SWEET XMAS

The middle of winter has long been a time of celebration around the world- From November onwards, more than 400milion people celebrate Xmas , that makes Xmas one of the the world’s biggest religious and commercial festivities. At that time everybody will take holiday to come back home for getting together, sharing for all of what happen during last year.

At that time, many town centers and shops will be decorate colored lights, shiny decoration and artificial snow painted on shop windows. Christmas tree with light and Christmas ornaments also appear every where. Shopping centers become busier ands often stay open till late and you can hear many traditional Christmas songs when you go to public areas. Most homes will be also decorated with Christmas trees, colored lights and paper or plastic decoration all of rooms. There are many Christmas greeting cards will be posted to friend, family in the three weeks before Christmas. Christmas greeting cards are often winter pictures, Father Christmas, best wishes or romantic scenes of life in past times.

Therefore Christmas is called a time for families, fund and enjoying! A time of family gathering and holiday meals. A time for Santa, stars and singing. A time for ornaments, gift and light. A time for who wants to return to a period in our childhood or some other good times in the past to against the troubles of adult life.
In our Vietnam, the Christmas celebration usually starts with Christmas Eve, the evening of December 24 and last during next day (25 December) so with almost Vietnamese Christmas is the most magical time of the year.
Talking about Christmas, thinking about happiness and hope. So Christmas is coming which will bring the peace message for our like today.


THE OLD MAN WITH SACK – WHO IS HE?

Father Christmas or Santa Claus has become the human face of Christmas, the old man with long white beard, red coat and bag of toys. Children are taught that he brings them presents the night before Christmas and all of children really believe this is true. He come into house down the chimney at midnight an places present for the children in socks or bags at their beds or in front of family Christmas tree. Children believe that if they write their wishes in letter and send to Father Christmas, their dreams will come true. Therefore, Christmas can be a time of excitement for children.

QUESTION FOR DISCUTION

1. Where will you go to enjoy the Christmas Eve?
2. What will you do to welcome Christmas?
3. What present do you want to receive in this season greeting from your sweet heart, your family and your friend?
4. If your lover/ your wife or your husband talks with you that he or she will make your wish come true but just only 1 wish on this Christmas. What would you wish? ( Great! Golden chance)
5. Have you ever welcome Christmas alone? Or with sadness?
- If yes, what happened? How was your feeling? What did you do?
- If no, pls imagine what you will do?
6. Which activity do you like best in preparing to celebrate Christmas? Shopping? Home decoration? Etc…?
7. Do you think that there is difference in Christmas welcome way between the single people and marriage people? If yes? What is it?
8. Have you ever had a sweet Xmas? What is it?
9. Do you think a real Christmas should have snow and cold weather? Is there any place on the world you wish to enjoy Christmas?
10. What do you think of Bien Hoa Christmas? Is it fun and beautiful?

SONG FOR CHRISTMAS
LAST CHRISTMAS( Chorus )

Last Christmas,I gave you my heartBut the very next day

You gave it away

This year , To save me from tears

I'll give it to someone special

( back to Chorus )

Once bitten and twice shy

I keep my distance

But you still catch my eye

Tell me baby

Do you recognize me?

Well It's been a year

It doesn't surprise me

(Happy Christmas)

I wrapped it up and sent it

With a note saying "I love you"

I meant it

Now I know what a fool I've been

But if you kissed me now

I know you'd fool me again

( back to Chorus )

A crowded room

Friends with tired eyes

I'm hiding from you

And your soul of ice

My god I thought you were

Someone to rely on me

I guess I was a shoulder to cry on

A face on a lover with a fire in his heart

A man under cover but you tore me apart

Now I've found a real love

You'll never fool me again

(back to Chorus )

(back to Chorus )

A face on a lover with a fire in his heart

A man under cover buy you tore him apart

Maybe next year I'll give it to someone

I'll give it to someone special.

LOVE - MARRIAGE

Love has many different meanings and takes an important role in our life also. It is an intensive feeling inside us which we want to forward to somebody but in some special case we have to keep it hidden in your heart. The love between boy and girl can start by many partner’s interesting character even at the first sight… People can fall in love by her/his intelligence, attractive body, huge property or power in social. Some body falls in love as normal way but other one just want to know how to love or even love just for fun….... Love is essentially an abstract concept, much easier to experience than to explain. In ordinary case, it usually refers to interpersonal love, its symbol maybe marriage, expectation of live together with partner forever. Marriage is an interpersonal relationship with governmental, social, or religious recognition, usually intimate and sexual, and often created as a contract, or through civil process. The most common form of marriage unites a man and a woman as husband and wife and often are declared by a wedding ceremony.

In general, from love to marriage it will be a big turning-point in life of everybody. Because that is the beginning of a new life, combining two families into one together with changes, challenges. Through that, you will feel differences with single life before. And for a negative example: while you want to receive romantic actions, enjoy freedom for shopping, travel... but in front of you, the worry about expense in family, take care of children, housework to do will turn you down. Maybe sometime you feel boring and tired, enthusiasm will start to dim in you, even you have recognized what you would lose when you compared your life before marriage with after marriage. It seems love and marriage like the rule of life, maybe we know their definition, but we will not really understand and not experience if we’ve never spent that time before.

New vocabulary:

· Intense : maõnh lieät
· Interpersonal : giöõa caù nhaân vôùi nhau
· Abstract : trừu tượng, khó hiểu
· Intimate : thaân mật
· Turning-point : böôùc ngoaëc

Question:

1. Can you give 3 commonest reasons people decide to get married?

2. What age do you want to get married? What age is suitable for man and woman to get married? Is it affected by social? Tradition? Family?

3. What will you do to build up the happy family while you are just a member in big family before marriage, but after marriage you become owner in small family?

4. How do you think about couples just want to maintain relationship in love without marriage? What will (be) decrease even lose in love after marriage ? Are you afraid of that?

5. Do you think woman’s life will change after marriage? What are they? Do you want to enjoy life as a single man as long as you can?

6. Can you share a target love and standard marriage in your opinion?

Further reading:

Finding a partner

In order to get married, it is necessary to find a suitable partner. A partner may be found by the person wishing to be married via a process of courtship. Alternately, two marriage-able people may be matched by a third party, typically with the match finalized only if both candidates approve the union. This is known as an arranged marriage.

The choice between courtship and arranged marriage is made by the person seeking marriage or by his or her parents. In some cases, the parents will be ready to force an arranged marriage because of cultural tradition or for some other special reason. It is worth noting, however, that in many cases the person seeking marriage is comfortable with having his or her marriage arranged and, even disregarding parental preference, would freely choose an arranged marriage. Actual forced marriage is common in only a few communities and often attracts harsh criticism even from people who are generally in favor of arranged marriage.

Given a choice, the preference for the method of courtship or arranged marriage is determined by whether a person believes that marriage should be based on emotion or logic. At one end of the scale is a person who believes that there is only one unique "soul mate" suitable for them. A partner is typically chosen based on the depth of emotional connection experienced with their partner during the courtship phase of the relationship. At the other end of the scale is a person who believes that there are many suitable partners, and typically views marriage chiefly as a means to start a family. The deep emotional bond between partners characteristic of good marriages is more likely to be viewed as something which can be developed through nurture and cultivation with any suitable partner. Most people fall somewhere between these two extremes.

FUNNY STORY

Candles of Giving Births

A 40-year-old couple asked the Bishop for praying God to bless them a child. The Bishop : Tomorrow I'm coming to Roma and I will light on 3 candles for you in Vatican Church.After 2 years, the Bishop goes back to visit those couple for the results. He comes inside the house and sees only the wife with 2 sets of twins. The Bishop : Where's your husband ? Wife : Thank you Sir for lighting candles and now we have 2 sets of twins. My husband has come to Roma to blow off those 3 candles

Home Early

A blonde guy gets home early from work and hears strange noises coming from the bedroom. He rushes upstairs to find his wife naked on the bed, sweating and panting. "What's up?" he says. "I'm having a heart attack," cries the woman.He rushes downstairs to grab the phone, but just as he's dialing, his 4-year-old son comes up and says "Daddy! Daddy! Uncle Ted's hiding in your closet and he's got no clothes on!" The guy slams the phone down and storms upstairs into the bedroom, past his screaming wife, and rips open the wardrobe door. Sure enough, there is his brother, totally naked, cowering on the closet floor. "You rotten bastard," says the husband, "my wife's having a heart attack, and you're running around naked, scaring the kids!"

INVENTION

Innovation is the act of introducing new ideas and methods to improve the old ones. It is an important element which effects to the development of a country. It is changing our daily life also. People are always active and creative to brainstorm to find new things and apply them in many fields. We can see innovation in science, economy, education, politic, culture and other areas. In my opinion, Innovation is a big topic and we have limited time so I just focus on one of kind of it, INVENTIONS.
Just have a quick look at some things around you, you can realize there are many inventions which have given you a lot of advantages like convenience and comfort in daily life. Image how your life would be if we did not have any invention!!
Great inventions around the world were created and have been applied to help us to reach the modern life. Women find it comfortable and easy to balance the time to arrange their work in office and their housework, taking care of their babies. Men have much more time for their families and hobbies.
Inventions have been in a lot of daily fields such as communication, transportation, entertainment, food and others. How about our life if there were no electricity, no lights, no TVs, no internet, no laptops, no high-tech machines? How could you communicate with others easily and timely without telephones or mobile phones?
How long would it take you to move to other places without means of transport like motorbikes, cars, ships or planes? When you get ill but no medicine, what would happen? There are a lot of questions like this which you spend all life to answer. Close your eyes in 30 seconds and image how you could manage you life without inventions, you will value its importance.



QUESTIONS TO DISCUSS:
1/ In your opinion, what inventions are most important?
- Please tell me why?
2/ What inventions do you like best?
- What advantages can you get from them?
3/ What are the most important and useful for you in your daily life?
- Tell us the reasons please?
4/ Have you ever got any difficulty when you apply inventions to you life?
- What is it?
- Why you get stuck on it?
5/ Share us some advantages and disadvantages you get from inventions?
6/ Image and tell us what you think about your life if you stuck in some following cases:
- No electricity, no electric lights.
- No telephones, no mobile phones, no internet.
- No computers, no laptops.
- No vehicles: motorbikes, cars, ships, planes.
- No fast food.
- And others.
7/ Have you ever create any thing which you think it is your own great invention?
- What is it?
- What are its advantages and disadvantages?/ what can it use for?
- How were your feelings at that time?
8/ If you have chance and enough good conditions, what will you create to change or improve the old ones which you think they are not suitable for us?

FURTHER READING:

Pre-electrical Lamps
The first lamp was invented around 70,000 BC. A hollow rock, shell or other natural found object was filled with moss or a similar material that was soaked with animal fat and ignited. Humans began imitating the natural shapes with manmade pottery, alabaster, and metal lamps. Wicks were later added to control the rate of burning. Around the 7th century BC, the Greeks began making terra cotta lamps to replace handheld torches. The word lamp is derived from the Greek word lampas, meaning torch.

Oil Lamps
In the 18th century, the central burner was invented, a major improvement in lamp design. The fuel source was now tightly enclosed in metal, and a adjustable metal tube was used to control the intensity of the fuel burning and intensity of the light. Around the same time, small glass chimneys were added to lamps to both protect the flame and control the flow of air to the flame.

Ami Argand, a Swiss chemist is credited with first developing the principal of using an oil lamp with a hollow circular wick surrounded by a glass chimney in 1783.
Lighting Fuels
Early lighting fuels consisted of olive oil, beeswax, fish oil, whale oil, sesame oil, nut oil, and similar substances. These were the most commonly used fuels until the late 18th century. However, the ancient Chinese collected natural gas in skins that was used for illumination.
In 1859, drilling for petroleum oil began and the kerosene (a petroleum derivative) lamp grew popular, first introduced in 1853 in Germany. Coal and natural gas lamps were also becoming wide-spread. Coal gas was first used as a lighting fuel as early as 1784.
Gas Lights
In 1792, the first commercial use of gas lighting began when William Murdoch used coal gas for lighting his house in Redruth, Cornwall. German inventor Freidrich Winzer (Winsor) was the first person to patent coal gas lighting in 1804 and a "thermo-lampe" using gas distilled from wood was patented in 1799. David Melville received the first U.S. gas light patent in 1810.
Early in the 19th century, most cities in the United States and Europe had streets that were gaslight. Gas lighting for streets gave way to low pressure sodium and high pressure mercury lighting in the 1930s and the development of the electric lighting at the turn of the 19th century replaced gas lighting in homes.

FUNNY STORY:
THE BOM AND THE PILOT
Three people were on a plane. One said to the pilot, "I have a glass bottle. What do I do with it?" The pilot told him to throw it out the window. The second one asked the same question and the pilot also told him to throw it out the window. The third one asked the pilot, "I have a bomb. What do I do with it?" The pilot told him to throw it out the window. When they landed they met a man crying. When asked why he was crying, he replied, "Because I got hit in the head with a glass bottle. They met a woman who was crying for the same reason. Then the met a man laughing. They asked him why he was laughing and he replied, "Because I walked by a building and farted. Then the building blew up.

HELMET - SOLUTION FOR VIETNAM TRAFFIC

On TV or radio, sometimes do we hear about serious traffic accidents which injured or killed a lot of people. These accidents did a great damage to victim’s lives. Although everybody knows the harm of these accidents, there has still been an increase of number of traffic accidents nowadays. Why? This is the problem that we will discuss today.

1/ Traffic problems in Vietnam today:

Nowadays, traffic in Vietnam is very chaotic. According to many experts, Vietnam is considered to be one of the countries that are leading the traffic accidents every year. Since the beginning of this year, there has been more than 11,000 traffic accidents and 76% of them were caused by motorbike (Source: Thanhnien online)
As far as I know, the main reasons for this are the awareness of people. Some people ignore the police’s warnings and they are not aware of how dangerous it is if they don’t obey the traffic law. For instance, few high school students use motorbikes to go to school, many people overtake, turn left or right and park illegally. When being asked about their mistakes, they often give many excuses.
Moreover, at school, children are not educated to execute traffic law, they don’t have any chance to practise, they must learn all theory by hard, so it is very difficult for them to understand. May be, that is the reason why 25% people died of traffic accidents are children.
The second reason is the lack of facilities. Many national highways are in bad condition. Most of them are very old, narrow and they have lots of pot-holes, thus it prevents the transportation. In addition, pavements are known as places to merchandise, park and advertise. The pedestrians have to walk at roadways and therefore make it easy to cause accidents. There problems are considered as reasons that make the traffic in Vietnam become more and more chaotic.

2/ Solutions to these traffic problem:

To reduce the amount of traffic accidents, our government has passed traffic laws, rebuilt traffic infrastructure, replaced traffic light as well as recently enacted the law “ Wearing helmet while driving motorbike”. According to this law, everybody using motorbike will have to wear helmet from Dec 15 2007. It is said that this will protect our head from injury if accident happens. It also help you avoid noise, dust when driving. Mr Hans Thomson, a representative of WHO in Vietnam reported that in Thailand, since the government passed “ wearing helmet law”, the amount of people died of head and neck trauma reduced 24%.
However, buying a high-quality helmet isn’t easy at all. There are many kinds of helmets as well as artificial ones in outlet, and people don’t have any guides to choose a good one. In addition, the price of helmet is so high that the poor can’t buy it. For example, in Da Nang, the price of a helmet cost one-fourth worker’s wages.
On the other hand, many people don’t voluntarily wear helmets. Have you ever heard of “ Hiring Helmets”? This is a way to cop with police. In general, these helmets are in bad conditions, thus it will be very dangerous in case you have an accident.


3/ Conclusion:

In my view, it is necessary to educate people and show them the benefits of executing traffic law. We should also pass strict laws the punish hard-headed people. However, the most important thing is that everyone must be aware of what they are doing and willing to obey traffic law because it affects not only themselves, their children but also other people. Last but not least, voluntarily executing traffic law especially wearing helmets while using motorbike help you to prove how civil you are.

Questions:

1/ What do you think of traffic problems in Vienam today?
2/ Do you think the low price of motorbikes is one of reason to cause more traffic jam as well as accidents? Why?
3/ What difficulties do you face with current traffic jam? ( time/money/etc..)
4/ What are your ideas of wearing helmets? Advantages and disadvantages?
- Do you think it is a need to wear helmet in the city?
- How does it impact on your dressing? Fashion clothes with helmet?
- Does it truly help to improve consequence of accident?
5/ Do you think this time people will follow this rule strictly?
- If not, what do you think our government should do to get it on track?
-
6/ Do you have any criteria when buying? What are they/
7/ The quality of helmet is a concern when buying. Are you pleased with its current quality?
- If no, what do you expect?
- How about the design/size?
7/ Beside enacting of the rule to wearing helmet, we should educate people about traffic laws. However, traffic lesions are taught very boring at school. In order to improve it, do you think what they would do?
8/ Some construction sites of water pipe or drainage obstructed the traffic and even caused traffic jam and accident.
- Can you name some construction sites?
- What do we expect from it?


LEARNING CORNER:

Slang in daily talk

1/ One on one

If you want to talk to someone alone, you say you’d like to speak him or her one-on-one. Or if a teacher gives you some special help after class you can say you got some one-on-one advice. When you’re talking about talking, one-on-one means a conversation between two people with no one else around.

- You think you’re good at basketball? Let’s see. Let’s have a game of one on one.- I need to talk to you one-on-one about some serious issues.

2/ All-nighter
A study or work session that goes through the night; studying without sleep ( usually a last-minute course of action ).
The term is popular with college students who spend the night before an exam studying ( or ‘cramming’ ), trying to learn a lot of material in a short period of time. The term is frequently used in the phrase ‘ pull an all-nighter
- We pulled an all-nighter to finish the report.- I pulled an all-nighter to study for my math exam.

3/ All ears
Listening carefully; keenly attentive.
- I was all ears as Svet told me this exciting story.