BLACK FRIDAY

The day after Thanksgiving Day is called Black Friday in the USA. It's considered the beginning of the Christmas shopping.  Black Friday has been the busiest shopping day for the last 6 or 7 years.

  

A lot of retailers open very early (3 or 4 am) offering fantastic sales in order to kick off the shopping season.

There are so many people queuing for hours to get the best bargain that sometimes you may find it absolutely chaotic to take advantage of Black Firday sales. Some bargain hunting even camp out  overnight in order to secure a good place at the queue.

While the word "black" often has a negative connotation, here it alludes to profitability which is noted in black ink (loses are noted in red).

Questions:

1. If you have understood everything you'll be able to give a definition for the following words:

    retailer, sale, bargain, profit.

2. Do you remember when Thanksgiving Day is celebrated?

3. When was Black Friday 2011?

4. Do we have in Spain any shopping days named after colours?

5. When do people in Spain queue for hours?

6. Why do people in Spain camp out overnight?

7. For what reason would you queue for hours or camp out overnight?

Animals special adaptation

How can animals live
in such different places in the world?

Animals live everywhere on Earth. Some places on Earth are very hot and some are very cold. Some places on Earth have a lot of water and plants, and other places have very little water and few plants. Animals can live in many different places in the world because they have special adaptations to the area they live in. Each adaptation has been produced by evolution. This means that the adaptations have developed over many generations.

Look at this web: ANIMALS ADAPTATION. Read about the adaptations of all the animals on the left column, chose one, and make a summary about how can it survive in its environment.

Do you know any other animal adaptation that is not in this web?

REGISTROS LINGÜÍSTICOS

Hemos estudiado en clase, los diferentes niveles de lengua: culto o formal, coloquial y vulgar; incluso, habéis dramatizado delante de vuestros compañeros situaciones adaptadas a cada situación comunicativa. Para que no se os olvide, visionad la secuencia de la serie Aída y contesta a las siguientes cuestiones:

1. Determina el registro lingüístico que están utilizando los actores en su diálogo.
2. Señala, al menos, cuatro ejemplos de dicho registro que observes en él.
   

Les habitudes de Jean.

Salut! Voici un exercice pour pratiquer le français. J'espère que vous le ferez sans problèmes.
Vous pouvez le corriger après l'avoir fait.

Cliquez ici pour se diriger à l'exercice.

La deuxième partie, il faut parler d'une journée habituelle. Vous devez le faire ici (minimum: utilisez dix verbes au présent).

Time Travelling to Middle Age

Hi there boys and girls!

Have you seen the film "Back to the Future"? It's about a young boy like anyone of you, Marty, but with a special friend: a crazy scientist, Doc, who has just invented a Time Machine... and he put it in a Delorean! For the testing travel, the car-time machine must reach 88 miles per hour (about 120 km. per hour). Doc sent his faithful dog Einstein into the past... and it returned to the present without problem.

Now, imagine you are Marty and you can travel to the Middle Age. Your Social Science teacher wants you to do a special activity about tournaments in the middle ages. You must look for adequate clothes so anyone in the past feel anything strange about you... What will you wear?
Besides, you have to describe how the knights fought,

And how many types of tournaments there were

What do you think? It was a funny hobby? or it was dangerous and useless?

If you were a medieval knight, would you partipate in a tournament?

You can see a full armoured knight here

You have a lot of information about tournaments here

You must harry, you only have a few hours until the Delorean loses its energy to return to the future!

LA DESCRIPCIÓN

Desde el curso pasado, venimos trabajando en clase las tipologías textuales. Ahora, repasaremos la descripción. Normalmente, no hay problema en reconocerla; la dificultad se plantea cuando tenemos que realizar una descripción, ya que el escaso vocabulario que manejamos, en este sentido, nos impide un correcto y completo diseño de la misma. Por ello, te proponemos:

1. Completar la actividad que propone el siguiente enlace para enriquecer tu vocabulario.
2. Lee la información de esta página y añade dos expresiones más a cada columna.
3. Por último, realiza una descripción de tu persona con las nuevas expresiones que has adquirido.
   

Geometric approach for arithmetic problems

Hi everyone!

As my first contribution, I hope this one will be curious enough for you.

Do you remember about one of my inquiries in class regarding the easiest thing that anyone can do in Maths?

It was, of course, TO COUNT. Therefore, if you could reduce in some way another kind of problem to a counting-problem, it would be easier. The purpose of this entry is to put an example about this way of reasoning:

"What is the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 500?"

Whenever I mentioned this arithmetic problem in class, it seemed to take too long due to the quantity of sums it required. So let's have a look at another way to figure out the result of the sum:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + ... (here go all natural numbers between) ... + 497 + 498 + 499 + 500.

If you were counting some things (red dots, for example) that have to do with that situation, they could be displayed as groups by rows, with each group standing for each one of these numbers, and all groups aligned at their beginning, like this:

                                                 •       (1)
                                                 •   •       (2)
                                                 •   •   •       (3)
                                                 •   •   •   •       (4)
                                                 •   •   •   •   •       (5)
                                                                               (etc.)

It is very easy to realize that all groups form a right triangle -with same height as length in dots, so it is isosceles too-, no matter how many numbers you want to consider, in our case 500. And that is very near to be half square with 500 dots on each side.

Now, imagine every dot inside a square box, and add more boxes on each row to complete a big square. It is obvious that we have  500 · 500  boxes, the only thing left to decide is how many of them have a red dot. It will help if we colour diagonal boxes in blue, and other boxes with dots in yellow, like in the picture below.

Boxes in both colours match to those with a dot. Notice that blue boxes must be exactly 500.

And what about yellow ones?.  Notice that there are same number of yellow boxes as no-color boxes, so they are

(500 · 500 - 500) : 2 = 124 750 .

Hence, the red dots are 125 250.



By the way... ...Could you apply this to other examples?