If you click here, you will find an example of a Speaking Task:
Speaking
Germany fingerprint shopping
Read the following questions and listen to the radio report.
Say if they are true or false and correct the false ones:
1. The customer pays by credit card.
2. The customer hurts her finger.
3. The customers give their bank details to the shop.
4. With the system described, errors are likely to be made.
5. Shops give you points when you show them your finger.
6. Students in Germany now can eat their food with their fingers.
Listen to the report here: bbc
Now check your answers reading the script:
Germany fingerprint shopping
German consumers are ditching cash and plastic in favour of fingerprint shopping. Specially registered shoppers can pay by placing their finger on a checkout scanner, avoiding the need for cash or payment cards. This report from Steve Rosenberg:
Listen to the story
A supermarket in southern Germany is the setting for a retail revolution. What is changing is not what people are buying, but how they're paying for it. I watch as one customer completes her shopping at the checkout. Instead of reaching for the handbag and taking out cash, or credit cards, or a cheque book, she puts her finger into a scanner and takes a receipt.
She's one of a quarter of a million Germans who now foot their bills with their fingerprints. Turning your digit into a debit card is simple - you just register your bank account details together with your fingerprint in the shop's database. But how safe is it? Ulrich Kipper is the IT manager who developed the system:
ULRICH KIPPER: The probability that fingerprints can be mixed up is one to 10 million. So it's a fairly low probability that we make an error. If you compare it to the likeliness of being out in the night and being robbed, I would say this happens rather frequently, and I would say with the fingerprint system we are fairly on the safe side.
Your digit can also double up as a loyalty card - so as well as paying with your finger, you can also earn points with your pinkie. And it's not just supermarkets. At some German schools, students are now using biometrics to buy their school dinners. Finger food - German style.
Steve Rosenberg, BBC News, Berlin
Listen to the words
a retail revolution
a very significant change in the way that people do their shopping
checkout
the place in a shop, especially a supermarket, where you pay for the things you are buying
foot their bills with their fingerprints
pay for their goods by scanning their fingertips at the checkout
digit
a thumb, toe or, as in this case, finger
mixed up
incorrectly identified (by thinking that someone/something is someone/something else)
double up
have a second use/function
a loyalty card
a special card which you can use in a particular store or supermarket to collect reward points or receive discounts with every purchase
pinkie
a very informal word for little finger
biometrics
analysis of certain biological features using modern technology (in order to identify a person)
Finger food
this is a play on words: literally, finger food is food that you can eat without using knives, forks or spoons; here, food that you pay for using your fingerprint
Say if they are true or false and correct the false ones:
1. The customer pays by credit card.
2. The customer hurts her finger.
3. The customers give their bank details to the shop.
4. With the system described, errors are likely to be made.
5. Shops give you points when you show them your finger.
6. Students in Germany now can eat their food with their fingers.
Listen to the report here: bbc
Now check your answers reading the script:
Germany fingerprint shopping
German consumers are ditching cash and plastic in favour of fingerprint shopping. Specially registered shoppers can pay by placing their finger on a checkout scanner, avoiding the need for cash or payment cards. This report from Steve Rosenberg:
Listen to the story
A supermarket in southern Germany is the setting for a retail revolution. What is changing is not what people are buying, but how they're paying for it. I watch as one customer completes her shopping at the checkout. Instead of reaching for the handbag and taking out cash, or credit cards, or a cheque book, she puts her finger into a scanner and takes a receipt.
She's one of a quarter of a million Germans who now foot their bills with their fingerprints. Turning your digit into a debit card is simple - you just register your bank account details together with your fingerprint in the shop's database. But how safe is it? Ulrich Kipper is the IT manager who developed the system:
ULRICH KIPPER: The probability that fingerprints can be mixed up is one to 10 million. So it's a fairly low probability that we make an error. If you compare it to the likeliness of being out in the night and being robbed, I would say this happens rather frequently, and I would say with the fingerprint system we are fairly on the safe side.
Your digit can also double up as a loyalty card - so as well as paying with your finger, you can also earn points with your pinkie. And it's not just supermarkets. At some German schools, students are now using biometrics to buy their school dinners. Finger food - German style.
Steve Rosenberg, BBC News, Berlin
Listen to the words
a retail revolution
a very significant change in the way that people do their shopping
checkout
the place in a shop, especially a supermarket, where you pay for the things you are buying
foot their bills with their fingerprints
pay for their goods by scanning their fingertips at the checkout
digit
a thumb, toe or, as in this case, finger
mixed up
incorrectly identified (by thinking that someone/something is someone/something else)
double up
have a second use/function
a loyalty card
a special card which you can use in a particular store or supermarket to collect reward points or receive discounts with every purchase
pinkie
a very informal word for little finger
biometrics
analysis of certain biological features using modern technology (in order to identify a person)
Finger food
this is a play on words: literally, finger food is food that you can eat without using knives, forks or spoons; here, food that you pay for using your fingerprint
Global warming
You can watch this report on VOA and answer some questions. Then you can check your answers looking at the script.
First read the questions:
Say if the following sentences are true or false:
1. The change in climate is not due to human causes.
2. The sea level will increase 1 metre by the end of the century.
3. The situation can still be reversed.
4. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for 50-100 days.
5.America is the leader of the Kioto Protocol
6. Ebell says that Global warming is not as serious as people say.
7. Richard Somerville says the Kioto Protocol lacks something.
8. Ebell says the crops will be weaker.
9. Anthony Broccoli says people will not survive.
10.He also says the world won't be as different as some people predict.
Now watch the report:
report
You can check your answers looking at the script:
Script:
In the past year, several scientific reports have alerted the world to increasing glacier melting in Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica, reducing habitat for polar bears and other forms of life.
The habitat for beetles that ravage trees has expanded from the normally warm U.S. southwest into the evergreen forests of British Columbia.
Warmer tropical waters seem to be bleaching coral reefs.
The general scientific view is that these changes are caused by a heat-trapping blanket of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere emitted by coal, natural gas, and gasoline burning.
Richard SomervilleRichard Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego says the current warming trend is different from ones that have occurred earlier in Earth's history. "We know enough now to be able to say that the current warming, the warming that we've seen in the last decades of the 20th century, is primarily due to human causes."
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the atmosphere has 30 percent more carbon dioxide than a century ago and Earth's average surface temperature has risen nearly one degree Celsius in that time. The group warns that it can be expected to go up much more in the next 100 years -- between one-and-a-half and nearly six degrees.
The panel says this could mean a sea level rise of up to one meter by the end of this century, possibly engulfing coastal regions and island countries.
James HansenU.S. space agency climate expert James Hansen was one of the first scientists to warn of global warming in the 1980s. He says the world is nearing the time when it cannot be reversed. "We're getting very close to a tipping point in the climate system. If we don't get out of our business-as-usual scenarios and begin to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we are going to get big climate change."
But scientists say arresting global warming is a daunting challenge. For one thing, carbon dioxide has a lifetime of 50 to 100 years in the atmosphere. Rutgers University climate researcher Anthony Broccoli says ocean warming compounds the problem. "Heat is going into the ocean and gradually the effect of that heat going into the ocean would be to make the climate warmer, even if we stopped raising atmospheric CO-2 levels today."
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol commits more than 120 signing nations to limiting greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. The United States is not part of the agreement because President Bush withdrew the country from it soon after taking office in 2001.
Myron EbellThis was the correct move, according to Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington public policy research group promoting government deregulation. "There is just so much exaggeration involved in these claims about the impacts of climate change."
Ebell does not believe global warming is a serious threat. But he says even if it were, the Kyoto Protocol is bad politics. He believes restricting energy use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will hurt national economies. "All of this effort is going for nothing. The reason I believe that is because the world cannot afford to go on the kind of energy diet that the Kyoto Protocol is the first step of."
Factories are one source of pollutants adding to climate changeRichard Somerville at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography agrees that the Kyoto Protocol is flawed. But he believes the flaw is its insufficient limits on greenhouse gas emissions. He says they will make only a negligible difference, but argues that the accord is better than nothing. "Kyoto keeps the issue alive. One of the advantages of signing Kyoto is it gets you to the point where you can look past Kyoto, where the nations of the world can come together with the experience of Kyoto, which involves large industries, and decide what does it make sense to try next?"
But opponents of the Kyoto accord say the next step should be nature's. Myron Ebell says glaciers have been melting since the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago, yet people have adapted. He argues that global warming has benefits, such as a longer growing season and hardier crops."Carbon dioxide is necessary for plants to photosynthesize, so if there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plants should grow more quickly, more vigorously and they should be more resistant to things like drought," says Ebell.
Rutgers University's Anthony Broccoli disagrees that global warming will bring about an overall benefit. Yet he is also not willing to say the world will become uninhabitable -- just not the same. "Based on our best projections, we would find it to be a very different world."
Lie Lay Lain
Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol
We'll do it all
Everything
______ our own
We don't need
_________
Or anyone
If I ________ here
If I just ________ here
Would you _________ with me and just forget the world?
I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel
Those three words
Are ______ too much
They're not enough
If I _____ here
If I just ________ here
Would you _______ with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we're ______
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into ______
[Chasing Cars lyrics on http://www.metrolyrics.com]
Let's _____ time
Chasing cars
Around our heads
I need your grace
To __________ me
To find my own
If I ________ here
If I just __________ here
Would you ________ with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we're ______
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into _________
All that I am
All that I _______ was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see
I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things will _______ change for us at all
If I ______ here
If I just _________ here
Would you __________ with me and just forget the world?
Now check your answers:
We'll do it all
Everything
On our own
We don't need
Anything
Or anyone
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel
Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life
[Chasing Cars lyrics on http://www.metrolyrics.com]
Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads
I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life
All that I am
All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see
I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things will never change for us at all
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
We'll do it all
Everything
______ our own
We don't need
_________
Or anyone
If I ________ here
If I just ________ here
Would you _________ with me and just forget the world?
I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel
Those three words
Are ______ too much
They're not enough
If I _____ here
If I just ________ here
Would you _______ with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we're ______
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into ______
[Chasing Cars lyrics on http://www.metrolyrics.com]
Let's _____ time
Chasing cars
Around our heads
I need your grace
To __________ me
To find my own
If I ________ here
If I just __________ here
Would you ________ with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we're ______
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into _________
All that I am
All that I _______ was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see
I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things will _______ change for us at all
If I ______ here
If I just _________ here
Would you __________ with me and just forget the world?
Now check your answers:
We'll do it all
Everything
On our own
We don't need
Anything
Or anyone
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel
Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life
[Chasing Cars lyrics on http://www.metrolyrics.com]
Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads
I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life
All that I am
All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see
I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things will never change for us at all
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Used To
We use "Used To" to talk about habits in the past . You are going to watch a video in which some people talk about things they used to do in the past, but which they hardly do or don’t do at all now. Can you complete the sentences below about all the people in the video?
1. Elizabeth used to …………………………………..
2. Pamela’s dad used to …………………………………..
3. Andrew used to …………………………………..
4. Billie used to …………………………………..
5. Courtney used to …………………………………..
6. Jennifer used to …………………………………..
7. Ingrid used to …………………………………..
8. Karina used to …………………………………..
9. Richard used to …………………………………..
10. Mike used to …………………………………..
11. Neil used to …………………………………..
12. Sue used to …………………………………..
13. Robin used not to ………………………………….., but now she does.
14. Rebecca used to …………………………………..
15. Mia used to …………………………………..
16. Patricia used to …………………………………..
1. Elizabeth used to …………………………………..
2. Pamela’s dad used to …………………………………..
3. Andrew used to …………………………………..
4. Billie used to …………………………………..
5. Courtney used to …………………………………..
6. Jennifer used to …………………………………..
7. Ingrid used to …………………………………..
8. Karina used to …………………………………..
9. Richard used to …………………………………..
10. Mike used to …………………………………..
11. Neil used to …………………………………..
12. Sue used to …………………………………..
13. Robin used not to ………………………………….., but now she does.
14. Rebecca used to …………………………………..
15. Mia used to …………………………………..
16. Patricia used to …………………………………..
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