My English blog: UNIT 1

A way with words

There is a tendency of thinking of English as the most important language around the world. In fact, it is thought to be the language with the greatest number of speakers, just behind the Chinese and our lovely Spanish. However, not all English speakers are native. There are 360 million English native speakers, but it is actually spoken by more than one thousand people, either as a second language or as a lingua franca.

The great typo hunt, by Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson

"On a fine June weekend in 2007, in the verdant reaches of northern New Hampshire, I decided to change the world.

The world needed changing— that I knew. Global warming threatened to give us all a lethal tan; war and poverty decimated whole nations; crops worldwide were shriveling; even our brethren beasts menaced us with their monkeypox and bird flu and mad cow disease. I just couldn’t figure out what I could do for our troubled civilization.

Those thoughts echoed in my head as I drove into the idyllic little town of Hanover, New Hampshire, for my five- year college reunion. I’d been toying with the idea of a road trip. Oil addiction and carbon emissions aside, I had to count myself among the many Americans who regarded their cars as a signifier for freedom itself. Any day I could get into my iron steed and— escape. I hadn’t, so far, but I could. I could explore the country, embark on towering adventures, and simultaneously fulfill some noble purpose. Yes, a road trip seemed like a fine idea, but I didn’t know what was worth seeing and, more crucially, I didn’t know how to infuse the trip with the sparkling sap of magnificence. How do people blunder into conditions that their unique abilities alone can resolve? I couldn’t trust that I would wander into a situation where only my intimate knowledge of Final Fantasy lore would defuse a standoff between two rival video-game-obsessed street gangs. I pondered that as I pulled into a parking spot and ventured off to find my classmates."

Extracted from The great typo hunt

Look at these following pictures. Is there anything wrong with them? Identify the problem if there is any.

Suffixes

A suffix is a letter or a group pf letters attached to the end of a word to form a new word or to alter the grammatical function of the original word. Here below there are some examples: