How do we use prepositions of time in the English language? Choose the correct prepositions of time in the following sentences.

1. Peter is playing tennis _____Sunday.

2. My brother's birthday is _____the 5th of November.

3. My birthday is ______May.

4. We are going to see my parents ______the weekend.

5. ________1666, a great fire broke out in London.

6. I don't like walking alone in the streets _______night.

7. What are you doing _______the afternoon?

8. My friend has been living in Canada _______two years.

9. I have been waiting for you ________seven o'clock.

10.  I will have finished this essay ________Friday.

Study skills

Every student wants to be a smart reader, i.e. to know basic reading strategies, be able to imply them while reading process and understand the content. Read the strategies of a smart reader and match them with questions one should ask when dealing with the text.

E.g.: Select relevant parts of the book matches with question a) Do I use the content page, the index, the headings for guidance?

Am I a smart reader?

By Stella Cottrell

Strategy	Option	Questions to think of
Know exactly what you are looking for		a) Do I use the content page, the index, the headings for guidance? b) Do I identify which parts of which chapters I need, and put markers in these?
Use reading lists selectively		c) Do I keep trying to anticipate what is coming next, or what the conclusions will be?
Examine sources for suitability		d) Do I know what questions I’m going to answer? Have I considered what information I need?
Find information quickly		e) Do I use marker pens to highlight important words and phrases? Do I make notes about the points I highlighted, to help me remember them?
Select relevant parts of the book		f) Do I keep changing the pace, according to the needs of the text? Do I scan rapidly for specific information? Do I read quickly to get the general sense of a passage, and then read difficult parts slowly?
Practice second-guessing		g) Have I looked at the recommended reading lists? Do I know what I need to read?
Read interactively		h) Have I tried using an index? Have I got faster with practice?
Vary reading speed and method		i) Do I question what I’m reading? Do I look for answers to my questions?
Use photocopies		j) Have I considered:  - whether it is up-to-date or not?  - whether it looks readable?  - whether it has the information I want?

Read for fun

Read the beginning of Chapter II of Evelyn Waugh’s well-known novel “A Handful of Dust” and answer the following questions.

Does the design of the house characterize the main characters?

Is there any sense in the surname of the character? Do you know any other examples of surnames that have descriptive sense?

What does Edwardian style mean? Find out what Elizabethan and Chip and dale styles mean.

A Handful of Dust

by Evelyn Waugh

Mrs. Beaver stood with her back to the fire, eating her morning yoghurt. She held the carton close under her chin and gobbled with a spoon. “Heavens, how nasty this stuff is. I wish you’d take to it, John. You’re looking so tired lately. I don’t know how I should get through my day without it.”

 “But, mumsey, I haven’t as much to do as you have.”

 “That’s true, my son.”

 John Beaver lived with his mother at the house in Sussex Gardens where they had moved after his father’s death. There was little in it to suggest the austerely elegant interiors which Mrs. Beaver planned for her customers. It was crowded with the unsaleable furniture of two larger houses, without pretension to any period, least of all to the present. The best pieces and those which had sentimental interest for Mrs. Beaver were in the L-shaped drawing room upstairs. Beaver had a dark little sitting room on the ground floor behind the dining room, and his own telephone.

The elderly parlour maid looked after his clothes. She also dusted, polished and maintained in symmetrical order on his dressing table and on the top of his chest of drawers, the collection of sombre and bulky objects that had stood in his father’s dressing room; indestructible presents for his wedding and twenty- first birthday, ivory, brass bound; covered in pigskin, crested and gold mounted, suggestive of expensive Edwardian masculinity—racing flasks and hunting flasks, cigar cases, tobacco jars, jockeys, elaborate meerschaum pipes, button hooks and hat brushes. There were four servants, all female and all, save one elderly. When anyone asked Beaver why he stayed there instead of setting up on his own, he sometimes said that he thought his mother liked having him there (in spite of her business she was lonely); sometimes that it saved him at least five pounds a week. His total income varied around six pounds a week, this was an important saving. He was twenty-five years old. From leaving Oxford until the beginning of the slump he had worked in an advertising agency.

Beaver sat on beside his telephone. Once it rang and a voice said, “Mr. Beaver? Will you please hold the line, sir, Lady Tipping would like to speak to you.” The intervening silence was full of pleasant expectation. Lady Tipping had a luncheon party that day, he knew; they had spent some time together the evening before and he had been particularly successful with her. Someone had chucked...

 “Oh, Mr. Beaver, I am so sorry to trouble you. I was wondering, could you possibly tell me the name of the young man you introduced to me last night at Madame de Trommet’s? The one with the reddish moustache. I think he was in Parliament.”

 “I expect you mean Jock Grant-Menzies.”

“Yes, that’s the name. You don’t by any chance know where I can find him, do you?”

“He’s in the book but I don’t suppose he’ll be at home now. You might be able to get him at Brat’s at about one. He’s almost always there.”

“Jock Grant-Menzies, Brat’s Club. Thank you so very much. It is kind of you. I hope you will come and see me some time: Goodbye.”

 After that the telephone was silent. At one o’clock Beaver despaired. He put on his overcoat, his gloves, his bowler hat and with neatly rolled umbrella set off to his club, taking a penny bus as far as the corner of Bond Street. The air of antiquity pervading Brat’s, derived from its elegant Georgian façade and finely panelled rooms, was entirely spurious, for it was a club of recent origin, founded in the burst of bonhommie immediately after the war. It was intended for young men, to be a place where they could straddle across the fire and be jolly in the card room without incurring scowls from older members. But now these founders were themselves passing into middle age; they were heavier, balder and redder in the face than when they had been demobilized, but their joviality persisted and it was their turn now to embarrass their successors, deploring their lack of manly and gentlemanly qualities. Six broad backs shut Beaver from the bar. He settled in one of the armchairs in the outer room and turned over the pages of the New Yorker, waiting until someone he knew should turn up.

 

Writing