Small groups timetable updated

TIMETABLES FOR GROUPS – Second term (updated)

30 Jan - A	1 Feb - B
6 Feb - C	8 Feb - D
13 Feb - D
20 Feb - A	22 Feb - B
27 Feb - C	1 March - D
6 March - A	8 March - B
13 March - C	15 March - D
20 March - A	22 March - B
	5 April - C
10 April D

We are going to the cinema!

Hi!

As promised, we are going to the cinema. We are going to see a brand new film which I'm sure will deserve more than one award.

Here you have the trailer to have an idea of the plot:

And the info you can't forget:

Film: The Post (VOSE)
Date: 8th February 2018
Time: 16:30 & 19:00
Cinema: Séptimo Oficio, El Burgocentro de Las Rozas
Price for our students: 4€ 

You can't buy the tickets at the cinema. You must get them in you class. You pay 4€ to your teacher and they'll give you the ticket.

Don't miss this fantastic chance to do an activity together.

A dry January?

Learn new vocabulary listening to this 6 Minute English interview.

A Dry January

Discourse markers - KEY

Here you can see the key to the photocopies I gave you in our last class. Check if your answers were correct.

How to drink from a water fountain – without catching something

As part of a push to reduce plastic waste, London’s mayor has announced that drinking fountains are to return. But is it as safe as water at home? And how do you avoid getting oral herpes?


Wonderful news! Water fountains are coming back. In an attempt to tackle plastic waste, the old municipal staple will be installed in public places in London so we can have a free drink and top up refillable bottles. But can we be sure the water is clean? If your lips touch the spout, will you get herpes or some other orally transmissible infection? Should you wipe the spout before drinking? Or perhaps do a sneaky inspection of the person in front of you to establish if their oral hygiene is up to scratch?
Water fountains have been a feature of cities since the ancient Greeks put them near temples and dedicated them to gods and heroes. Britain caught up in the mid-19th century, with the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association responsible for 800 drinking fountains in London alone. The technology used to help reduce the risk of infectious diseases has improved, including slanted jets of water, filters and better maintenance. But over the past 30 to 40 years, drinking fountains have been disappearing because of the marketing of bottled water, a lack of investment and maintenance by local authorities, and concern about health risks. So, how best to ensure a hygienic experience?
The main source of contamination is on the knobs and buttons of fountains; if you are going to wipe anything with a disinfectant, go for the knobs, not the spout.
The risk of getting herpes from the spout is almost negligible, but for those who feel queasy about any public amenities, it is best to drink from the flowing jet of water, rather than wrapping your lips round the spout.
Remember: disease outbreaks from municipal water fountains are extremely rare and tend to be isolated cases involving individuals with an impaired immune system.
Modern designs of water fountains are likely to pose a negligible risk to your health. And the benefits of access to free, clean water in city centres are enormous. Kids can have water instead of sugary drinks; older people can avoid dehydration; runners and cyclists can rehydrate without having to lug plastic bottles with them. The only downside will be for businesses that sell us expensive water in plastic bottles. Ah, well.

Up to a million Britons use steroids for looks not sport

Up to 1 million people in the UK are taking anabolic steroids and other image- and performance-enhancing drugs (IPEDs) to change the way they look, public health experts and doctors have said.
This ranges from teenagers seeking the perfect physique to elderly men hoping to hang on to youthful looks.
Research suggests that appearance rather than sporting performance is the reason for a majority of those now using anabolic steroids and other IPEDs.

If you want to read the whole article, click here: The Guardian

What a shame! 

Why shoppers who switch queues wait the longest

It is a frequent conundrum while waiting in shop queues to pay for post-Christmas bargains : will switching queues save me time?   
New research by Harvard Business School has found that doing just that when finding yourself at the end of the queue may in fact have the opposite effect.
According to the study people in a particular spot in a queue were four times more likely to leave when there was no one behind them, and twice as likely to move to another line. This is despite them typically waiting even longer to get served.
"It's nuts because the number of people behind you has nothing to do with how long you are going to wait, but it shapes our behaviour," Ryan Buell, an expert in service management who led the research told the Guardian.
"If we are in last place, we are almost 20 per cent less satisfied than if someone is behind us."
The study explored a phenomenon known as "last place aversion", which is the profound unease felt by people who know they earn less than others, come bottom of the class in an exam, or are last in a queue.
Participants were told it would take about five minutes. In reality the test took a minute but when they logged in they were forced to wait in a virtual queue displayed on the screen. They started at the back and could wait, switch to a second queue or leave.

Around one in five people grew impatient at the back and switched to the other line. with those who switched waiting around 10 per cent longer than if they had stayed in their original place.
Those who switched twice ended up waiting 67 per cent longer, it found.
Mr Buell said: "When we join a queue, we tend to make the most rational choice we can, which usually means joining the shortest queue. But if we see a line moving faster, we might switch without having enough extra information, and we can often get it wrong."
On the back of his study, he said that people should think hard about switching when they are last in line.
"Try to separate out if the other queue is really moving faster, or if you just don't feel good about being at the back," he said.
Another strategy is to strike up conversation with the person in front, which passes the time until someone else joins behind you. Failing that, he said, simply don't look back.
                                                                                                                                  Telegraph

Certificate exams

Here you have the link to the exams you took in class last week:

NA2_exams

US government goes into shutdown after Senate rejects funding bill

The United States has its first government shutdown in nearly five years after senators failed to reach a deal to keep the lights on.

An effort by Republicans to keep the government open for one month was rejected in a vote on Friday night after they failed to address Democratic concerns about young undocumented migrants known as Dreamers.
Republicans needed 60 votes to pass the bill. Five red-state Democrats supported it while four Republicans voted against and 12am ET came and went without a deal, causing funding for the federal government to lapse.
Federal law requires agencies to shut down if Congress has not appropriated money to fund them. Hundreds of thousands of “non-essential” federal employees will be put on temporary unpaid leave. In previous shutdowns, services deemed “essential”, such as the work of the homeland security and the FBI, have continued.
On Saturday morning, Donald Trump greeted the news with a typical flurry of tweets. “This is the One Year Anniversary of my Presidency,” he wrote, “and the Democrats wanted to give me a nice present. #DemocratShutdown.”
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said later Trump would not negotiate immigration policy with Congress until the shutdown ends.
Speaking on the floor after the vote on Friday night, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, also assailed the opposition party, saying the shutdown was the result of a “cynical decision by the Democrats”. Minority leader Chuck Schumer delivered a scathing rebuke of Trump. The New Yorker said the president “walked away from two bipartisan deals” and that “a Trump shutdown will serve as a perfect encapsulation for the chaos he has unleashed”.
A White House statement issued just before midnight said “this is the behavior of obstructionist losers, not legislators”.
Democrats blamed Republican divisions. Oregon senator Ron Wyden said lawmakers from his rival party were not on the same page as Trump.
“You’ve got the three branches of government – everything,” Wyden said. “Can these folks organize a two-car parade?”

You can read the whole article clicking here: The_Guardian

'Malnourished and dirty': police find 13 children and siblings chained in California house

Parents charged with torture and child endangerment after 17-year-old girl escapes and alerts authorities.

Thirteen malnourished siblings ranging in age from two to 29 have been rescued from a house in California where some of them were chained to beds, and their parents have been charged with torture, police have said.
Officers made the discovery after a 17-year-old girl escaped the house in Perris, about 70 miles east of Los Angeles, on Sunday and used a mobile phone she had found in the house to call them, the Riverside county sheriff’s office said. Officers initially thought she was about 10 years old.
“Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house but were shocked to discover that seven of them were actually adults,” police said in a statement. “The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty.”
The children’s parents, David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested and each charged with nine counts of torture and 10 counts of child endangerment. They were ordered held on $9m bail, police said.
Six of the couple’s children were minors, while the other seven were over 18, police said, adding that the siblings told officers they were starving.
The group were found in a neighbourhood of closely spaced one and two-storey, single-family homes.
A Facebook page that appeared to have been created by the parents showed the couple dressed in wedding clothes, surrounded by 10 female children in matching purple plaid dresses and three male children in suits. A neighbour who answered the phone on Monday but declined to be identified described the neighbourhood as recently built and said he did not know the Turpins and had not noticed anything unusual.

                                                                                                                           The Guardian

Unbelievable story against human nature.

Have you ever heard of "Fat Cat Thursday"?

Here you have some information about it. I hope you don't get too depressed.

'Fat Cat Thursday': top bosses earn workers' annual salary by lunchtime 

Independent study of pay gap finds FTSE 100 bosses earning more in three days than typical worker will receive in entire year

Bosses of top British companies will have made more money by lunchtime on Thursday than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year, according to an independent analysis of the vast gap in pay between chief executives and everyone else.
The chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid a median average of £3.45m a year, which works out at 120 times the £28,758 collected by full-time UK workers on average.
On an hourly basis the bosses will have earned more in less than three working days than the average employee will pick up this year, leading campaigners to dub the day “Fat Cat Thursday”.
Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said it was outrageous that bosses were picking up “salaries that look like telephone numbers” while workers were “suffering the longest pay squeeze since Napoleonic times”.
The analysis by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and the High Pay Centre shows chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid an average of £898 per hour – 256 times what apprentices earn on the minimum wage.
Tim Roache, the general secretary of the GMB union, said the pay gap between bosses and workers was “simply obscene”.
“Does anyone really think these fat cats deserve 100 times more than the hard-working people who prop up their business empires?” he said. “Workers who have to scrimp and save to feed their families and put a roof over their head – and like most of Britain’s working population will now be feeling the pinch after the festive period?”
Roache said the prime minister had failed in her promise to tackle excessive executive pay: “Last year Theresa May broke her pledge to guarantee worker representation on company boards, a move which would have helped shed light on corporate excess and redress the balance towards fairer pay.”
O’Grady agreed that workers should be given seats on pay committees to “bring some common sense and fairness to boardroom pay”, and called on the minimum wage to be lifted to £10 an hour. The minimum wage for over-25s is set to rise from £7.50 to £7.83 on 1 April. Under-18s can be paid as little as £4.05 and apprentices £3.50.
The highest paid chief executive in the analysis, which is based on 2016 figures, was Sir Martin Sorrell, who was paid £48m by advertising firm WPP. In 2015 WPP paid Sorrell £70m. His reduced pay helped bring down the FTSE 100 chief executives’ median pay packages from £3.97m in 2015 to £3.45m in 2016.
The title for the highest paid listed company boss this year is almost certain to be Jeff Fairburn, the chief executive of housebuilder Persimmon, who is on track to collect a £110m bonus.
Stefan Stern, the director of the High Pay Centre thinktank, said it was encouraging that remuneration committees had exercised “a tiny amount of restraint” on pay last year. “[But] there are still grossly excessive and unjustifiable gaps between the top and rest of the workforce,” he said.
Stern said the gap between bosses and workers pay had more than tripled in 20 years.
Peter Cheese, the chief executive of the CIPD, said the nation needed a “significant rethink on how and why we reward CEOs”. Cheese said bosses pay awards should more widely reflect the impacts of businesses on all stakeholders from employees to society more broadly.
Labour said the figures demonstrated how out of control inequality in Britain had become. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary, said: “The next Labour government will tackle rampant pay inequality with a real living wage of at least £10 per hour, with an excessive pay levy and by rolling out maximum pay ratios of 20:1 in the public sector and in companies bidding for public contracts.”

 

Happy new year to all of you!

I hope you have a wonderful year ahead. Take the best of it.