8A Angry planet

Movies and documentaries

a) An Inconvenient Truth (Documentary Film 2006, Al Gore)
                                               




b) The Impossible (2012) Official trailer
Based on the true story of a Spanish family


c) The Day after Tomorrow (2004) Official trailer


d) What the Earth would look like if all the ice melted


Images of Global icons at risk from sea level rise (2ºC and 4ºC)

GRAMMAR: THE PASSIVE

The passive is formed as follows:

be + past participle

If the active sentence uses the past simple, eg

He took the dog out for a walk,

Then the passive is made with the verb be in the same tense plus a past participle, eg

The dog was taken out for a walk.

The two sentences are talking about the same thing, but the emphasis is different. 

-> In the first sentence, we are more interested in the person who takes the dog out for a walk; in the second sentence we are more interested in the dog that is being taken out.

We use by + agent in the following situations:

• when we want to name the doer of an action.
• when we want to make a dramatic effect by placing information about who/what did something at the end of a sentence, saving the new information until last, eg The race was won ... by a 60-year-old!
• when we want to make a fluent, direct link to the following sentence, eg The dog was taken out by Charles. He is a great dogwalker.

SPEAKING ACTIVITY
Passive tense for the environment

Check out the following links to learn more about the passive and to practice it:

a) A thorough explanation on the passive by Seonaid

b) Englisch-hilfen.de (several online exercises with online correction)