A Monthly Newsletter for Teachers of English

June 2009

© Pearson Longman 2009 PHOTOCOPIABLE

- 1 -

S

TARTING OFF

Complete the table below for your last two holidays.

H

OLIDAY

#1

H

OLIDAY

#2

1. When was it?

2. Where did you go?

3. Who did you go with?

4. What did you do?

5. Was it fun?

6. Would you do it again?

Work with a partner. Tell each other about your holidays.

B

EFORE YOU READ

/F

IRST READING

You’re going to read an article about holidays in the future. Look at the holidays below and try to decide which holidays
are available now and which might only be available in the future.

holidays in space

holidays under the sea

holidays in the Antarctic

holidays on Mars

Read the text quickly to check your answers

A C T I V I T I E S S H E E T

June 2009

© Pearson Longman 2009 PHOTOCOPIABLE

- 2 -

S

ECOND READING

Read the text again more carefully and decide if the sentences below are true (T) or false (F).

1. According to the text, holidays are very common nowadays.

T ☐

F ☐

2.

Cook’s holidays were for the very rich.

T ☐

F ☐

3. The rooms at the undersea hotels are cheap.

T ☐

F ☐

4.

In Kubrick’s film, holidays on the moon were not very popular.

T ☐

F ☐

5. We know how much Dennis Tito paid for his trip into space.

T ☐

F ☐

6. There is always a market for new and strange holiday destinations.

T ☐

F ☐

V

OCABULARY

1

UBIQUITOUS

RELATIVELY LITERALLY

CONFINED (TO)

INHOSPITABLE

PRIVILEGE

1. limited to (ADJECTIVE)

2. an advantage or favour given to one person or a very
limited group (NOUN)

3. a place which is difficult to live or stay in because it is
so unpleasant or dangerous (ADJECTIVE)

4. meaning exactly what it says (ADVERB)

5. compared to other things (ADVERB)

6. seeming to be everywhere (ADJECTIVE)

V

OCABULARY

2

Complete the sentences with words from Vocabulary 1.

1. People live in deserts, in the mountains - even in the arctlc. People live in the most _________________ places.

2. We have computers at work, at home, in shops… they really are _________________ machines.

3. There are _________________ millions of stars in our galaxy.

4. I feel very lucky to have worked here. It has been a _________________.

5. My house is _________________ large for the town.

6. The job includes a lot of office work but it is not _________________ that - there is a lot of travelling as well.

A C T I V I T I E S S H E E T

June 2009

© Pearson Longman 2009 PHOTOCOPIABLE

- 3 -

T

HIRD READING

Four sentences have been removed from the text - one from each paragraph. Read the text carefully and decide where

the sentences should go.

PARAGRAPH 1 - TRADITIONAL HOLIDAYS

…when he began organising and selling tickets for packaged trips in Great Britain and, later...

PARAGRAPH 2 - BENEATH THE WAVES

...for those with the money, the time and the desire...

PARAGRAPH 3 - AMONGST THE STARS

...all bright white walls and strange chairs...

PARAGRAPH 4 - THE FUTURE OF HOLIDAYS

...a holiday in Antarctica, anyone?

S

PEAKING

What would your ideal holiday? Work with a partner to plan it. Think about

When you would like to go: what time of the year, what season…

Where you would like to go: the country, region, city; one destination or more...

How you would like to travel: by plane, by car, by train, by boat...

How long you would like to go for...

Who you would like to go with: friends, family, by yourself...

What you would like to do...

When you have planned your holiday tell the rest of the class about it.

A C T I V I T I E S S H E E T

June 2009

© Pearson Longman 2009 PHOTOCOPIABLE

- 4 -

TRADITIONAL HOLIDAYS

Holidays as we think of them today - going away
from your home, usually to a place far away, often
to another country - are so ubiquitous that we
forget that they are in fact a relatively modern
invention.

The first holidays were ‘invented’ by Thomas Cook
in the middle of the 19

th

century around Europe,

the United States and the world. Before Cook trips
abroad were the preserve of the super-rich and
were almost always related to business or
diplomacy; thanks to Cook ordinary people began
to travel for pleasure and, soon enough, to expect
to be able to take holidays with some regularity.

BENEATH THE WAVES

Does the idea of looking out of your hotel window
and seeing tropical fish swimming past sound
good

to you? Well, ‘future’ holidays are quite

possible today. Underwater hotels are already
open or will open later this year in locations as far
apart as Fiji, the Bahamas and Dubai. You can
expect the heights of luxury - restaurants galore,
shops, sports centres, golf courses, tennis courts,
even a wedding chapel -

just don’t expect the

rooms to be cheap!

AMONGST THE STARS

If a trip to the bottom of the sea isn’t enough to
excite you, what about a journey that is, quite
literally, out of this world? The idea of holidays in
space is not a new one: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A
Space Odyssey featured a trip to moon Station V,
where tourists could stay at a busy Hilton hotel, for
example, though the decoration was strictly 1960s.

The first space tourist was an American, Dennis
Tito, who in April 2001 travelled on a Russian

Soyuz

rocket

to

the

International Space Station,
where he spent seven days as
a tourist, orbiting the earth 128
times; for his trip Tito reputedly
paid $20 million. Four other
men and one woman have travelled commercially
into space since Tito, all but one of them
American.

THE FUTURE OF HOLIDAYS

With holidays in space no longer confined to the
realm of film, what else can the future hold for us?
Further and further away - to Mars or beyond, for
example - or perhaps trips to ever more
inhospitable corners of our own planet. One thing
is for sure: however strange the place, there will
always be someone like Dennis Tito, ready to pay,
and pay well, for the privilege of being first.