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Issue #041 -- Week 15/02/15-21/02/15 February 24, 2015 |
Hello,Greetings and General InformationI've had some joy lately, hearing from my Chinese friends who are having a good time during their New Year break - the Spring Festival. Thank you for your wishes, wǒ de péngyǒu! (=my friends) A warm welcome to our new subscribers! I wish you will find My English Club fun and instructive and I look forward to welcome you as a new valued member soon. Read, learn and communicate around the world! Please feel free to contribute to these pages when you have a minute. They are meant to be a platform for exchanging ideas, stories and opinions - an ideal medium for practicing your English, which should be used to the full. Together, let's bring it alive, let's make it the welcoming community you wished for, when you joined. Use the Comments facility at the end of every page and start making friends worldwide. You and your friends can always subscribe individually through the form on My English Club If anybody mentions to you that they are interested in receiving it, please tell them this - many thanks. Also, they can read the previous issues on Back Issues for English Corner E-zine. Month 6 ~ Lesson 25We started studying three subjects back in September 2014: pronunciation and grammar for improving your communication skills, as well as website design and development, for applying your English in practice once you get skilful in English and website building. Once we covered the basics of pronunciation, we started a new course in reading. In our reading course we started to work on some reading skills for the TOEFL exam, for those of you who are contemplating this in the future. This is particularly useful to my current students, who need to take this exam as part of their Level 5 course in Reading/Writing, this being the main reason for which I started this section. Until I shall have the time to create my planned e-books from these courses, you can find our past lessons for free, as follows: Pronunciation: Reading ~ Inferring (=guessing) Rhetorical PurposeReading Skills for TOEFL [8] In some of the questions during the TOEFL exam you may be asked to explain why the author includes certain words, phrases, or sentences in a passage. Occasionally, an author includes these words or phrases for no other reason than just to improve the overall presentation of the ideas or of the passage, not specifically to give the reader extra information. Sometimes you have people asking certain questions to which they don’t expect an answer – they are called rhetorical questions. An example would be “Nice weather, isn’t it?” In an exam, in a question asking you about this kind of information in the text, you must decide which of four multiple-choice answers best explains why the author chose to include the highlighted information. For you to decide this, you must first look at how the highlighted information fits into the overall presentation of ideas in the passage rather than only looking at the highlighted information itself. Let’s look at an example: The Magnetosphere “The magnetosphere is the region of space in which Earth’s magnetic field, which is due to currents in Earth’s iron-rich core, is dominant. Rather than having a spherical shape around the Earth, the magnetosphere has the look of a teardrop, with a tail pointing away from the Sun. On Earth’s sunward side, solar winds serve to compress the magnetosphere, while on Earth’s opposite side, interaction with the solar wind draws on Earth’s opposite side, interaction with the solar wind draws the magnetosphere into a tail that extends well beyond the orbit of the Moon. Question: Why does the author mention “a teardrop” in the passage? A) To indicate that the magnetosphere consists of liquids In this question, you are asked to explain why the author mentions “a teardrop” in the passage. To answer this question, you must look at the information around “a teardrop” to see how it fits into the ideas around it. The author states that the magnetosphere has the look of a teardrop, with a tail pointing away from the Sun. From this, it can be determined that the author mentions a teardrop in order to indicate the shape of the magnetosphere. To answer this question correctly, you should click on the last answer: choice D What to remember about questions testing rhetorical purpose: 1) How to identify the question: Find the relevant phrases: 2) Where to find the answer: The targeted information is highlighted in the passage. 3) How to answer the question:
Grammar ~ Emphatic ‘So’ and ‘Such’We were talking about other ways of giving emotions emphasis and we said we were going to look at how to use expressions with ‘so’ and ‘such’. This is another short and easy lesson, as I am very busy nowadays with my own application for some extra studying and this proves to take a lot of my time lately. Nevertheless, it has to end within two weeks and we can return to our normal lesson length then. Let’s start with some examples: "She’s sùch a nice gírl!" These have an emotive emphasis similar to that of exclamations, but their tone is rather ‘gushy’ (meaning very emotional or enthusiastic). The words ‘so’ and ‘such’ are stressed, and for extra emphasis, they may also receive nuclear stress. (Please see Issue 037 for more information on nucleus.) ‘Such’, like ‘what’ acts as a predeterminer, meaning that they are placed in front of a determiner. If you remember, determiners are words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘my’, ‘your’, ‘some’, etc. If you don’t remember this, don’t worry, we need to have a lesson on this matter, so keep reading and you’ll get that e-zine one day. ‘Such’ and ‘what’ both appear before the definite article with singular count nouns, and without an article with plural count nouns and mass nouns. See the examples below: “What a nuisance!” (count noun) ~ “It was such a nuisance!” Website Design ~ Before Registering a Domain NameTime has come for us to make final adjustments and final MKL-evaluating and thinking. MKL, for our newly subscribed readers is the ‘Master Keyword List’ (See Issue 021 for more information on MKL and keywords.) What's your VPP? A Valuable PREselling Proposition ("VPP") answers, in very few words and hopefully with just a touch of character, two critical questions about your Site Concept... • What specific and high-value information does your site deliver? A good VPP transmits these answers loud and clear. And the single best way to do that is to include your VPP in your domain name! Do not be "OVERclever" or subtle here. Include your Site Concept keyword and add the VPP "marketing angle/theme" to it. Make your VPP/concept crystal-clear to your human visitor. And, of course, the engines rank your site a touch higher when your Site Concept keyword is included in your domain name -- so feed it to the spiders. How Wide or Narrow Do You Go? The scope of your niche should be as narrow as possible, yet still offer lots of profit potential! Every success story starts small, then builds. And if you're like most people, you don't have the time to flesh out a big, broad concept all at once. If time is a limiting factor, stay especially narrow. More reasons to go narrow... • It will be tough to win at the SEs (site engines) if your concept is too broad; We shall soon get the ball rolling on registering a domain name. I wonder: did anybody get as interested in this website design business so as to start working on one? Please let me know by replying to this email. This Is It, Folks!I hope you find this information useful and not too confusing. Even though you're in the stage of building on it, have patience at this point in your learning and you'll be able to reap the fruit of your work later on, whichever aspect of our lessons you are concentrating on. A new and valuable addition to the website is the comments feature that can facilitate your communication 24/7 from now on. Your messages will be monitored and accepted or denied, depending on the content and the attitude, but NOT on the grammar, spelling and overall correctness of your input. I have offered the service of correcting messages retrospectively, as a constructive contribution to your continuous improvement. Do participate and make this place feel like a community. Please feel free to comment and suggest your ideas by replying to this email - I look forward to hearing from you. If you wish to chat either with me or with other members worldwide, go to My English Club . Enjoy your holidays and your time with your families! Lucia da Vinci Founder of My English Club |
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