Friday 17 December 2010

Comprehension Test: The Answers

Okay, so here are the answers to the short comprehension test I posted the other day.

According to the news article...
  1. The accident took place in Queens
  2. Four vehicles were involved; a bus, a truck and two vans
  3. Five people were taken to hospital
  4. None of the injuries were life-threatening so we can assume there were no fatalities.
Now that was quite straightforward apart from the fact that the BBC couldn't count. If you listen to the voice over they clearly state that there were three vehicles involved yet you can easily see four in the video.

To make matters worse they even had the descriptive text for the article stating that there were three vehicles. Although after about forty-eight hours someone did eventually change the text.

Saturday 11 December 2010

Scenes From A Beijing Street

Okay so this post has ended up a little out of sequence. To get to Tian'an Men on the last day I was in Beijing I (well me and three others) walked to the nearest subway station to catch a train to the square rather than taking a taxi. These were all street scene photos that I took during that walk to the station.

Comprehension Test


Watch this short news article and then answer the following questions.
  1. Where did the accident take place?
  2. How many vehicles were involved?
  3. How many people were injured?
  4. Were there any fatalities?

Sunday 5 December 2010

Tian'an Men

As you may remember from one of my earlier posts on Beijing we got to see Tian'an Men Square after dinner one evening, but the gate, after which the square takes it's name, wasn't lit up. Well on the last full day I had in Beijing I spent five hours walking around the Forbidden City (more on that later) which you enter through Tian'an Men.

The rather prominent portrait hanging from the gate is of Mao Zedong, who proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China from the balcony of the gate on the 1st of October 1949.

Friday 3 December 2010

Proper Snow

Like the rest of the country we've had snow this week. Not a light dusting but proper snow. This was the view from the front door this morning just after Bryony had left to go to work.

I'm not sure exactly how much snow we have had but, Bryony stuck a tape-measure in a sheltered non-drifting bit and got a depth of about 36cm and on a trip to the shops I miss-judged the edge of the pavement and ended up with snow above my knees. It's certainly a lot worse than it was in January. In fact I don't think I've ever seen so much snow in Yorkshire before.