Vocabulary Task

devise	ditch	elaborate	flounder	fortuitous	poignant
coin	cheery	cadaver	dung	sojourn	toil	tenuous

1.     Headdresses are made of feathers and grotesque faces and are often very _____.

2.     A couple of weeks after “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” was first published in November 2003, I met an old subeditor friend at a party who said he had once _____ a rather good comic routine around a martial art called Pungshway Shon in which the karate- style moves were derived from well-known punctuation marks.

3.     We even _____ phrases to express our sense of these differences, as when an English person, describes Italian as talking with their arms or Westerners refer to people from oriental countries as “insrutable”.

4.     In fact, it would appear that one of the beauties of the English language in that with even the most _____ grasp you can speak volumes if you show enough enthusiasm – a willingness to tootle with vigour, as it were.

5.     But the shoulder was indignantly withdrawn and the hardhanded son of _____ went to earth.

6.     He _____ a bit, but came up smiling, made a loose effort to brush the dust off his coat and legs, but a smart pass of his hand missed entirely, and the force of unchecked impulse slewed him suddenly around, twisted his legs, together, and projected him, limber and sprawling, into the lap of the Lord Longlegs.

7.     The sidewalks were merely long, deep _____, with steep snow walks on either side.

8.     A _____ fire was blazing on the hearth.

9.     Latin sentence is strictly _____.

10.From electronic libraries to the digitized _____ of an executed killer Networld! Covers everything that’s happening on the Net.

11.There can be no better preparation for a descent into Italy than a _____ among the upper Swiss valleys.

12.The residents of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea have 100 words for yams, while the Maori of New Zealand have 35 words for _____ (don’t ask me why).

13.The aborigines of Tasmania have a word for every type of tree, but no word that just means “tree”, while the Araucanian Indians of cile rather more _____ have an abundance of words to distinguish between different degrees of hunger.

14. 

Days of the Week

Unscramble the words
DAMNOY
USTEYAD
DEWNESDYA
HRDTUAY
IRFDAY
TURSAYDA
DYAUNS

Vocabulary Task

endow	futon	duvet	admonition	divest
deviousness	Generation 1.5	paddy	pendant	heed
tow-line	food stamp		towing	wobble

1.     In some countries, people like sleeping on a _____, and in more luxurious households, people might sleep in a four-poster bed.

2.     No human being _____ with sympathetic interest, who himself has to contend with difficulties, fails to be moved by the success or disaster of the contestants in a struggle of which the spectator has no part or lot.

3.     The engineers hadn’t expected the bridge to _____ because they had never built such a long bridge of this type before.

4.     Much of this sort of trouble would be saved if those who are ______ would keep remembering that they are _____, and give a pretty frequent look round to see how their man if getting on.

5.     Alternatively, they might use a _____.

6.     Paradoxically, the very ______ intended to reform the prodigal served only to reinforce his wicked ways.

7.     It is therefore unsurprising that many of the living organisms that have evolved on the earth have ______ the biologically advantageous capacity to trap light energy.

8.     Amusingly enough, lawyers sometimes drive their sports cars in the same fashion that they construct their cases; a lawyer noted for the _____ of his arguments, for example, may also be known for the circuitousness of his routes.

9.     There is a diversity among writers; bilingual, ______.

10.The entire clan croaked in unison surprisingly, incredulous that anyone would want to leave the Ichangu rice _______.

11. Necklaces are often worn with a crossbar _____ to which shells are attached.

12.You are warned to ______ this order.

13.The only reply we made to this was to pass him over the ______, and he took it, and stepped out.

14.Research has found that for many people from all classes, there is a srong stigma attached to the use of _____.

Numbers

One is a number,
Two is a number,
Three is a number,
Four!
Number five is before six,
And number seven is more!
Eight is a number,
Nine is a number,
Now we come to ten...
And we are back at one again!

Vocabulary Tips

cowled	elusive	holorime	intact
militant	obscurity	forge	paddy
rever	tow-line	trowel	wobble

1.     To all these people I send thanks – except, of course, the _____ plagiarist, to whom I address one heartfelt raspberry.

2.     A man might be a very fine artist, engineer, or philosopher, but unless he managed to bring his work to the attention of the ruler of the cities, he was likely to remain in _____.

3.     Sometimes it was by armed horsemen escorting a rich banker to some appointment; other times it was a file of _____ monks observing some saint’s day and carrying huge wax candles.

4.     Mrs Mott is using a _____ to dig small holes in the dirt.

5.     Among the many people to whom I am indebted for help in the preparation of this book, I must single out Miles Kington of the Independent for kindly allowing me to reproduce two _____ in the chapter on wordplay.

6.     It was probably a tabloid newspaper and they wanted to make a joke about how the bridge _____.

7.     The ceiling was _____ and so was I.

8.     I don’t wish to be insulting, but I firmly believe that if you took an average ______, and stretched it out straight across the middle of afield, and then turned your back on it for thirty seconds, that when you looked around again, you would find that it had got itself altogether in the middle of the field and had twisted itself up, and tied itself into knots, and lost its two ends and become all loops; and it would take you a good half - hour sitting down there on the grass and swearing all the while, disentangle it again.

9.     She feels a genuine affection for those little full stops and commas, colons and semi-colons and she protects them rather than _____ them.

10.I laughed, I howled, and I immediately wanted to join the _____ wing of the Apostrophe Society.

11.It was evening, and Bhaktaprasad was gazing down upon Kathmandu Valley as the Sun’s slanting rays lit its fields of greening ______.

12.Thus at the flaming ______ of life our fortunes must be wrought.