Etiqueta: culture

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Culture Learning Reading Vocabulary

Tastes of home: what food do you miss the most?

Cheese on toast, curry or a pint of bitter … if you’ve been abroad, what food and drink is first on your list when you get home?

Cheese on toast Biting into a generous cheesy wedge feels like home.’ Photograph: Rex      Features

I’m sitting in Changi airport in Singapore, thinking about food. Having bulldozed my way through the city’s hawker markets on a stopover from Australia, my mind is on my next meal. Not the foil-wrapped tray that awaits me, but a proper taste of home.

I’ve been away from the UK for 15 months, and in that time been asked what I miss, crave and covet. A greasy spoon fry-up, a bacon sandwich, Sunday lunch or a binge of Monster Munch and the Beeb? It’s like being asked to pick my favourite song. Home is London. It’s Yorkshire and Lancashire, too. All play parts in my life and shape my tastes. Choosing between them is too loaded for me to consider on an empty stomach, so rather than a homecoming meal, I am preparing for a homecoming food journey.

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Culture Learning Photo

Photo of the day: Shades of Red

Shades of Red

PeacePhotograph by Caruso Furyk, National Geographic Your Shot

Umbrellas shade novice monks at a pagoda in Mandalay, Myanmar (Burma). «It was a fine day, with sunny weather,» writes  Caruso Furyk, who submitted this picture to our Your Shot community.

 

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Comprehension Culture News Reading Vocabulary

United States Tightens the Noose on the Ivory Trade

The U.S. announces important new rules to restrict the domestic trade in ivory.

elefantesPHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL NICHOLS, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

The new ivory rules ban the commercial import of African elephant ivory.

New restrictions on the ivory trade designed to create «a near complete ban» on the commercial sale of African elephant ivory in the U.S. were announced Tuesday by the Obama Administration.

Elephants and rhinos have taken center stage in global coverage of illegal wildlife trafficking, and the ivory restrictions are a cornerstone of the administration’s new plan. (Read » Blood Ivory» in National Geographic magazine.)

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Culture Reading Song Vocabulary

Learn, sing and have fun!

UNCHAIN MY HEART

by Joe Cocker

Unchain my heart.
Baby, let me be,
‘Cause you don’t care.
Please, set me free.

Unchain my heart,
Baby, let me go.
Unchain my heart,
‘Cause you don’t love me no more.

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Learning Reading

50 Years Later, Beatles Steal Another Show

11beatles-3-superJumboCBS’s «Grammy Salute» Belongs to McCartney and Starr.

If there’s one thing pop learned in the last 50 years, it’s that Beatles songs never wear out their welcome. The Beatles’ original recordings have retained not only their musical brilliance but also the nearly universal good will that the band generated in its time, as well as the accumulated nostalgia that makes baby boomers conflate its music with all the pleasures of their youth.

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Culture Grammar Learning Reading Vocabulary

Hugh Turvey: Inside the Life of an X-Ray Artist

Hugh Turvey is a British artist and photographer who uses x-ray technology to create what he calls Xograms, a fusion of visible light and x-ray imagery. I first worked with him for an assignment in the magazine and have to come to rely on his expertise when it comes to seeing the unseen. I spoke with him about his work and recent photo published in the February issue of National Geographic magazine.

goldfish

X-ray of a goldfish in a bowl.

I am an experimentalist and I think in images. Since I started working with x-ray in the late 1990’s, I am constantly amazed with how little I know.” —Hugh Turvey

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Culture Learning

QUOTE OF THE DAY BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

 

shakespeare01

«Hell is empty and all the devils are here».
William Shakespeare

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Comprehension Culture Learning News Reading Vocabulary

Fantasy Hollywood: restaging classic films with black models

When two Senegalese photographers messed with some very familiar screen moments, they were taken aback by the racial dimension to the response.

Black Hollywood Breakfast                  Breakfast at Onomo’s, 2013. Photograph: Antoine Tempé

Back in the 80s, my classmates and I piled into Mbabane’s local cinema to watch Top Gun. We’d turn to each other, channeling our best version of Val Kilmer to spout “You can be my wing man anytime” – followed by intense laughter. Who doesn’t have a favourite line, an iconic moment from film lodged in our minds?

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Photo

Unlocking Secrets of the Grand Canyon’s Age.

Rocks from the iconic gorge provide the clues.

grand-canyon-younger-than-thought_75838_990x742

Sunrise over Mount Hayden in the Grand Canyon.

 

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Comprehension Culture Learning Reading

How to eat curry!

This month, How to Eat fancies a curry. Eat-in or takeaway? Dishes to share or your own main course? Washed down with beer or wine? And does anyone ever have room for dessert?
Thali

Loosen your belt, Britain! How to Eat – the blog seeking to establish an informal code of conduct for Britain’s favourite dishes – is back, and this month (with apologies to my Word of Mouth colleague Sejal Sukhadwala), we’re having a curry.

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Comprehension Learning Reading Vocabulary

Recipe: Shortbread

Try making these easy, buttery biscuits as homemade Christmas presents, with chocolate chips worked into the dough.

 

shortbreadIngredients

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Comprehension Culture Learning Reading Vocabulary

QUOTE BY GERTRUDE STEIN

«I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. It’s better to be rich».

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays that eschewed the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of 19th-century literature, and a fervent collector of Modernist art. She was born in West Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, raised in Oakland, California, and moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life.

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