Dec 29, 2018

News Quiz 2018

gilets jaune drapeau bbr sur les champs elysees nov 2018
Photo by KRIS AUS67 on Flickr [CC BY 2.0]
Although I haven't been a very active blogger this year - but check my posts on the CUP blog -  the traditional end-of-year news quiz is here as always! Focusing on key news stories from 2018 I tried to keep a balance between politics, showbiz and sports. And as usual, it's packed with lots of lexical chunks and other vocabulary items for your students to explore.


The quiz is available in two levels:

- Intermediate (B1+/B2-) including a multiple choice version
- Advanced (B2/C1 or higher)

Both versions can be downloaded in Word format if you want to adapt them.

The Intermediate level quiz has been rigorously checked using English Vocabulary Profile and VocabProfiler on LexTutor. The former helped ascertain that the quiz includes vocabulary appropriate for the B1-B2 levels (on the CEFR scale) and the latter that the majority of the words (96%) are in the top 3000 most frequent words in English (K1-K3). There are only 11 words (tokens) that fall outside the K1-K3 frequency bands. Nine words are in the K4 band (3001-4000), such as deteriorate and erupt - it is estimated that B2 level students should know 4000 words. And only two words are beyond the K4 band: icon (K5) and marijuana (K7), which, being cognates, will be familiar to speakers of most European languages.

An important caveat: the above mentioned tools supply data concerning individual words, not lexical chunks of which there are many in both versions of the quiz, for example in high spirits and came out in force.

The quiz is accompanied by a 10-page teachers' guide (scroll down) filled with ideas on how to use it in class and exploit the language from the quiz.

As usual, follow-up activities for vocabulary review and practice will be posted in a few days. Check back in the New Year.

UPDATE: Click HERE for vocabulary review activities




Happy New Year!

Advanced level with answers

or download as Word doc  


Intermediate level with answers (+ Multiple choice version)



Teachers' notes





UPDATE (2.01.2019) !


News Quiz with highlighted lexical chunks (advanced)

Adjective + Noun / Noun + Noun collocations
Collocations with Verbs
Other chunks



20 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing. Great idea for the end of the year lesson.

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    Replies
    1. I usually do it as the beginning of the year lesson. LessonS actually. I will be posting follow up activities later on

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    2. yes, thanks
      I meant either the last lesson in 2018 or first lesson in 2019. I actually gave them a few of the questions and asked them to google them. It was very successful.

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    3. Thank you for sharing your ideas and classroom activities. I was looking for something to start off with a group of students preparing for the final exams in Finland and landed on your site. The news quiz looks like a fun and useful activity for example to lighten a lesson. Will visit your site again.

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  2. Wow...great quiz, thank you so much for sharing!

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  3. TODA RABA! And Happy New Year Leo!

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  4. Dear Leo,
    Thanks a million for sharing this with your colleagues. I've integrated your quiz into my "Happy-New-Year" classes for years and I'm super grateful for the work you do. It's a time saver in terms of research for class and always good fun.
    Happy New Year to you and snowy (finally ;) greetings from the Unversity of the the German Armed Forces / Munich
    *Marlen*

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    Replies
    1. Dear Marlen,

      Thank you for this. It makes me happy to know that others find this useful and enjoyable.

      P.S. I'll be in Munich at the end of the month.

      L

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  5. Leo, thanks a lot for your great ideas! My students and I find them absolutely fantastic. And I can't wait to use your follow-up activities :-)

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  6. Thank you, Leo. I was late for the previous meeting and missed this quiz.

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  7. It's a shame you don't have a donate button! I'd most certainly donate to this superb blog! I suppose for now i'll settle for bookmarking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to new updates and will talk about this website with my Facebook group. Chat soon!
    ειδησεισ απο την ελλαδα τωρα

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  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  9. Wonderful resources. Thank you. Unfortunately, I find it hard to understand how to use them. Where are the articles? For example, you say that the answer to question
    #16 ("The flamboyant Israeli singer Netta won the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest with a song inspired by the #MeToo campaign. What song?") is "Toy". How should my students know that the answer is "Toy"? To know the answers, I suppose they should read those articles or watch the news. I might be wrong. Looking forward to receiving a kind reply.
    Thank you very much.
    All the best, Nick

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    Replies
    1. Hello Nick,
      Yes they wouldn't know if they don't follow the news, but then isn't it the case with any news trivia? You will see though that one of the suggestions in the teacher's notes above is to turn the activity into a WebQuest with students searching for answers on the internet. In any case, it's a bit too late in the year to do this quiz, I think. Do stand by for the 2019 edition coming in less than two mouths.
      Cheers,
      Leo

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    2. Hello, Leo
      Thank you very much for your kind reply. Great! It might be too late for this quiz, but I can always create a new one with current news (which can be easily found on the internet). Correct me if I am wrong. :)
      Best wishes, Nick

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