Grammar and Vocabulary

• I can use narrative tenses to talk about past events.
• I can talk about the news.
• I can use negative inversion to add emphasis.

Fake news is older than the internet

1 In pairs, discuss the questions. 1 What is fake news? 2 What fake news stories have you heard of? 3 When do you think fake news started?

Eight news words first: match each one to two words from the box.

1 What is fake news?

2 What fake news stories have you heard of?

3 When do you think fake news started?

Listen to a podcast and check your answers to Exercise 1 question 3.

Complete the questions with words from Exercise 3. Sometimes more than one answer is possible. Then listen again and answer the questions.

1 Why did a news report ___ that social media accounts would close if users made a spelling mistake?

2 Why do you think a newspaper reported ___ animals living on the moon?

3 Why did egg companies want the newspaper to say egg prices had ___?

4 How did the city newspaper ___ the truth that the other city newspaper was copying its stories?

5 Which of the ___ news stories in the podcast do you think is the best one?

Which event happened first?

THINK BACK Which past tense is used in each of the underlined parts?

Two past events, one earlier. Which tense shows the earlier one?

The underlined parts are 1 published, 2 was studying, 3 found and 4 had increased.

Fill the gaps: the Black Desert walls

Study Watch Out! Then complete the text with the correct past tense forms of the verbs in brackets.

PRONUNCIATION Listen to the sentences from the text. What do you notice about the way that the words had and been are pronounced?

1 Before the EBAP visited the Black Desert of Jordan, nobody had explored the archaeology of this large area.

2 Animals that had been running away from the people could not escape from this point in the walls.

Headlines that make you click

1 In pairs, look at the headlines and discuss the questions. 1 Why do you think news sites write these kinds of headlines? 2 Do you think the information in these kinds of stories is reliable? Say why.

Listen to a clickbait journalist talking about his work. Why does he think news sites write these kinds of headlines?

Which of these two headlines would you click first, and why?

• The most common structures for collocations are:
• adjective + noun, e.g. a bizarre theory
• verb + noun, e.g. reveal the truth
• adverb + adjective, e.g. potentially embarrassing
• verb + adverb, e.g. discuss calmly

Adjectives that label a news story

SPEAKING Would you like to work as a journalist? Say why.

Never had I felt so afraid

1 Read the newspaper article. What type of text is it? How do you know? book/film review celebrity profile gossip column human interest story news item opinion piece

Two sentences from the article: what changes in the word order?

Read the newspaper article. What type of text is it? How do you know?

Listen and write the sentences. Then rewrite each of them using a negative adverbial.

SPEAKING In pairs, look at the sentences you wrote in Exercise 3. Imagine each one is part of a different news story. What could each news story be about?

• the duration of states before a specific point in the past: She had been blind for 12 years when she started her journey.
• completed earlier actions with a relevance to the time of the story: He wrote about a spot that he had discovered on the surface of Venus.
• experiences that happened before a specific point in the past: By the time he died, he had written a lot of letters.

• the duration of actions that began earlier in the past and continued to the time of the story: He had been studying bird migration for years.
• earlier past processes with a relevance to the main events in the story: He had an accident with a pair of scissors that he had been playing with.
• We do not use the Past Perfect Continuous with repeated actions when we say how many times something happened: She had been visiting him regularly. NOT She had been visiting him three times.

• When we are telling a story about the past, we usually use the Past Simple for the main events and the Past Perfect Simple and Past Perfect Continuous to provide background information to those events.
• We often use linking words or time phrases with the Past Perfect tenses, e.g. when, after, because, as, before, by, by the time.
• By the age of 15, he had completed his system.
• He missed that event because he had been in hospital for two weeks.

• negative adverbial + auxiliary verb + subject + clause
• Some common adverbs and adverbial phrases:
• hardly/barely/scarcely … when …
• seldom/rarely
• never/at no time
• under no circumstances/in no way
• no sooner
• not only … but also …
• little (did I/they know/imagine …)
• Only (when) ...
• Not once (did) ...