5 free Mobile apps for ESL Learners / Teachers

Oxford English Vocab Trainer
If you are learning English for work, in preparation for academic study, or you are working towards an English language exam like TOEFL or IELTS, this is a quick and easy way to expand your vocabulary – even when your English tutor is not there. You can even access popular word lists from Oxford coursebooks to continue your studies at home.

LearnEnglish Grammar by British Council
LearnEnglish Grammar is a top interactive grammar practice app designed to help improve English grammar accuracy. The app offers 1000s of questions to help practice and reinforce your English grammar skills.

WordWeb Dictionary
The offline audio English dictionary and thesaurus with synonyms, related words, and professionally recorded pronunciations.

English Grammar & Phonetics
Written by Professors. Learn English Grammar and Phonetics. Audios, Exams, Resources & Exercises. Download free Content and Audios. Study on your Mobile. Work on your PC/Mac. Print what you need.

Cambridge English 1500 Conversation
English Conversations with many topic to talk together. This app have more than 1500 english conversations to listening and practice. Practice everyday to improve your English.

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16 Verbs for Body Movement

What is the vocabulary? and why is it important. Click here to read it.

Words	Meaning	Urdu
Eyes
Wink	Close and open one eye quickly	آنکھ مارنا
Stare	Look fixedly	گھورنا
Blink	Shut and open both eyes quickly	آنکھ جھپکنا
Mouth
Bite	Use the teeth to cut	کاٹنا
Swallow	Allow to pass down the throat.	نگلنا
Lick	Pass the tongue over	چاٹنا
Blow	Expel air through pursed lips	پھونک مارنا
Kiss	Touch as a sign of love	پیار کرنا
Hands
Pat	Touch gently	تھپتھپانا
Slap	Hit	تھپڑ مارنا
Punch	Strike with the fist	مکا مارنا
Wave	Move hand to and fro	ہاتھ ہلانا
Rip	Tear	پھاڑنا
Grab	Hold	پکڑنا
Legs
Kick	Strike with the foot	لات مارنا
Limp	Walk with difficulty	لنگڑانا

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Celestial event Vocabulary

What is the vocabulary? and why is it important. Click here to read it.

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Pomegranate Molasses - Reading Comprehension

Pomegranate molasses is a think dark-red condiment that is used in many parts of the Middle East. This Middle-Eastern ingredient has a sweet yet tangy taste. Concentrated syrup made from reducing fresh pomegranate juice, it manages to be both sweet and tart, while also having the depth of flavors of good balsamic vinegar and being quite fruity.

Delicious added to a marinade for either chicken or lamb, you can also use pomegranate molasses in salad dressings. A drizzle tossed through chickpeas and butter beans or cooked sweet potatoes can spark up these otherwise plain foods.

One of my favorites- an idea I learnt from cookery writer Lucinda Dodds -  is to combine pomegranate molasses with olive oil and a pinch of cinnamon and use this as a dressing for a fresh tomato salad. This flavor combination is simply amazing and I always make extra.  Then the next day I toss the leftovers through cooked faster and with top with some crumbled Walnuts an explosion of two of Peter for an easy and absolutely delicious lunch this middle Eastern ingredient has a sweet yet tangy taste Catherine Elliott ads flute easiest and take stock of vegetables.

Reading Comprehension

1. Select the most suitable synonym of ‘condiment’
a. Seasoning
b. Aloe
c. Ashes
d. None of the above

2. Pomegranate molasses is used in many parts of the
a. Asia
b. Japan
c. Africa
d. Middle-East

3. Pomegranate molasses has taste of
a. Sweet
b. Sour
c. Bitter
d. Acidic

Which of the following use isn’t listed in the passage.
a. Salad dressing
b. tossed in chick peas
c. Cooked through pasta
d. Cooked with prawns

4. Whose idea is to combine pomegranate with olive oil?
a. Jennifer
b. Editor
c. Kathryn Elliot
d.  Lucinda Dodds

5. She cooked the leftovers with some pasta and topped with
a. some egg
b. some cheese
c. some walnuts
d. some bananas

Editable Worksheet for Teachers:
Click here to download above Reading Passage and Questions;
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VAdVx633wwXgJGasm45gz684TjNVlPVB/view?usp=sharing

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16 widely used Compound Adjectives

What is adjective? Click here to read it.
Compound adjective means an adjective that has two or more words.

10 out of the box English Words

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Power of Political Cartoons

DID YOU KNOW?
Thomas Nast, a famous Nineteeth –century American cartoonist, created both the Republican party’s elephant and the modern image of Santa Claus. He was responsible for repeated attacks on corrupt New York mayor, Boss Tweed. Tweed once said that he didn’t care what people wrote about him because most of his people “couldn’t read,” but that he hated “those awful pictures.” Apparently, Nast was bribed with a considerable amount of money to leave the country. He didn’t. And Tweed was voted out of office largely due to Nast’s cartoons.
In this article, you will find a power of political cartoon and how to analyze its power and message. The political cartoons reflects the humors of society, historical significance and the broader aspects of a certain issue.
Undoubtedly, the power of political cartoons is historical and undeniable. Look through newspapers and magazines for a political cartoon that grabs you, that says something you want to support or argue against.
Read the following excerpt from an article by Richard Reeves, a syndicated columnist for the Universal Press. He understands the importance of political cartoons, not only in America, but throughout the world.

A Good Cartoon Is Worth a Thousand Words
Richard Reeves
‘They tell a story about President Lyndon Johnson smiling one morning after he read a Walter Lippmann column that ripped him up one  side down the other. “Why are you smiling, Mr. President?” said the least timid of his men.
“I’m glad Lippmann can’t draw,” said the president.
I wish I could – be a political cartoonist rather than a political columnist. God, how I envy them! Like much great work, cartooning seems easy if you’re not the one who has to do it. A political cartoon is simply the shortest distance between one point and one citizen.
There was a time I wrote thousands and thousands of words for the New York Times and in this column about Vietnam and Watergate, two of the big stories of the 60’s and 70’s. A few years later I flipped through a collection of the cartoons of Herbert Block and I realized, not without a sharp pain, that he, and his readers or viewer or fans, understood what was actually happening long before I and my most celebrated colleagues.
I understood then the power of a discipline that makes the creator choose. You ant really fudge it in few words. There were two sides to every story I wrote. There was one side in Herb’s work: good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. 
Cartoons often say it all, answering the simplest and most complex of questions: I know what they’re saying, but tell me what’s really going on?
It’s just not fair. A columnist can write volumes, or a president can give a hundred speeches, and not be able to make sense of why the most powerful nation on the planet would celebrate its victory in the Cold War by invading the Caribbean islands or sending a half million of its best young men and women into harm’s way to restore a rich king to a tiny desert throne.
The U.S. Army has the right to keep the reporters and cameramen away from their self-defined and self-described triumphs, but there is no power on Earth capable of turning off the imagination of a cartoonist.

Factors that make cartoons meaningful
Background: What is the historical buildup to the situation that prompted this cartoon?
Target: If someone or something is being made fun of, and if so, who or what is it?
Audience and Purpose: Who or what is this cartoon directed toward? Who does the cartoonist most want to affect with this cartoon? For what reason?
Strategies: These are the humorous devices the cartoonist uses. They include  irony, satire, caricature, setting, puns, bias, symbols and images. Explore these terms before you begin.

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Think Like a Real Writer - A professional writer explained

The blog emphasizes the importance of telling rather than showing in your writing. Michael J. Quinn in his book, Writing Inside and Out, explains how specific details help to clarify your writing and orient your reader.

Take a moment to recall red marks all over the pages of writing that you handed in during your school career. In addition to all of those “SP’s”, “GR’s” and “Frag’s”, do you remember the words “Be Specific” and “More details needed”? Have you at any point considered what those words implied, or why teachers repeated them so insistently?

Consider for a moment how we learn about the world in which we live. Those of you who have young babies, brothers and sisters, think for a moment about how they learn about the world around them. Learning starts before we can talk. It really starts before we even breathe. What tools do we use for learning when we are in the womb and when we first leave its safety? Our senses are our tools. They reach out and rub against raw experience. Through hot and cold, light and dark, sweet and sour, smooth and rough, loud and soft we learn what we like and what we loathe. We learn to trust and to fear. We learn about danger and safety. As we grow older, we learn language. When we can name what we trust and what we fear, we gain the illusion of control. But experience remains our prime teacher. 

“Be specific” and “More details needed”, remind you to refocus on experience. Think more about the nature of language. Consider for a moment a concrete noun, “desk”. As you read that word, some of you are thinking about your fourth-grade desk with the top that raised straight up. Others are thinking about a modern piece of office furniture, complete with computer and printer. Still others are thinking about an oak rolltop with intricate cubby holes in the upper-right hand corner. A reader will not be thinking of the same desk the writer has in mind unless the writer provides more details. The writer must be more specific. If communication is this difficult with a concrete word, consider how much more difficult it is with abstract words such as love, anger or frustration. When we write, we owe it to our readers to be as clear as possible. Clarity charges us to show not tell.

Example: Harper Lee uses the technique of showing not telling in her Pulitzer prize winning novel to Kill a mockingbird. She begins her paragraph describing Mrs. Dubose with the telling sentence “She was horrible.” Then she goes on to share the details that show her readers exactly what she means when she says “horrible”. 

“Her face was the color of a dirty pillowcase, and the corners of her mouth glistened with wet, which inched like a gladder down the deep groves enclosing her chin. Old age liver spots dotted her cheeks, and her pale eyes had black pinpoint pupils. Her hands were knobby, and the cuticles were grown up over her fingernails. Her bottom plate was not in” and her upper lip protruded; from time to time she would draw her nether lip to her upper plate and carry her chin with it. This made the wet move faster.”

DID YOU KNOW?
Learning involves taking risks. Take a risk. Share your write up with at least one other reader. Have the reader answer about what details does Lee use to show that Mrs.Dubose is horrible?

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Sleep, Dreams and Interpretation

During sleep, people recover from the physical and emotional stresses and injuries. They also dream. The book, Making Life Choices written by Debruyn, MS in Nutrition, a Ph.D in Biology from the Washington University and working as a contributor in The Worldwatch Institute says, people who had regular, adequate sleep were physically younger for their years than people who did not. This Straight Talk explores the importance of sleep and dreams and tells what is known about their effects on health.

I’ve always wondered what goes on during sleep. What exactly does sleep do for me? This question is difficult to answer. Even though people spend a third of their lives sleeping, no one seems to know for sure what goes on during all that time. However, we know some of the things that happen physically: the blood pressure falls, breathing and heartbeat slowdown, the muscles relax, and the body temperature falls. Perhaps most important, growth hormone is released at almost no time other than during sleep. Growth hormone provides growth and renewal of body cells. It is probably growth hormone that brings about the physical recovery that sleep brings. 

If a person doesn’t get enough sleep, all the body systems work less and less well. People become irritable, can’t concentrate, think slowly, and lose coordination. If deprived of sleep long enough, people may start feeling confused, begin seeing imaginary things, or even feel that they are going insane. Irregular sleep or chronic lack of sleep over years can shorten life. Other problems with too little sleep include fatigue, reduced ability to work, and increased risk of heart disease and digestive disorders. A few reports suggest that going without sleep for many months may even prove fatal, although such reports are extremely rare. However, people who do not sleep enough at night tend to nod off during the day. This can be dangerous if they are driving. Drivers who fall asleep at the wheel cause 6,000 auto-related deaths a year.

People’s sleep needs vary. About 2% of adults habitually sleep ten hours a night, and some even more. Children need more than eight hours of sleep a night. Babies sleep 16 hours or even more; most adults, about six to seven hours. These differences seem to reflect the rate of cell growth, which is fastest in the young and which slows throughout life. Amazingly, though, by the age of 60, you will have slept for about 20 years of your life.

I’ve heard that an hour of sleep before midnight is worth two afterward. There’s nothing special about the hour of midnight. It is true, however, that early hours of sleep are deeper than others and therefore, more restful. You go through several stages during sleep. First, after you start to sleep. your body temperature falls, and your brain slows its activity. At this point, you may suddenly jerk half awake- the sign of a sudden burst of brain activity hat signals that start of the first stage of sleep. During the first stage of sleep, your muscles relax, and your heartbeat slows down. 

Minute’s late, you enter the second stage of sleep. The brain activity slows still more. Your eyes roll from side to side, but if they were to open, they would not see. This last for about half an hour; the third and fourth stages of sleep bring very slow brain activity, relaxed muscles and even breathing. This is the deepest sleep of all. It occurs mostly in the early hours of a night’s sleep.

It is during the deepest stage that REM sleep occurs. (REM stands for rapid eye movements). The rapid eye movement seems to reflect dreaming, as if the person’s eyes were following the actions of the dreams. You cycle several times a night through REM, into other stages of sleep, and back into REM.

That’s amazing when you had no idea what’s going on while we are asleep. What do you suppose it’s all for? We don’t know. But we do know that REM sleep seems to be essential to a person’s well-being.

People deprived of REM sleep become hostile, irritable and anxious. When sound sleep is again possible, people who have been deprived of REM sleep will experience longer periods of REM to make up for what they’ve missed. This is one reason why sleeping pills may actually harm people. Many of them interfere with this important phases of sleep.

People who drink alcohol, consume caffeine or consume cigarettes may also be interrupting their normal sleep patterns without knowing it. Even a single alcoholic drink before bed time has caused abnormal stoppage of breathing in sleep experiments. Caffeine and nicotine, the drug of tobacco, are both stimulants and can change the brain’s activity to prevent normal sleep.

Images in dreams may be symbols of real-life events. The following dream symbols can be interpreted in many ways, and most experts rely on the dreamer’s interpretation.

Accident: something that has shocked or hurt the dreamer.
Actor: a desire for public attention.
Alien: Some aspect of the dreamer’s personality that seems out of character and foreign.
Alligator: being gripped by fears’ ideas or urges that arise from inside.
Baby: The dreamer as an infant, who needs café from others in order to survive.
Basement: Unknown feelings, hidden motives, memories of the past. 
Beach: The line between the conscious and unconscious mind, and deep ideas and feelings.
Blindness: a refusal to admit or understand something.
Bomb: explosive emotions of the dreamer that may harm others.
Burial: Fear of death, or fear of disturbing memories. 
Butterfly: a change, emotional or physical from something undesirable to something desirable.
Cat: Understanding and knowledge.
Chicken: Fear of abuse by others.
Clothes: The dreamer’s body image or a preferred image shown down to others.
Fish: The inner, unconscious self.
Flying: mastery of a new skill.
Frog: Unconciuos knowledge, and the power to change.
Ghost: An old lingering fear.
Legs: Support systems, such as parents, friends and religion.
Lightning: release of tension or revenge.
Mermaid: Love  of which the dreamer is not aware.
Olive: Peace, love and kindness.
Rainbow: Harmony.
Sand: Passing of time.
Shampoo: Trying to forget or come to terms with something negative.
Test: Fear of failure.

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Vocabulary Related To News

What is the vocabulary? and why is it important. Click here to read it.

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Beat Depression By Eating - Reading Comprehension

 “Better diet quality, no matter which way you measure it, is associated with an approximate 30% reduction in the risk for depression,” says Felice Jacka, PhD, director of the Food and Mood Centre at Deakin University in Australia and president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research. She’s also written a book on the subject, Brain Changer: The Good Mental Health Diet.

In September, an analysis of 26 previous studies found that psychiatry, along with following a Mediterranean diet full of green vegetables, fruits, nuts, beans, olive oil, and seafood could ease symptoms of depression. It also found that people who ate more meat, dairy, and processed foods had a higher risk of becoming depressed. Of the 26 studies included, only a handful showed no relation between diet and mental health. And a small randomized controlled trial, published a few weeks ago, found that college students with symptoms of depression saw their mood improve in just 3 weeks on a similar diet. That type of trial is considered the “gold standard” among researchers.

But before you toss your antidepressant and run to the nearest farmers market: None of this research suggests that diet alone can cure or prevent depression. The idea is that improving your diet gives you a strong foundation for healing, no matter what other treatments you may try.

Keto for Severe Cases?
Not everybody is sold on the merits of the Mediterranean diet for fighting depression, or at least not for depression that hasn’t responded to other treatments. Chris Palmer, MD, is director of the Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA, and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “The evidence that we can effectively treat patients with clinical depression with dietary intervention is marginal at best,” he says. “Part of it is that these are really difficult things to study, because you can tell a patient to eat more fruits and vegetables, eat less junk food, but actually understanding what they're eating is almost impossible -- we can’t know what they really did.”

None of this research suggests that diet alone can cure or prevent depression. The idea is that improving your diet gives you a strong foundation for healing, no matter what other treatments you may try. 

What Should You Eat?
If you want to make a change today, without medical supervision, Jacka and Ramsey encourage people to eat more plant-based foods in general -- leafy greens and other vegetables, fruit, beans, nuts and seeds, whole grains -- along with healthy fats, seafood, and lean animal protein. In other words, eat many of the same foods you’ll see on almost any “healthy” diet program. To support your gut health, Ramsey also recommends fermented foods like pickles and sauerkraut.

“The simple message is that a healthy diet is important for brain and mental health, just as it is for physical health,” says Jacka. “Unlike many other factors in our lives that may predispose us to depression, we have a choice over what we eat. All the evidence we have now tells us that a healthy diet can both prevent and treat depression and may be important for other aspects of brain health, such as dementia. This is true for people across the lifespan -- even very young children.”

And if you do decide to adjust your diet, you don’t have to make sweeping, extreme changes. Adding more leafy greens and seafood could make a good start. “I’ve found that eating better, even when it’s not 100% of the time, it does make a difference,” says McCarthy. “There’s a happiness factor.”

\

Reading Comprehension

Q1. Diets rich in leafy greens and seafood help manage your moods?
a. Research doesn’t know
b. Research points to yes
c. Research points to no

Q2. What field of science focuses on how your diet affects your mental health?
a. Psychiatry
b. Nutritional psychiatry
c. Biology

Q3. What makes 30% reduction in the risk for depression?
a. Medicines
b. Meat
c. Better diet quality
d. None of the above

Q4. How many previous studies found green vegetables, fruits, nuts, beans, olive oil, and seafood could ease symptoms of depression?
a. 20
b. 30
c. 26.
d. 16.

Q5. What makes people at higher risk of becoming depressed?
a. Smoking
b. Vegetable
c. Meat
d. None of the above

Q6. Can diet alone cure or prevent depression?
a. Yes.
b. No.
c. Maybe.
d. Sometimes.

Editable Worksheet for Teachers:
Click here to download above Reading Passage and Questions;
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wzVn1X-nvNwcMqDXli8eBYG25ONl-uYn/view?usp=sharing

Reference:
(https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20191202/can-you-eat-to-beat-depression)

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Food Related Vocabulary

What is the vocabulary? and why is it important. Click here to read it.

Family Related Vocabulary

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