miércoles, 14 de mayo de 2014

Talking point: Golden moments

This week's talking point is golden moments, which refers to the way we celebrate big events in our life. Before getting together with the members of your conversation group, go over the questions below so that ideas come to mind more easily the day you get together with your friends and you can work out vocabulary problems beforehand.
  • How often do you get together with family and friends to celebrate events?
  • What are the reasons for the celebration? (Think about the following, but you can add your own ideas: birthdays; moving to a new home; getting engaged/married; anniversaries; getting a new job or being promoted; graduating from university; the birth of a child; retirement)
  • How do you prefer to celebrate big occasions?
  • Do you usually exchange presents?
  • Have you ever been the protagonist of a celebration?
  • Choose one of the following: A moment in your life when you won something; or a day you will never forget; or an embarrasing moment; or the best day in your life. What happened?
To illustrate the point you can watch the video a birthday party taken from the MacMillan Inside Out web page  from our Anecdotes series.


1 Whose birthday party was it?
2 How old did he turn?
3 What was special about the party?
4 What kind of party was it?
5 What was the theme of the party?
6 Why?
7 What fancy dress did she wear?
8 Where was the party held?
9 How many people turned up at the party?
10 Did she know everybody?
11 What did they eat?
12 What did they do all night?
13 Who did she dance with at the end of the night?

Key:
1 Her brother’s 2 Nineteen 3 It was a surprise party 4 A fancy dress party 5 The letter G 6 Her brother’s name is Ges 7 Lady Gaga 8 At her sister’s house 9 Forty-five 10 No, just a handful. All of her brother’s friends were there 11 Pizza, burgers and chicken wings because they had a barbecue 12 They played music and danced 13 A twenty-one-year-old