Get ready to read

A
The world beater
Elicit that you might expect an article with this heading to be 
about athletics or another kind of sport.
1–2
Get students to work through Exercises 1 and 2, and then 
get feedback.
3–4
Get students to skim to fi nd the answers to Exercise 3 and 
then discuss Exercise 4 as a class. Tell the class that another 
commonly-used rhetorical question is 
Why do these things 
always happen to me?
. It is making the point that things 
always go wrong for the speaker, and it does not require a 
response.
5–7
Get students to work through these exercises individually, 
checking with a partner and/or the whole class after each 
exercise. They could read the rest of the article at http://www.
timesonline.co.uk/tol//life and style/article680936.ece.
More activities
Set up the word circle game which is mentioned in 
Get 
ready to read 
above. Ask nine students to suggest a letter 
each and then another student to choose which letter should 
be the central letter. Students work on their own or in pairs to 
make as many words as they can with the letters. Set a time 
limit (three minutes, say) and then check answers.
Ask one student to read out his/her list. This student scores 
points for every word he/she has made that no-one else has 
made (two points for a two-letter word, three points for a 
three-letter word, etc.); the other students cross off words on 
their list as they hear them read out. Repeat this procedure 
with other students until no one has any words on their list 
that are not crossed off. The winner is the student with the 
most points after you have checked all the words. 
PHOTOCOPIABLE
 
© Cambridge University Press 2008
B