It seemed like many of you still had questions about the exam that we didn’t have time to review in class today. I know some things are difficult to explain on the web, so here is my plan:

Tomorrow I will be sitting in the Starbucks on Soi Langsuan (right across the street from the Mater Dei side entrance) from 5:30-7:30pm. If you have questions, come by and I will help you. You are also welcome to just come and chat. In short:

• WHO: Me! And you, if you want to come.
• WHAT: Study meeting to review for your Reading & Listening/Speaking exams.
• WHERE: Starbucks on Soi Langsuan (across the street from Mater)
• WHEN: Saturday, February 20th, 5:30-7:30pm
• WHY: Because I want to help you do well on your exams.

Please bring your own sheets; I don’t have any extra ones left and I don’t want to kill trees to print more.

Listening & Speaking exam outline

Reading exam outline

(.PDF) Verbs used with gerunds (list)

(.PDF) Verbs & gerunds explanation

Microsoft Word files:

(.DOC) Verbs used with gerunds

(.DOC) Verbs & gerunds explanation

Black Beauty – Part I – My Early Home

The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end. Over the hedge on one side we looked into a plowed field, and on the other we looked over a gate at our master’s house, which stood by the roadside; at the top of the meadow was a grove of fir trees, and at the bottom a running brook overhung by a steep bank.

While I was young I lived upon my mother’s milk, as I could not eat grass. In the daytime I ran by her side, and at night I lay down close by her. When it was hot we used to stand by the pond in the shade of the trees, and when it was cold we had a nice warm shed near the grove.

As soon as I was old enough to eat grass my mother used to go out to work in the daytime, and come back in the evening.

There were six young colts in the meadow besides me; they were older than I was; some were nearly as large as grown-up horses. I used to run with them, and had great fun; we used to gallop all together round and round the field as hard as we could go. Sometimes we had rather rough play, for they would frequently bite and kick as well as gallop.

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of these three children. They were intelligent children, and they were friendly, clever, and pleasant to look at. But they were very unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was full of bad luck and sadness. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.

Their bad luck began one day at the beach. The three children lived with their parents in a huge house at the heart of a dirty and busy city, and sometimes their parents gave them permission to take a bus to the seashore.

Violet, the eldest, liked to skip rocks. As she threw the rocks across the water, she was looking out and thinking about a machine she wanted to build. Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet was very good at thinking up and building strange machines. This morning she was thinking about how to make a machine that could return a rock after you had thrown it into the ocean.

Klaus, the middle child and the only boy, liked to look at animals in the small pools between rocks. Klaus was a little older than twelve and wore glasses, which made him look intelligent. He was intelligent. His parents had a huge library in their house, a room filled with thousands of books on nearly every subject. Being only twelve, Klaus of course had not read all of the books in the library, but he had read a great many of them and had remembered a lot of information from his readings.

Sunny, the youngest, liked to bite things. She was a baby, and very small for her age, barely larger than a boot. She made up for her small body size with the size and sharpness of her four teeth. Sunny was at an age where one mostly speaks in strange noises. Except when she used the few actual words in her vocabulary, like “bottle,” “mommy,” and “bite,” most people had trouble understanding what it was that she was saying. For example, this morning she was saying, “Gack!” again and again, which probably meant, “Look at that strange, tall person coming out of the fog!”

See below for the table of rules.

1. Exploding, because after they have exploded, we can’t see them. (B)
2. Broken, because her heart broke at the time when he said goodbye, and it’s after that now. (B)
3. Shocking, because the truth is the reason for people’s shocked feeling. (A)
4. Surprised, because the president is feeling surprised; something has already surprised him. (A)
5. Freezing, because the weather is making things frozen (like people and water). (B/C)
6. Frozen, because if a popsicle is not completely frozen, then it’s just juice or water. (B/C)
7. Winding, because a road never stops “going” unless someone destroys it, so it’s ongoing. (B)
8. Wound, because someone or something has already stressed out (“wound up”) the executive/businessman. (B/C)
9. Distracting, because this scene is what is making the drivers feel distracted. (A)
10. Distracted (something has distracted him) or distracting (he is distracting other drivers by doing crazy things). (A)
11. Dripping, because the problem with the faucet is that it will not stop dripping. (B)
12. Dripped, because the art is already finished; the paint is already dripped and not dripping anymore. (B)
13. Melting, because after they are completely melted, they are not icebergs (just water). (B)
14. Melted, because until it melts completely, the ice doesn’t become drinking water. (B)
15. Overworked, because “overwork” is something you must do to a person. Here the accountant’s boss has probably overworked her. (C)

Here is the table of rules to remember. If you look above, you will see that I have labeled each number with the rule that helps explain it (A/B/C).

Black Beauty IDs

“You’re putting the cart before the horse.”
When you put the cart before the horse, you are doing something the wrong way round.

“You’re beating a dead horse.”
If someone is trying to convince people to do or feel something without any hope of succeeding, they’re beating a dead horse; it’s no use.

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
This means that if you are given something, a present or a chance, you should not waste it by being too critical or examining it too closely.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”
This idiom means you can offer something to someone, like good advice, but you cannot make them take it.

The Golden Cobwebs – Thai translation

Chaba – English translation

5 Sentences + answers

Verbs & Gerunds worksheet – answers

Ongoing vs. Completed worksheet – answers + “Why?” answers

Timeline Sentences (part 1, part 2) – answers

Past Tense Stories – answers