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Before we get started, it’s important to know the construction of the third conditional, because that will allow us to make our third conditional sentences. Its construction is “if + past perfect + would have (done).” I’ve put the word ‘done’ there simply as an example; in reality, we put a past participle after the …

However if someone has a pronounced contumacious streak – or a record of unpredictable behaviour – we might say that he or she is ‘a loose cannon’ (the connotation being that the individual could metaphorically explode/move out of position at any moment, like an improperly secured cannon on an old ship). Following on from this …

Straight from the horse’s mouth – This means directly from the original source of the information. For example – “Where did you hear the story about John leaving?” “He told me. I got it straight from the horse’s mouth.” This means that John told him the story directly. He didn’t need to get the story …

As mentioned above, the Second conditional can be used to talk about now or the future. We use it when we are only imagining something. The construction of the Second conditional is ‘If + Past + Would (do).’ We can call this last part the Conditional tense. For example: – If I met Leonardo DiCaprio, …

The first thing that we should know about auxiliary verbs is that they don´t tell us the action in a sentence but they help the main verb in the sentence. The primary auxiliary ‘DO’ is used in the present simple tense and the past simple tense. We generally use it in questions and negative sentences. …

When you arrive at a party or meeting and don’t know anyone else there, you need to ‘break the ice’ – i.e. you need to do or say something that will introduce yourself to other people and make the situation more comfortable, e.g. ‘Dave broke the ice by offering the other people at the meeting …

“I eat apples every day.” This sentence contains the transitive verb “eat”. We have the subject “I” and “apples” are our object. Consider this next one. “John threw the ball at the wall.” In this sentence, “John” is our subject and “the ball” is our object. Now let’s look at some intransitive verbs. “The sun …

To start, let’s look at the word ‘although.’ This word is used when we want to present a contradiction. For example, if someone was born and raised in Paris, we would obviously expect them to speak French, wouldn’t we? So consider the following example: ~ Although he’s from Paris, he doesn’t speak French. The underlying …

In fact there are several idioms simply to feature the word ‘ball’. Another way of saying that we want to start something – ‘to kick off’ is one way of saying this, as we saw in ‘Tip of the Week’ – is to say that we will ‘get the ball rolling’, e.g. ‘let’s get the …

Today I am going to talk about the verb ‘get’ and explain some of its meanings and give you some examples of each, thus making it easier for you to understand. The general meanings of the verb ‘get’ are ‘become’ and ‘obtain’. However, it has several other meanings too. When we follow ‘get’ with by …