What is a palindromic number?

Nuevos alumnos

EL PAÍS News in English

'A reward for terrorism'

Dear readers,

Spain, Ireland, and Norway this week announced they will formally recognize the State of Palestine on May 28, bucking a historical trend among Western nations to leave the issue to one side. While 143 of the 193 member states of the United Nations have taken the step, many of the world’s most powerful countries, notably G7 members including the U.S., the UK, France, Germany, and Italy, have not. (...)

‌EL PAÍS visited the front lines of the renewed Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region, accompanying a Ukrainian police special operations unit on a civilian extraction mission. Only around 300 inhabitants remain in Vovchansk, the main target of a new Russian lightning military campaign launched on May 10, from a pre-war population of some 17,000. The vast majority have fled or been evacuated and those that remain, a member of the unit explained, are often “pro-Russian.” “The police have been told that if they leave, the city will be occupied by the “banderistas,” he said, using a common expression in Russia to refer to followers of the 1930s Ukrainian ultranationalist leader Stepan Bandera.

We also reported on the dangers posed by the proliferation of satellites orbiting Earth, which could have detrimental effects on the ability of planetary defense systems to detect asteroid impacts and near-Earth objects. Companies such as SpaceX, OneWeb, and Amazon are engaged in a satellite space race, with Elon Musk’s Starlink planning to reach 42,000 devices in the coming years. (...).

We hope you enjoy this selection of stories

You can also read:

• The ‘new’ Latino-American
• The best photos of the Milky Way of 2024 (final 25 photos selected from more than 5,000 entries)
• Diplomatic crisis with Spain helps Argentina’s Milei cover up his domestic battles
• Linguists, biologists and publicists, the new experts setting up as ‘prompts engineers’ for ChatGPT
• The hell that is ‘sextortion’: ‘Tomorrow your contacts will receive you-know-what if you don’t pay up’

Making Decisions

Compound Adjectives

EL PAÍS News in English

Gazans face a new Nakba

Dear readers,

May 15 marked the anniversary of the Nakba, “catastrophe” in Arabic, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled during the creation of the State of Israel during the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948. Seventy-six years later, Palestinians are again being displaced as the Israeli offensive in the Strip continues in Rafah, with renewed fighting in the north against Hamas militants in areas where the fundamentalist militias had been declared “dismantled.” Some 450,000 Gazans have now evacuated Rafah, the last refuge for the majority of the Strip’s population, many having been previously displaced from other areas earlier in the war. (...)

In the U.S., President Joe Biden has challenged presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump to two debates in June and September, ahead of the November election. The two presidential candidates have been sparring over the issue for weeks, with the Trump camp announcing in April that the former president is “willing to debate anytime, anyplace and anywhere.” Picking up the gauntlet, Biden said he had heard Trump “was free on Wednesdays,” in reference to the weekly recess in the ongoing hush money trial against the Republican in New York. CNN and ABC News secured the broadcast rights to the debates, which are scheduled to be held on June 27 and September 10.

Elsewhere this week, Iberian killer whales returned to the headlines by sinking a sailboat in the Strait of Gibraltar between Morocco and Spain, the seventh vessel the orcas have been attributed with sending to the bottom of the sea since 2020. This curious behavior by the so-called Gladys orcas, a pod of 15 killer whales, has attracted global interest given the cetaceans’ prolific modus operandi. However, experts believe that these are not intentional attacks, but rather learned behavior that may be related to their curiosity, their fondness for play, or some form of caution. (...).

We hope you enjoy this selection of stories

You can also read:

• One factor reduces by a third the probability of dying after a stroke: social class
• ‘They were killed for being lesbians’: Attack on women burned alive shocks Argentina
• Humans are one of the species that spend the most amount of energy on having a baby
• Young Spaniards are losing their ability to accumulate wealth
• The napkin deal that brought Messi to Barça drives auction for thousands of dollars

ALUMNOS OFICIALES Información convocatoria ordinaria MAYO 2024

Revise all the info for the exams on the EOI CT website.

>5 tips for reducing exam stress and anxiety

Read all the tips and put them into practice.

Prepositions Meanings in some Phrasals

Topic Vocabulary

These are some of the words you should use if you have to speak / write about these topics.

Listening CHALLENGE

Try these two short Lucy's listening challenges!

C2 Cleft Sentences

We use cleft sentences, especially in speaking, to connect what is already understood to what is new to the listener. 

In a cleft sentence, a single message is divided (cleft) into two clauses. This allows us to focus on the new information.

Conjunctions (2)

Read the sentences and pay attention to the meaning, use and punctuation of conjunctions. They always connect words, phrases or clauses.

British Culture: Clever comebacks for "jokes" By Lucy

Read the pdf. document here and do the activities.

Has relying on tech made us more stupid?

Read the article by OneStopEnglish /The Guardian and do the activities. 

Key.

EL PAÍS News in English

From immigration to inflation

Dear readers,

This week we reported on what seems to be a concerted effort by several European nations to recognize Palestinian statehood ahead of the EU elections. We also analyzed the results of a survey of EU citizens reflecting their biggest concerns, from immigration to inflation.

‌In the Americas, we examined a controversial development project in a protected mangrove in Ecuador; the company behind the plan is owned by the president's wife. We also unveiled new information about the probe into the looting of Venezuela's state-owned oil company.

But our top story this week was a science article about how our cells, and not our DNA, are the masters of human destiny. The biologist Alfonso Martínez Arias defends that genes do not define the uniqueness of a person.

We hope you enjoy this selection of stories
 

• You can also read:
• Porn for women: Can it really be feminist or ethical?
• Pierre Boulle: The spy who invented ‘Planet of the Apes,’ a world with intelligent gorillas and humans with lazy brains
• Digital body language: How non-verbal communication works on social media
• Vaping now more common than smoking among young people – and the risks go beyond lung and brain damage
• The cost of being a Taylor Swift fan

Oral Practice (by Splendid Speaking)

This entry is almost 13 years old, but still useful:

Try the following Splendid Speaking Activities to rehearse both the speech and the interaction parts of the oral exam:
Technology, Music, Language Learning, Jobs, Environmental Concerns, Cultural Attractions, Jobs, Eating Habits, Travel, Money, People, Home Sweet Home, Work, Life, Personality, Sport and Fitness, Cinema & TV, National Festivals.
Remember there are many other topics, all of which can be checked here ... and don't forget this.

Interactive Speaking Practice

Here are some different ways in which people communicate and a question for you to discuss. First you have some time to look at the task. (1 min.) 

For the following 5 minutes, talk to each other about the advantages and disadvantages of communicating in these different ways and then decide which two ways of communicating are the least effective. [Adapted from Cambridge Assessment]

C1 Writing Exam Practice

The following documents are taken from Cambridge C1 Advanced Teaching Tips for Writing and, though not exactly the same as EOI's exams, you may learn how to do the tasks and check the way they are corrected:

Tasks

Sample Answers & Comments

Common Verb Collocations

Write down the ones you didn't know and make at least a sentence with each of them.

Conjunctions (1)

Read the sentences and pay attention to the meaning, use and punctuation of conjunctions. They always connect words, phrases or clauses.

Adverbs

 Check adverbs and their position in the sentence!

Writing Tips

 

Key to Mediation activity

Compare your (written) mediation version to this suggested one.

C1 & C2 Oral Exam Practice & Times

The following cards can be used to practise the oral exam:

C1: Oral Production

       Oral Coproduction (more)

C2: Oral Production

      Oral Coproduction

Times for preparation and exposition of oral tasks 

Nouns + Prepositions

Mediation activity

Read this text and do either a written (as in the document rubric) or oral mediation (in 3 mins). Thanks Asun!

Suggested KEY tomorrow

Trinomials

Binomials 2

 

EL PAÍS News in English

Biden faces his Vietnam over Gaza protests

Dear readers,

Observers have described the protests against the Gaza war sweeping across U.S. university campuses as President Joe Biden’s Vietnam, in reference to the 1968 demonstrations that coincided with the Democratic convention in Chicago. Coincidentally, Biden will be anointed as the party’s official candidate for the November presidential election in the same city later this year, a prospect that frightens many Democrats who remember how disastrously the convention five and half decades ago played out amid street protests. The president’s political future is increasingly seen as being inextricably linked to securing a ceasefire, and the more distant prospect of a lasting peace, in Gaza ahead of a presidential ballot that is expected to be decided by extremely fine margins and where the Democrats do not enjoy nearly as much support among younger voters as they did in 2020.

In the international sphere, EL PAÍS analyzed another of Washington’s open fronts in the global geopolitical tussle, Africa, where U.S. influence in the fight against jihadist terrorism in the Sahel is increasingly on the wane with Russia waiting in the wings to exert its influence in countries such as Niger and Chad, which have both called for the withdrawal of American forces stationed on their soil. (...).

‌We also spoke to Jean-Michel Claverie, professor emeritus of genomics at Aix-Marseille University in France, who has spent his long career studying potential threats to humanity lurking in the regions of the planet covered in permafrost. Claverie has recently found five new families of viruses, known as “zombie viruses,” in samples up to 48,500 years old taken from seven different places in Siberia. (...).

We hope you enjoy this selection of articles from El País USA Edition.

You can also read:

• Paul Auster, a life in in images. I recommend you read 4 3 2 1 and the New York Trilogy: superb!
• Life is hell for the poor in Cartagena, where sexual exploitation starts in childhood.
• The cost of being a Taylor Swift fan
• Rubén Baler, neuroscientist: ‘We are guinea pigs. Our attention has become a profitable commodity’
• Gender shapes health: Women live longer but with poorer quality of life
• Carmen Estrada, neuroscientist: ‘Science and God cannot coexist’
• From Mariana Enriquez’s chaos to the perfect workspace: What the disorder of our work desk says about us

C1 / C2 Revise Passive Reporting Structures

Do some of the exercises on this blog. You needn't do all of them, just a couple of each to revise the different structures.

Prepositions TEST

 Advanced Prepositions TEST

Revise (if necessary)

Questions for Teenagers (you might answer as well even if you're not one of them).

Oral Exam INFO

Let's Communicate