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English Detective #38, Great cities and their leadership: May 6, 2014
May 06, 2014

The current investigation (Introducing this issue):

In the watching/listening (or reading) activity for this newsletter the mayor of Rio de Janeiro talks about 4 “commandments” to make cities responsive to their citizens and great places to live. I thought his list was insightful!

He suggests new ways of looking at problems, and adds “You don't always have to be rich or powerful to get things done. You can find original ways…”-- but must always consider the needs of the city’s residents. You’ll have to listen to get the rest…

If you’d like a little more on cities, interesting to either kids or adults, National Geographic gives a brief history of urbanization and city growth.

Practice new (and old) related vocabulary with a crossword on Adjectives for City Planning. (You might also like the Adjective Opposites Matching Games on the EnglishHints' Vocabulary Games page. Many of those adjectives also apply to city growth and planning.)

Incidentally, as we reach the end of the school year (at least in the U.S. and a number of other countries), I liked some suggestions for preventing students from losing English over the summer.

If you teach middle or high school ESL, check out the new section in ESL Teacher resources on websites your students can use to stay in practice. (These are great sites if you’re learning English, too. They’re all free-- or at least have large free sections-- and many are marked by level. There are reading, vocabulary, grammar and English game sites.)



Getting the whole story: reading/listening practice:

Click here for the Rio mayor’s talk on commandments for cities.

This is the short National Geographic article on the growth of cities: Populations on the Rise.

Follow the Clues (Vocabulary Practice):


Here's the City Planning Adjectives Crossword. The answers are here. The words to complete the crossword are given on the upper right, but why don’t you try to fill out any that you can before looking there?

Ideas for Summer English Practice:


Here's a link to the ESL Teacher Resources page. Go to the last section: Websites for Students. Hope you find a few that are just what you were looking for!

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Coming in the next issue: Job Hunting 101: How to Present Yourself (resume & interview tips)

In case you missed these: Earlier issues of English Detective have articles on a number of topics, plus practice with all 570 words from the Academic Word List. You can check them out with the link to the back issues page below (or find what words were practiced each issue here.

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