Hands-on English current events activity for May, 1998

Note: You are welcome to print, copy and use this activity with your students. However, this material is copyrighted, so please don't re-publish it anywhere without permission.

Countries in the news

To the instructor:
To do this exercise, your students will have to skim through current newspapers or news magazines, looking for information on 9 different countries. If they are well informed, they may already know some of the anwers!

What's here:
Below are listed 9 countries (List A) and 9 current events (List B). Your students can try to match these, either based on their own knowledge of current events or by browsing through a few recent papers and news magazines that you supply.

Once they have finished this, they can match these 9 items with the correct location of the country (List C) and the capital city (List D). For this part they may need to consult an atlas or world map. When finished, they will have four pieces of information--the name of the country, the event that happened there, the geographical location of the country, and the capital city.

Follow up:
Have each student pick one of the 9 events and select a news story about it to read more in depth. If there is time, they could report back to the group on what they learned.

For more advanced students, have them create their own matching exercise, using a selected newspaper or magazine. They can start by selecting 3 or 4 news stories and writing a sentence about each one. Have them write the name of each country and each of their sentences on separate index cards. Shuffle and give to another student to solve.

WARNING--The activity as we have written it may go out of date fairly quickly. Make sure that each of the news items in List B appears in the papers that you bring to class! If they don't, you can change some of the items yourself before printing out the exercise (be sure to make the change in each of the four lists).

There is an Answer key at the end which you may find useful if you need to edit the exercise to suit your students.

Happy teaching! --the Editor

List A--Countries in the news

• Northern Ireland
• Indonesia
• India
• China
• USA
• Israel
• Russia
• Serbia
• Mexico

List B--News events

• This country celebrated its 50th anniversary with a big military parade.
• This country has problems right now with big forest fires.
• Recently they tested a nuclear bomb in this country.
• U.S. President Clinton will visit this country in June.
• After 30 years of fighting, people in this country voted "yes" to accept a peace agreement.
• The province of Kosovo is part of this country now, but some people there want independence.
• This country has economic problems now because of a coal strike.
• After thousands of students protested, the president of this country resigned.
• Recently some school children were killed by a young boy with a gun.

List C--Location

• south of the U.S.A.
• north of England
• south of China and west of Burma
• near Albania in the south of Europe
• east of Poland
• north of Australia
• east of Egypt in the Middle East
• north of India
• south of Canada

List D--Capital city

• Washington, D.C.
• Belfast
• Mexico City
• Moscow
• Belgrade
• Beijing
• Jakarta
• Delhi
• Jerusalem

Answer key

If each of the items is numbered 1 through 9, the answers below correspond to the matches for List A, B, C and D. You probably won't need this key for your students, but it will come in handy if you have to delete or change an item in the exercise.

• 1 - 5 - 2 - 2 (ie, N Ireland, peace agreement, n. of England, Belfast)
• 2 - 8 - 6 - 7
• 3 - 3 - 3 - 8
• 4 - 4 - 8 - 6
• 5 - 9 - 9 - 1
• 6 - 1 - 7 - 9
• 7 - 7 - 5 - 4
• 8 - 6 - 4 - 5
• 9 - 2 - 1 - 3
  

Editor's note: I'd be very interested to hear what you and your students thought of this activity! Thank you! We welcome teaching suggestions.--Anna Silliman.

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