Big Solar And Renewable Energy In The Age Of Fracking

The world’s largest solar power plant is up and running in California. We’ll look at where solar stands now, and the future of renewable energy. You access the programme here.

Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert?

A much-touted theory suggests that practising any skill for 10,000 hours is sufficient to make you an expert. No innate talent? Not a problem. You just practice. But is it true?

Cloze test

Some of you were commenting on the challenging nature of task 3 in the reading exam paper so I'm posting a link to cloze exercises you can access here and some others at the eoisantander site.

Oral Presentations

This term we're starting to practice for our speaking exam by doing oral presentations in class. Here is some useful language and phrases to use in them and you can also refer to the Advanced 2 blog for additional tips. As well as that, you can practice for the oral expression part of the exam through the activities posted here for you.

Speaking and writing assessment criteria

You can find a handout like the one in class right here for you to see the assessment criteria that will be applied to your written and spoken productions in English.

Cleft sentences

You can access some extra cleft sentence examples and practice at the englishadvanced2 blog.

Why do we like corruption?

Since our current topic deals with crime, you may want to practice some of the vocabulary we've gone over by completing this cloze on the Spanish Royals, the key to which can be found here, or read this somewhat old article from The Economist which tries to figure out the role of our Roman Catholic culture as an undelying explanation for our acceptance and endorsing of corruption. Seeing as our media is highly unreliable you might want to learn about what our government is up to by accessing more impartial reports such as this one by Reuters on why Spain is no country for judges or this one by The Guardian on how in Spain francoist torturers get away with murder and their successors refuse to pursue human rights!