Mini-Lessons from Friday, Apr. 20, 2012

These Mini-Lessons are posted on Twitter, and in China on Weibo, throughout the day. You can follow them there!

To get the most from them, you should try to use them in sentences, or discuss them with friends. Writing something on Twitter or Weibo is a great way to practice!

• Tip: Set goals and measure progress. Simple tests will help you see how much more you've learned, and give you a reason to keep going.
  
• Proverb: Ignorance is bliss: It may be better not to know something bad. "Don't tell the boss the bad news 'til Monday: Ignorance is bliss."
  
• Academic Vocabulary: contradict: say the opposite of someone; disagree. "You say you're 25, but your passport says 28; that's a contradiction."
  
• Literature: Rumpelstiltskin: a strange little man in Grimm's Fairy Tales who makes a king's new wife guess his name.
  
• Art: cubism: 20th century painting style, breaks up objects and puts them together again in a new way to show them from many sides.
  
• Slang: knuckle down: get serious and do something. "If you don't knuckle down and study, you're going to fail this class."
  
• Geography: Mason-Dixon line: named for two surveyors, border of several states in eastern US; once thought division between Northeast and South.
  

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NOTES:

1. Academic Vocabulary is the Academic Word List from Oxford University Press. This is "a list of words that you are likely to meet if you study at an English-speaking university."
2. The Proverb, and the Literature, Art, and Geography words are from lists in the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. I wrote the definitions and examples myself.
3. The Tip and Slang words are from my own lists, and I wrote the definitions and examples myself.

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This lesson is ©2012 by James Baquet. You may share this work freely. Teachers may use it in the classroom, as long as students are told the source (URL). You may not publish this material or sell it. Please write to me if you have any questions about "fair use."

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