Vocabulary

It’s the 22nd day of April. It’s Earth Day!

Earth Day was born in 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco. It is celebrated in more than 192 countries every year.

Events are held to show support for the protection of our natural environment, as well as inspire awareness and appreciation. 

In honour of this important day, here is a set of words and phrases related to the environment and the problems it is facing:

We've put together a small set of common words, phrases and expressions which we think will come in handy for those who follow fashion…
For those of you who aren’t that interested, we still hope this will help you have a conversation about the subject. You never know enough vocabulary, right?

You will find the following phrases useful while speaking English, as well as writing in English.

See what we did there? That was the first example of the idiomatic expression as well as.

We have chosen four different phrases for you. Each one is easy to remember and comes with two examples:

As well as

Meaning:  in addition to something or someone else; also

Examples:

Regular Adjectives

Most adjectives follow one of these rules when making comparatives.

One syllable words add er:

New becomes newer

Two or more syllable words add more first:

Intelligent becomes more intelligent

Words that end in y become ier:

pretty become prettier

Words that end in er add er:

Clever becomes cleverer

Modal verbs are often difficult to learn because they can be used in a variety of situations. They are used with other verbs to express ability, obligation, possibility, and permission.

Let's take a look at some uses.

Can

Can is used with ability ("I can speak English") and possibility ("I can come too").

Being able to spell well in English will improve your reading and writing fluency. It will also help with vocabulary and comprehension.

Spelling is especially important for the written section of IELTS, TOEFL and ESOL English exams. You will lose marks for poor spelling; it will also make it harder for you to get your point across.

Do you agree? How important is being able to spell English words to you?

Take a look at this email sent by a manager to his employees. Pay attention to the orange idioms which all relate to the body. Do you know what they mean?

Note: The tone of this email is informal for a business correspondence. I have used a lot more idioms than you would expect to find in an email. I would not recommend using so many in real-life!

Business Email to Staff

Colleagues,

Collocations refer to words that usually go together. For example, basic collocations are make and do:

We say, I made a mistake, not I do a mistake.

We say, I do my homework, not I make my homework.

Margaret Thatcher, the British female prime minister, has died after a stroke aged 87.

She was elected Prime Minister in 1979 and served for 11 years until she was forced to step down by her party in 1990.

A Soviet journalist called her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.

No one, nobody, none, nothing, neither and no are all examples of negative pronouns. Negative pronouns indicate the non-existence of people or things.

Which one we use depends on the subject of the sentence. We do not use another negative in a clause with nobody, no one or nothing. e.g "I don't do nothing."