Year: 2009

Tie the Knot

I saw a funny article on the BBC website today. Two people with the same name met on Facebook and decided to get married! There were some nice expressions in the article, too. The first one is to ‘tie the knot’: A couple with the same name who found each other through social networking website …

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Carbon Neutral

I nave noticed more and more articles about the environment in the news in recent years. I think this is great because it is very important for people to be aware of the effect that their actions have on the whole world. One of the key phrases in the environmental news over the last years …

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Jakarta Bombing

I’m sure you have probably heard about the recent suspected terrorist attacks in Jakarta, Indonesia. Here in Indonesia it is all we have been seeing in the news for the last few days. There was an interesting piece of vocabulary in an article about it on Reuters.com: Indonesia police: bomb attacks have JI hallmark ‘Hallmark’ …

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Staycation

I saw an interesting word on the Guardian website yesterday. There was an article about people choosing to have ‘staycations’. What they mean is that people are choosing to stay at home in the U.K. for their vacation rather than going abroad. I had not seen the word before yesterday but it turns out that …

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I love YouTube

I love YouTube. There’s just so much great stuff on it. That’s why I was interested to see that Google are optimistic about it becoming profitable in the future. In the article linked to above, there’s some really nice vocabulary in the third paragraph used to describe proportion of YouTube videos supported by advertising. Analysts …

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Blacklist

I was pleased to see in the news that Garuda Airlines will be allowed to fly to Europe again. Garuda is Indonesia’s national airline and I have flown with them quite a few times since I moved to Indonesia five years ago and found them to be quite reasonable. The first piece of vocabulary from …

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On the Brink

There’s an article in the BBC business news today that caught my eye because it has three really interesting expressions in it. The first is in the title: Major US lender ‘on the brink‘ In this situation ‘on the brink’ means that something, probably bad is about to happen. From the rest of the article, …

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Drunk Badger

Keeping up our animal theme from yesterday, I saw a funny article about a drunk badger on reuters.com. I already knew that elephants and monkeys got drunk on fermented fruit sometimes but I didn’t know that badgers did it, too. ‘Badger’ is an interesting piece of vocabulary because it is an animal that is common …

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