Prime Time 7, Coursebook plus Semester Self-checks

9 Spot on language Key words for past meaning The following text deals with the situation in Slough, a town just west of London. a) Highlight the conjunctions, time expressions, etc. typically used with tenses expressing past meaning. After the Second World War, as Slough’s economy returned to civilian production, its growth resumed. […] By the mid-1950s the local press began to voice employers’ fears that there were not enough people to fill the ever-increasing number of vacancies. Thankfully, there was an external source of labour to ease the pressure on the jobs market – the “New Commonwealth” countries of the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies. One of those in the first wave of Commonwealth migrants to move to Slough was Lydia Simmons, originally from Monserrat, who years later would chair council committees and serve as mayor. Like some other West Indians, her family had already lived elsewhere in the UK, in north London, but came to Slough because of its employment prospects. “My father had never liked commuting by train, as he had to in London,” she said. “Here you could bicycle to work, and if you didn’t like your job, you just bicycled somewhere else. When we got here in 1960, I was 16.” (David Rose, The Observer , 2008) b) Look at the two sentences below and then explain the different usages of “would” in a past context. How could you replace “would” in sentence 2? 1. She was an immigrant from Monserrat, who years later would become mayor. 2. When they lived in London, her father would come home very late every day. c) Imagine the journalist’s interview with Lydia Simmons. Write down the questions you think he must have asked in order to elicit the information he reports about her and her family. The right tenses Complete this news article with the correct tense forms of the verbs given. In a reverse of the trend of the past 50 years which  1 (bring) thousands of West Indians to Britain, in recent years many families  2 (take) their children back to islands such as Barbados or Jamaica for what is seen as a better education. Parents who  3 (be born) in Britain or who  4 (live) there for a long time say British schools  5 (become) ill-disciplined whereas those in the Caribbean are much stricter. In 2004, thirty-five years after she  6 (arrive) in Britain from Jamaica at the age of 10, Joy Seaton-Graham  7 (return) to the Caribbean. She  8 (worry) for some time about the education her two boys  9 (get) in England. So when she  10 (hear) about the excellent reputation of schools in Barbados while she  11 (visit) the island on holiday she  12 (decide) to relocate there. Mrs Seaton-Graham says that since the move her sons  13 (make) good progress because expectations of pupils are higher than at the school they  14 (attend) in England. (Andrew Alderson, Daily Telegraph , March 2006; adapted) 1  2  5 10 134 Ethnic and cultural diversity Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv