Angielski z Roy`em (mp3)

Roy, od lat mieszkający w Tarnobrzegu, zaprasza was na łamy "Echa Dnia" w każdy wtorek.

ON THE ROAD

June is turning out (= okazuje się) to be an eventful (= pełno wydarzeń) month. This week, I’m off to Manchester for a few days with a group of local disabled people. Apart from taking a look around the city and a tour around the Man U stadium, we’ll be having drama lessons with our English partners. Maybe we’ll even be able to create a piece of work together? In any case, Britain will be such a shock for the guys in my group. So many things will look different, sound different, and be the wrong way round. The cars will be on the wrong side of the road. The food will taste different. I’m hoping that we’ll all come home feeling refreshed (= odświeżony) with new ideas, images (= obrazy) and memories.
EXAMS

Are you fed up with (= mieć dość) exams and tests? If so, you might find this piece of news quite encouraging (ynkaridżiń, = zachęcający). The General Teaching Council, an influential (ynfluenszyl, = wpływowy) teaching organisation in Britain, has recently said that there should be no national exams for children under 16. The council says exams are not improving educational standards: they just make pupils feel demotivated (dimotywejtyd) and stressed. Moreover, exams encourage bored teenagers to drop out of school (= leave before the end). The council says that schoolchildren in England and Wales do an average (awerydż, = średnio) of 70 national tests and exams before they are sixteen: this makes them the most tested pupils in the world. It feels that the Standard Assessment Tests that children do when they are seven, eleven and fourteen should be got rid of (to get rid of = wyrzucić). Moreover, the council says that teachers are having to focus on (= skupić się na) getting their students to do well in the tests rather than on giving them a broad (brołd, = szeroki) education. Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher who was against traditional schooling, is probably smiling somewhere….

PASSIONATE MINDS

This is the title of a really good book that I’m reading right now by David Bodanis. It’s all about the relationship between Emilie du Chatelet, a brilliant eighteenth-century female mathematician, and Voltaire, the famous writer. These remarkable (= znakomity, wybitny) people lived together in a mansion (manszyn, = dwór) in the countryside, conducting (to conduct = prowadzić) experiments and sharing ideas. They helped to popularise the work of Isaac Newton, one of the greatest physicists of all time. This means that they helped to shape (szejp, = kształcić) the way in which we look at what is around us today. Although Bodanis doesn’t give as much of the science as I would like, he makes both of them really come to life, with all their insecurities (= niepewności) and dreams.

MOHAMMED YUNUS

In case (= jeśli) you don’t know who he is, he won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago for his work in helping the poor. He came up with (= wynalazł) the idea of microloans (majkrolołnz, = mikropożyczki), very small loans that poor women could take out (to take out a loan = wziąć pożyczkę). This idea has had a huge positive effect on the lives of poor people around the world. At a church conference in Germany the other day, he said something like this: Poverty (= bieda) is not having the chance to discover your talents and find out who you are.