English Day by Day is designed for school students to improve their performance in the English language.
Hey,
today we first did a quick warm up about the California Gold Rush and you learnt many interesting facts about it. Here is what we said:
The gold rush happened is the 1850's in California, more precisely in San Francisco. Within a year, more than 300.000 gold diggers descended upon the West coast. They wanted to strike it rich and find gold nuggets.
Levi Strauss profited from this gold by selling jeans with a special feature / characteristic.
There was a rivet at the pocket to prevent the jeans from tearing.
Virginie doesn't really like wearing jeans because she thinks they're not comfortable and too hot in the summer.
As for Eliott, he totally agrees. Skirts are more fashionable.
Then we continued working on the understanding of this difficult text. We corrected the exercise you had to do for today about characters, places, time, point of view and atmosphere. Here are the indications from the text that have helped us determine all those charateristics:
First Group of People:
*Who?
Marlow and "pilgrims". Marlow is the captain of the steamer and "pilgrims" is the nickname of the crew (the crew is the people who work on the boat, the sailors).
*Where?
on the steamer, on the river.
*When?
At night, more precisely at dawn / daybreak.
*Characteristics of this group?
The are at bay / lost / scared
Second Group of People:
*Who?
"wood-cutters" (l.10) ==> the natives.
*Where?
in the jungle.
*Characteristics of this group ?
They are hidden and they're playing drums.
Which point of view?
it's a first person narrative and we have the impressions of Marlow and his crew.
Finally, you had to find out some words proving that the characters (Marlow and his crew) are confused, lost and scared. Here are the first quotations:
I don't know (l.1)
Something (l.2)
Very slow (l.3)
It was very quiet there (l.6)
We could not tell (l.9)
The snapping of a twig would make you start (.10-11)
Unknow planet (l.12)
Suddenly (l.14)
Incomprehensible (l.18)
Who could tell ? We were cut off from the comprehension... (l.19)
Phantoms (l.20)
We could not understand / could not remember
No memories (l.24)
Unearthly (l.25)
Monster / Monstrous (l.26)
HW: you need to finish highlighting the words that prove the characters' state of mind, be able to present the document and also tell me why some words were left out in the text I finally gave you.