March 21, which now stands as one of television's most famous cliffhangers. The plot twist inspired widespread media coverage and left America wondering "Who shot J.R.?" for the next eight months. The November 21 episode solved the mystery, identifying Kristin Shepard, J.R.'s wife's sister and his former mistress, as the culprit.

The CBS television network debuted the first five-episode pilot season of "Dallas" in 1978; it went on to run for another 12 full-length seasons. The first show of its kind, "Dallas" was dubbed a "primetime soap opera" for its serial plots and dramatic tales of moral excess. The show revolved around the relations of two Texas oil families: the wealthy, successful Ewing family and the perpetually down-on-their-luck Barnes family. The families' patriarchs, Jock Ewing and Digger Barnes, were former partners locked in a years-long feud over oil fields Barnes claimed had been stolen by Ewing. Ewing's youngest son Bobby (Patrick Duffy) and Barnes' daughter Pam (Victoria Principal) had married, linking the battling clans even more closely. The character of J.R. Ewing, Bobby's oldest brother and a greedy, conniving, womanizing scoundrel, was played by Larry Hagman.

As J.R. had many enemies, audiences were hard-pressed to guess who was responsible for his attempted murder. That summer, the question "Who Shot J.R.?" entered the national lexicon, becoming a popular t-shirt slogan, and heightening anticipation of the soap's third season, which was to air in the fall. After a much-talked-about contract dispute with Hagman was finally settled, the season was delayed because of a Screen Actors Guild strike, much to the dismay of "Dallas" fans. When it finally aired, the episode revealing J.R.'s shooter became one of television's most watched shows, with an audience of 83 million people in the U.S. alone--a full 76 percent of all U.S. televisions on that night were tuned in--and helped put "Dallas" into greater worldwide circulation. It also popularized the use of the cliffhanger by television writers.

The shooting of J.R. wasn't "Dallas'" only notorious plot twist. In September 1986, fans learned that the entire previous season, in which main character Bobby Ewing had died, was merely a dream of Pam's. The show's writers had killed the Bobby character off because Duffy had decided to leave the show. When he agreed to return, they featured him stepping out of the shower on the season-ending cliffhanger, and then were forced the next season to explain his sudden reappearance.

The last premiere episode of "Dallas" aired on May 3, 1991. A spin-off, "Knots Landing," aired from December 27, 1979 until May 13, 1993. "Dallas" remains in syndication around the world.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=VideoArticle&id=52279

First barrel ride down Niagara Falls

October 24: General Interest

1901 : First barrel ride down Niagara Falls

On this day in 1901, a 63-year-old schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to take the plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel.After her husband died in the Civil War, the New York-born Taylor moved all over the U. S. before settling in Bay City, Michigan, around 1898. In July 1901, while reading an article about the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, she learned of the growing popularity of two enormous waterfalls located on the border of upstate New York and Canada. Strapped for cash and seeking fame, Taylor came up with the perfect attention-getting stunt: She would go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.Taylor was not the first person to attempt the plunge over the famous falls. In October 1829, Sam Patch, known as the Yankee Leaper, survived jumping down the 175-foot Horseshoe Falls of the Niagara River, on the Canadian side of the border. More than 70 years later, Taylor chose to take the ride on her birthday, October 24. (She claimed she was in her 40s, but genealogical records later showed she was 63.) With the help of two assistants, Taylor strapped herself into a leather harness inside an old wooden pickle barrel five feet high and three feet in diameter. With cushions lining the barrel to break her fall, Taylor was towed by a small boat into the middle of the fast-flowing Niagara River and cut loose.Knocked violently from side to side by the rapids and then propelled over the edge of Horseshoe Falls, Taylor reached the shore alive, if a bit battered, around 20 minutes after her journey began. After a brief flurry of photo-ops and speaking engagements, Taylor's fame cooled, and she was unable to make the fortune for which she had hoped. She did, however, inspire a number of copy-cat daredevils. Between 1901 and 1995, 15 people went over the falls; 10 of them survived. Among those who died were Jesse Sharp, who took the plunge in a kayak in 1990, and Robert Overcracker, who used a jet ski in 1995. No matter the method, going over Niagara Falls is illegal, and survivors face charges and stiff fines on either side of the border.

Words in the news

Young Britons shy away from learning languages
Figures show that most teenagers in the UK have no foreign language skills, and this has an economic impact.
Download transcript & vocabulary (21 K pdf)

Bagatela

Es algo de poco valor o de poca importancia. Proviene del italiano bagattelle, lengua en la cual también tiene el significado de ‘cosa sin importancia’. La palabra se formó en italiano a partir del bajo latín baga (pequeña prenda de ropa) cuyo diminutivo era bagatta. El vocablo original ya aludía a algo pequeño y el diminutivo a algo menor aun, pero el italiano se caracteriza por tener en ciertos casos un diminutivo del diminutivo (Ver fettucine), de modo que bagatta tiene el diminutivo bagattella, algo realmente insignificante. La palabra llegó también al francés bagatelle, con el mismo significado.El etimólogo alemán del siglo XIX Hugo Schuchardt, por su parte, sugiere que el origen no sería baga sino baca, que en latín significaba ‘pequeño objeto redondo’ pero, en todo caso, la evolución posterior de la palabra sería la misma. En la primera edición del Diccionario de la Academia, bagatela aparecía así definida:
Cosa menuda, de poca substancia, sin valor.
http://www.elcastellano.org