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Improve your Speaking online Episode 9, Introduction:

This week we bring new current topics in Episode 9 so you can improve your online speaking from home.

 

Topic 1: APTIS B2 speaking test model📝

This week, Dilo presents an APTIS B2 speaking test model.

Let´s go!

Speaking part 1

In this part you will answer 3 questions about personal topics (30 seconds for each question)

  1. What makes you the happiest?
  2. What are you afraid of?
  3. Where do you see yourself in 5 years’ time?

Speaking part 2
Describe a photo and answer 2 questions related to the photo (45 seconds for each answer, including the description of the photo).

  1. Can you describe the picture?
  2. Where did you go the last time you took a train?
  3. What is your dream destination?
Episode 9

Speaking part 3
In this part, you will have to compare 2 pictures and answer 2 questions about them. You will have 45 seconds for each response.

  1. Tell me about what you see.
  2. What time of day is best to fly?
  3. What days are airports most busy?

Speaking part 4
In this part, you again need to answer three questions related to a picture but this time you answer them all in one response. You have one minute to prepare a structured response and two minutes to talk.

  1. When was the last time you travelled abroad?
  2. What do you like the most about travelling?
  3. How do you fell when you are travelling?

Topic 2: Jobs 💼

Working for Yourself Sucks Sometimes, but It’s Better Than a Day Job.

Let me remind you why you (should) quit.

Episode 9
Article

Working for someone will always mean working towards someone else’s agenda

For some of us, doing anything but what we want to do just won’t fly.

Working for someone will always mean a cap on your income

Businesses run on budgets and can only afford you if you fit into their budget.

Working for someone will always mean dealing with people you don’t like

My husband and my best friend are former colleagues, so it won’t just be people you don’t like. Sometimes it’ll be people you love.

Final Words

To me, it comes down to this:

We will focus the conversation on the following questions:

  1. Do you share the writer’s opinion?
  2. Would you prefer to be a freelance worker? Why? Why not?
  3. What is the best and the worst about your current job?
  4. How would you answer to the writer’s final question? (Which is more difficult, forcing myself to do work I don’t care about; or challenging myself to keep trying to do what I believe in?)
  5. What is your dream job?

 

Here we leave you some vocabulary you can use during the talk:

  • Schedule: arrange or plan (an event) to take place at a particular time.
  • Freelance: self-employed and hired to work for different companies on particular assignments.
  • Entrepreneurship: the activity of setting up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.
  • Nerve-racking: causing stress or anxiety.
  • 9-5 (adjective): A nine-to-five job is one that you do during normal office hours, for example a job in a factory or an office.
  • Stiff: a dead body or a person who is very boring or lacking in humor or wit.
  • Enhance: intensify, increase, or further improve the quality, value, or extent of.
  • Don’t count your chickens before they hatch: you should not make plans that depend on something good happening before you know that it has actually happened.

Topic 3: Business 💲

Getting your piece of the data economy.

Nearly everything we do — from the songs we listen to; to the shows we watch; heck, even just walking down the street — now results in the creation of data.

Speaking online

 

We will focus the conversation on the following questions:

  1. Do you normally accept cookies when you go to a website? Why? Why not?
  2. What’s your opinion after watching the video?
  3. Do you think there will be a time when we will have control over our data?
  4. Have you ever thought about this situation before?
  5. Why do you think companies ask for cookies?

 

Here we leave you some vocabulary you can use during the talk:

  • Data: information in an electronic form that can be stored and processed by a computer.
  • Third-party cookies: created by domains that are not the website (or domain) that you are visiting. Usually used for online-advertising purposes.
  • Keep your head down: to continue to concentrate and work hard at something.
  • Data economy: a global digital ecosystem in which data is gathered, organized, and exchanged by a network of vendors for the purpose of deriving value from the accumulated information.
  • Trigger: something that causes someone to feel upset and frightened.
  • Data set: a collection of related sets of information that is composed of separate elements but can be manipulated as a unit by a computer.
  • Upwards: towards a higher position, level, or value.
  • Bells and whistles: attractive additional features or trimmings.

Topic 4: Games 🎮

Wordle is simple but not addictive, making it the perfect game for our Covid times.

Easier than a crossword, quicker than sudoku, and more engaging than hangman, Wordle’s dynamic works across all ages.

Episode 9
Article

Covid times might spell ennui. Those hours after night falls, where often zilch takes place. Which hobby could bring vital daily sport using skill, craft, brain power? Games using words, maybe? Have you noticed what I’ve done there? The first four sentences of this piece are composed entirely of five-letter words.

What’s so significant about that, you may ask? If you’re a fan of Wordle, the daily online teaser that’s spread almost as virulently as Omicron in a primary school, you’ll know exactly why I’ve used this linguistic trick. Wordle requires you every day to guess a random five-letter word, starting from scratch, and you have six attempts to work out the answer.

I’m a relatively recent convert to this game, which was launched in October last year and now has more than two million people playing on a daily basis. Its perfection lies in its simplicity: you don’t have to get an app, there are no adverts or sponsors, it’s not trying to upsell you, there are no fancy graphics, and it’s not trying to claim your personal details. At midnight every day, a new edition is there on your browser, inviting you to pit your wits against an algorithmic puzzle-master.

It is the perfect expression of these Covid times, allowing people to feel connected to others in a virtual dimension. Wordle has a pared-down functionality, but it still allows participants to share their completed, but blanked-out, puzzle with others (or, more accurately, to show how clever they are). It’s taken over from the Zoom quiz night and the clapping for carers as a way of building a loose community of people in a shared enterprise.

Easier than a crossword, quicker than sudoku, and more engaging than hangman, Wordle’s simple dynamic works across all ages. My own Wordle family comprises our best friends, whose 11-year-old daughter gets smartly out of bed early each morning (an accomplishment for which she was not previously renowned) in order to complete that day’s puzzle. My own seven-year-old-by-proxy has also been drawn into Wordle’s appeal, one of the benefits of which is that she has just encountered the word proxy (yesterday’s solution).

Like other such sensations, Wordle has a narcotic property, but what I particularly like about it is that it doesn’t feed an addiction. There’s no opportunity for bingeing. And an all-consuming passion for Wordle is not going to result in you losing your home, or your marriage. In some senses, it belongs in another time. There’s only one game every day, and it teaches you patience (although my guilty secret is that, if I’m awake after midnight, I sometimes find myself doing that day’s puzzle).

Its only drawback, as far as I can see, is that it was invented in the US, so it occasionally uses American spellings. We thought for a long time before we got to “favor”. This “controversy” was earnestly discussed on radio phone-in shows, concrete proof that Wordle is taking over the nation.

Meanwhile, I hope that regular players will find the opening sentences of this column useful in their quotidian endeavours. Maybe share these words.

We will focus the conversation on the following questions:

  1. Have you ever played Wordle? Do you enjoy it?
  2. What new hobbies do you have since the COVID situation started?
  3. What do you think about games such as crosswords, sudokus or wordle?
  4. When do you play this type of games?
  5. Do you know anybody who play this type of games?

 

Here we leave you some vocabulary you can use during the talk:

  • Engage: occupy or attract (someone’s interest or attention).
  • Ennui: a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.
  • Zilch: nothing; none; no.
  • Upsell: persuade a customer to buy something additional or more expensive.
  • Pared-down: it has no unnecessary features, and has been reduced to a very simple form.
  • Bingeing: an act of excessive or compulsive consumption.
  • Drawback: a disadvantage or negative feature.
  • To pit your wits against someone/something: to use all of your intelligence to try to defeat someone or to solve a problem.

Topic 5: Science 🧪

How the brain makes memories.

Every time we learn something new, our brain changes. Figuring out how memories are encoded at the genetic and molecular level is at the frontier of neuroscience.

Episode 9

We will focus the conversation on the following questions:

  1. Have you ever thought about memories and how they are stored in our brain?
  2. What memories do you remember the most?
  3. Do you usually remember things or forget things?
  4. What’s your earliest memory?
  5. Many people find that a certain sound or smell brings back a childhood memory very strongly. Does this happen to you?

 

Here we leave you some vocabulary you can use during the talk:

  • Apartment (US) – Flat (UK): a suite of rooms forming one residence.
  • Diaper (US) – Nappy (UK) : a piece of thick cloth or paper which is fastened round a baby’s bottom in order to absorb its waste.
  • Sidewalk (US) – Pavement (UK): a paved path for pedestrians at the side of a road.
  • First floor (US) – Ground floor (UK): the floor of a building most nearly on a level with the ground.
  • Parking lot (US) – Car park (UK): an area or building where cars or other vehicles may be left temporarily.
  • Gas (US) – Petrol (UK): a light fuel oil that is obtained by distilling petroleum and used in internal combustion engines.
  • Elevator (US) – Lift (UK): a platform or compartment housed in a shaft for raising and lowering people or things to different levels.
  • Flashlight (US) – Torch (UK): a portable battery-powered electric lamp.

Topic 6: Free topic

Do you find these topics boring or uninteresting? Don’t worry. Dilo gives you the opportunity to choose your own topic for a conversation class.

Think of some vocabulary you would like to learn related to your topic and send us some information about it with the subject «Free topic». We are sure your ideas will be very good 😁

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