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Present perfect simple/continuous and past simple worksheet

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Present perfect simple/continuous and past simple worksheet

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Hitchhiking the USA - blog (extra reading practice)

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Hitchhiking the USA - blog (extra reading practice)

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If you are interested to read the full adventures of the hitchhiker whose article we read in class today, you can follow the link and read the full story of his journey.

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United States

Is hitchhiking still possible in the United States? Is it safe? Follow along for 4-5 weeks as I attempt to hitchhike my way across America from coast to coast.
I'm pretty f*cking excited right now. A bit nervous too...
By the time you read this, I'll be standing on the side of the road in Oregon - attempting to hitchhike across America from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. Soliciting free rides from total strangers. Meeting interesting people from all across the country - and sharing their stories with you.

I've explored jungles in the Darien Gap and journeyed through remote canyons in Northern Mexico.

But a long-distance hitchhiking trip in my own country could possibly be the most challenging travel experience yet!

Track My Progress

To make things interesting, I'm letting you track my progress in real-time. With the GPS on my iPhone you can see exactly where I am right this moment!
Check back frequently to see how I'm doing.
Where Am I Now?

Live Instagram Updates

Not only can you track where I am, but I'll be live-streaming photos via my Instagram account. This will let you see what I see on the road while hitchhiking across America!

What's My Route?

I have no idea. West coast to East coast. I'll probably stay North to avoid the heat of the summer, but who knows. Some back roads, some long highway rides - I'll attempt to mix it up a bit.

Where Will I Sleep?

Like always, my trusty Hennessy camping hammock will come along with me. So I may do some stealth camping in the woods, or pay to stay in a campground or two. Because showers are nice from time to time.

Cheap motels or hostels won't be ruled out either, as I'll still need some occasional WiFi to get work done. I'll also be using CouchSurfing.org to stay with local people who want to hear a good story.

Is Hitchhiking Illegal?

Yes and no. It's illegal to stand on the side of a major highway and solicit rides, because this is a danger to other drivers on the road.

However standing at the on-ramp entrance before a highway is legal in most states. The laws vary from state to state, as do the interpretations of the law. Occasionally different police officers will interpret the law differently too.

There's a possibility that I'll get a few warnings, maybe a ticket, but it's very unlikely that I'll get arrested. Think of it like jay-walking. Technically it's illegal, but it's not something that's enforced with an iron-fist.

Why Hitchhiking?

Because hitchhiking is an adventure. Because it will be challenging. Because I'll meet interesting people. Because it's something I've always wanted to try. Because I'd like to inspire you to follow your dreams, no matter how ridiculous they are.

Follow #HitchUSA

Join the adventure! Follow along on Facebook and Instagram using the hashtag #HitchUSA.

UPDATE: Mission Accomplished!

My hitchhiking journey is now complete. You can read about it here:

Have you ever been hitchhiking before?

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Hitchhiking Across America: One Ride At A Time * Expert Vagabond

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United States Is hitchhiking still possible in the United States? Is it safe? Follow along for 4-5 weeks as I attempt to hitchhike my way across America from coast to coast. I'm pretty f*cking excited right now. A bit nervous too...

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Information about Direct and Indirect Questions

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Information about Direct and Indirect Questions

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(Download this explanation in PDF here.)

Have a look at this conversation.

Me: Excuse me. Could you tell me where the nearest station is?
Person in the street: Certainly. It's along that road on the right.
Me: Thank you. And do you know if there's a supermarket near here?
Person in the street: Yes, there's one next to the station.
Me: Thank you very much for your help.

I use indirect questions when I'm asking for help in the street, because they are very polite. Indirect questions start with a phrase like 'could you tell me...' or 'do you know...'. For example:

Direct question: Where is the bank?
Indirect question: Could you tell me where the bank is?

Notice that in the indirect question I put the verb ('is') after the subject ('the bank'), in the same way as I do with a normal positive sentence ('the bank is over there'), but in the direct question I put the verb 'is' before the subject 'the bank'. This is called inversion, and it is used to make direct questions in many verb tenses in English, but we don't use inversion in indirect questions. This is very similar to the grammar of reported questions. However, we use indirect questions in a different way from reported questions. Indirect questions are a way of being polite. They are very, very common in English, especially when you're talking to someone you don't know.

'Yes / No' Questions

To make an indirect 'yes / no' question, we use 'if' and the word order of a normal positive sentence. This is the same as for reported 'yes / no' questions. On the other hand, we don't usually need to 'backshift' (change the tense of the verb) as we do with reported questions.

Of course, most tenses make questions by using 'inversion' (changing the word order). To change from a direct 'yes / no' question with inversion to an indirect question, you add 'if' and change the word order back to a normal positive sentence. You don't need to use inversion.

'Yes / no' questions for tenses with inversion:

'Yes / no' questions with tenses that use 'do / does / did':

Sometimes you want to make an indirect question using the present simple of any verb except 'be' or the past simple of any verb except 'be'. These tense make direct questions by using 'do / does / did'. When we want to make indirect 'yes / no' questions using these tenses, we need 'if' and we don't need 'do / does / did'.

'Wh' Questions

In the same way as with reported 'wh' questions, we use the question word and the word order of a normal positive sentence to make indirect 'wh' questions. We don't need to use inversion. Again, we also don't usually need to 'backshift' (change the tense of the verb) as we do with reported questions.

To change a direct question to an indirect question for tenses that make questions using inversion, you just add 'if' and change the word order back to a normal positive sentence.

'Wh' questions for tenses with inversion:

'Wh' questions for tenses with 'do / does / did':

Sometimes you want to make an indirect 'wh' question using the present simple of any verb except 'be' or the past simple of any verb except 'be'. Usually these tenses make questions by using 'do / does / did'. However, when we want to make indirect 'wh' questions using these tenses, we don't need 'do / does / did'. Instead, we use a question word and then normal positive sentence word order.

Common Problems

It can be difficult to remember to put the verb after the subject, especially when the indirect question is in the present simple tense of 'be'. For example, we need to say:

Could you tell me where the station is?

NOT:

Could you tell me where is the station?

Try Indirect Questions Exercise 1 (with the present simple tense)here.
Try Indirect Questions Exercise 2 (with the past simple tense) here.
Try Indirect Questions Exercise 3 (with modal verbs) here.

Need more practice? Get more Perfect English Grammar with our courses.

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(Download this explanation in PDF here.) Have a look at this conversation. Me: Excuse me. Could you tell me where the nearest station is? Person in the street: Certainly. It's along that road on the right. Me: Thank you. And do you know if there's a supermarket near here?

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The debate surrounding graffiti, and if or when we can label it art, is connected to the social and political history of New York City.

Many social historians view graffiti and street art as a means for marginalised groups that have little political, economic or social power to find a voice in their society.

Read on and decide for yourselves!

Article one: https://www.forbes.com/2009/04/22/shepard-fairey-art-history-opinions-book-review-graffiti-lives.html

Article two: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/mar/17/street-artist-blu-destroys-murals-in-bologna

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The day before the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, I attended the unveiling of Shepard Fairey's Barack Obama "HOPE" portrait at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. As street artist-turned-pop icon Fairey addressed the crowd, I considered the hope that he himself stood for, having risen from underground graffitist to mainstream presidential portrait artist. I wondered, when it came to graffiti, had Fairey's success redrawn the line between art and vandalism?

But just three weeks later, Fairey was arrested on the way to the opening of his solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston. The charges: tagging property with the same images that the ICA would display that night.

Crime, like beauty, is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. For New Yorkers, associations between graffiti and decrepitude were recently reinforced when the staircase of a Queens building, visible from the No. 7 train and famous for the graffiti which covers the walls, collapsed and critically injured a woman. For every person who heard about the incident and fondly remembered the building, another probably thought it was no surprise that the edifice was in a state of disrepair.

In Graffiti Lives, Beyond the Tag in New York's Urban Underground, Gregory J. Snyder explores this tension between art and defacement. Snyder surveys New York City street art from the 1960s to the present, providing insight into the underground world of graffiti and the artists themselves.

Snyder opens the art vs. graffiti debate by first introducing the "Broken Window Theory," that tolerating petty crime, such as a broken window, increases the likelihood that more serious criminal activity will occur. For some, like the NYPD, graffiti is perceived to be such an invitation; for others it is the most important art movement of the second half of the 20th century.

This divide has also influenced the terminology associated with street art. Snyder explains that it was "those who wished to influence public opinion about the culture and its practitioners" who coined the phrase "graffiti," which is associated with the sort of vandalism seen on bathroom walls. The artists, on the other hand, call themselves "writers."

Graffiti spread to New York City from Philadelphia, where the markings of "Bobby Beck" first appeared all over the highways. As graffiti culture evolved in the Big Apple throughout the '60s, it became a vehicle for expression and personal messages. Snyder describes the early tags of "CORNBREAD," a writer who used markings on a bus route to pursue a woman he admired.

Writers began to use graffiti as an opportunity to have a public voice, a characteristic that remains vital to writing culture today. "Graffiti is the public application of an alias for the purpose of fame," says Snyder as he analyzes the three forms of graffiti most often used to achieve this aim: Tags are the writer's signature, throw-ups consist of a two-color outlined text and pieces are multi-color mural masterpieces.

By the 1980s "train era," New York City had become what Snyder calls "the Mecca for writers everywhere." Subway cars covered with colorful writing had become a defining characteristic of the city. But when the MTA ruled that trains with graffiti would no longer be allowed in service, this spurred another transition from the underground train to outdoor walls across the city.

Snyder learns about the methodology of writing by asking various artists to illustrate certain words collected in what Snyder refers to as his "Black-Book." He selects words that relate to the relationship between the aesthetic and the vandalistic, such as "art," "wreck," "struggle" and "politics," and asks writers to choose one to illustrate. This tool helps Snyder engage with writers and also helps him understand the writing culture that drives the technique.

Snyder concludes with a discussion of those writers who successfully translated their skills from the illicit to the profitable. "Much of the allure of graffiti writing is getting away with something that is illegal," Snyder concedes. But there are also plenty of examples of graffiti having been allowed and even paid for, and times when it has opened the door to mainstream success, in the form of a designer label, a tattoo parlor, or a book or gallery show.

For more book reviews, see:

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's "This Child Will Be Great"

Kapferer and Bastien's "The Luxury Strategy"

Jayanti Tamm's "Cartwheels in a Sari"

Snyder's Graffiti Lives is certainly more of an academic paper than a literary read. While it is not the type of book that one sits down to read front to back, it does serve as a reference providing information on the history of graffiti in New York City. The book will be useful to researchers but may feel too specific for most.

A lack of illustrations reinforces the academic feel of the text, and may lose some readers who would have been interested in visualizing the art. A small number of black and white photographs are scattered throughout the text, and a few color images are inset in the middle, but for a book on colorful art, these minimal images leave the reader wanting more.

With such a proliferation of street art in New York City, the reader must place a significant amount of trust in Snyder's analysis. For example, he makes broad statements about how graffiti writers think or act, but the reader may question if such generalizations are accurate across all graffiti writers or if this is the writer's own personal bias or perspective.

Snyder addresses this limitation, acknowledging that he does not have the authority or knowledge to make claims about who are the best writers. What he does promise his readers, however, is an "intimate look at graffiti writing." This, Snyder accomplishes.

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Art Or Vandalism? A History Of New York Graffiti

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The day before the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, I attended the unveiling of Shepard Fairey's Barack Obama "HOPE" portrait at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. As street artist-turned-pop icon Fairey addressed the crowd, I considered the hope that he himself stood for, having risen from underground graffitist to mainstream presidential portrait artist.

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Today we listened to 5 minutes of a thirty minute podcast. If you want to continue to practise your listening skills with some challenging material, have a listen to the rest of the program!

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Keri Phillips: Hello this is Rear Vision with Keri Phillips. Today, the story of plastic.

TV commercial [archival]: When you look at plastic, you know how it helps things stay fresh and safe and light and unbreakable and strong and easy to carry, but take another look. Plastic also saves energy because it helps make cars lighter to save gas, and plastic insulation helps save energy at home. Even these strong plastic bags help save energy because they take less energy to make than other grocery bags. To learn more, call this number for a free booklet, and take another look at plastic.

Keri Phillips: A hundred years ago, almost everything in our daily lives would have been made of natural materials. Our clothes would have been wool or cotton, our furniture wood and so on. Today, many of these natural products have been replaced by plastic and now you'll find plastic in just about everything we use. It's so ubiquitous we don't even really notice it.

Susan Freinkel is the author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. What exactly is plastic?

Susan Freinkel: Plastic is kind of a misnomer. Plastic isn't a single thing. Actually there are tens of thousands of plastics, and what they all have in common is they are something called polymers, which just means that they are big molecules made up of lots of little molecules and atoms strung together. I always think of them like beads on a necklace, and what a plastic is like depends on the way those beads are arranged. So whether they are smooshed together, whether they are far apart, whether there's little dangly bits, that will tell you what the plastic is going to be like, whether it's going to be transparent like plastic film, or whether it's going to be hard like a vinyl record (I'm dating myself there), or whether it's going to be slippery or bristly or stretchy. What they all have in common is that they are polymers.

Andrea Sella: So the chemical components of plastics are extremely varied.

Keri Phillips: Professor Andrea Sella teaches chemistry at University College London.

Andrea Sella: The word 'plastics' is really a catchall term, it's a little bit like saying mammals. Well, mammals, we go from the platypus to the blue whale to the elephant and they are very, very different. To a non-chemist, you sort of look at plastics and go, well yes, it's sort of kind of the same. But first of all you can split plastics into two kinds. One is what's called the thermoplastics, and those are things that essentially you can soften by warming, and then when you cool them down they harden again. So in a sense you can sort of reuse them over and over again.

There are others, on the other hand, like, for example, the components of Lego, the materials used in Lego, which once you've set their shape, that's it, you can't melt it and start again. And that all really comes down to the chemical structure. So there is a bewildering array of chemical structures and of chemical components.

Plastics are an absolutely extraordinary class of materials that really emerged during the 20th century. And they are entirely synthetic, but the amazing thing about them is that they can be shaped into pretty well any shape you want, they can be coloured in pretty well any colour you choose, and in many cases they can be tailored to suit specific applications.

Plastics have completely revolutionised our world because what they've done is they've enabled really lightweight packaging, really lightweight applications which have replaced expensive things. And when you start thinking back to, for example, hair care, how did people comb their hair? Well, once upon a time you essentially had two options. One was to use some kind of piece of wood, possibly with prongs of metal. The alternative was to use ivory. One was not terribly delicate. The other, well, it was expensive because you had to get it from far away.

Keri Phillips: The first plastic, celluloid, was developed as an alternative to ivory in the 1860s and '70s. It was a mixture of natural and synthetic materials. Professor Jeff Meikle is the author of American Plastic: A Cultural History.

Jeff Meikle: It was made out of cellulose and camphor. Cellulose was derived from old rags or from paper pulp and mixed with camphor and then it was pressed under a pretty intense pressure into blocks. The blocks were then sliced and then those slices of different colours could be mixed together and so you could do light and dark slices, piling them up and then hardening the whole block again under pressure, shifting it on end, slicing it again and then you'd get a thin sheet of material that had light and dark striations alternating and that would be a substitute for ivory because ivory has those kinds of growth striations in it. So that could be easily reshaped or moulded and curved under heat and used for jewellery, comb handles, the backs of mirrors, things like that, so that one could avoid having to use ivory, which some people felt even then was soon going to be...elephants were being driven extinct because of ivory hunters, which of course is something we face today. So celluloid was a replacement for ivory, it was a replacement for tortoiseshell.

The kind of dough that they got when they mixed cellulose and camphor was kind of a doughy mass, almost like baking dough, that kind of consistency. If you can think of a huge vat of dough in a commercial bakery being mechanically churned, they could take blobs of that, throw it on a roller in different colours, amber and black and darker reddish coloured things, and then those different colours would be combined on the roller and flattened out, hardened, and you'd get a replacement for tortoiseshell, which would be translucent in places, almost transparent in some and totally opaque in others.

One of the really unique uses of celluloid was for shirt collars. Men would wear a shirt for a whole week, maybe even longer without laundering it, but the collar got filthy. So they needed new collars, and linen collars were replaceable, they'd button onto the shirt and unbutton, but they had to be washed and laundered, and a celluloid collar, which was stamped with an embossing that made it look like fabric and even had stitching on the hem of it, a celluloid collar could just be taken off at night and scrubbed with a brush and used again the next day and it would look very clean again.

Keri Phillips: You're listening to Rear Vision with Keri Phillips on RN, ABC Radio National.

The first totally synthetic plastic was developed in the first decade of the 20th century.

Susan Freinkel: That was when this Belgian emigre who also was kind of an amateur inventor started looking around and he saw that there was a crying demand for shellac. Why shellac? When I started thinking about the stuff, I knew shellac as the stuff that you have on decorative boxes. Well, shellac is also a really good electrical insulator, and at that time the US was rapidly electrifying, there was a huge demand for insulator of electrical wires. The problem is shellac is made from a resin that is excreted by the lac beetle, and it takes something like six months and thousands of beetles to come up with a pound of shellac. You're not going to get a lot of wires insulated that way.

So Baekeland starts looking for some kind of alternative, and again he sets up a little lab behind his house and runs all these different experiments, trial and error, and after a couple of years he comes up with this hard, dark material that he called Bakelite. And we all know Bakelite, it's something that we see in costume jewellery. Bakelite was another great plastic and it got widely used for industrial uses but also for telephones and jewellery and fountain pens, just everywhere. The Bakelite company's trademark was infinity because, they argued, it had so many different uses.

The other thing that was important about Bakelite is it was a completely synthetic material. Celluloid had one foot in the plant world. It came out of plant cellulose. Bakelite was made out of some sort of by-product of the process of turning coal into coke. It was made from fossil fuels. It was the product of the lab, it was not in any way a natural material. And from Bakelite on, that was sort of the basis of plastics.

Andrea Sella: In the late '30s early '40s you start to get the development, particularly at the great American chemical company DuPont, of people who start to play around with 'Friday afternoon' experiments, and this is kind of a classic thing in the sciences, there's legend about it, that you do your normal research Monday to Thursday, and then on Friday afternoon you try something slightly off the wall, something that doesn't have much chance of working but that might be kind of cool if it did.

Well, one of these Friday afternoon experiments was conducted by a man called Wallace Carothers, and Carothers knew that if you reacted a molecule called an amine with another molecule called an acyl chloride you could link them together essentially in the same way that proteins are linked, with what's called an amide bond.

Well, Carothers had a really cool idea. He imagined what you used were double headed molecules, so that one end would react with the other, and then you had two attachment points at either end. So you could now perpetuate this to infinity, and to his astonishment what he got were these incredible kind of viscous glops. And when he put a glass rod into the solution, out came a fibre. This is really the birth of the material nylon.

And nylon initially seemed a rather trivial material, but you make ladies stockings out of it and you've got an enormous market for making stockings which were almost invisible and which are way, way cheaper than silk.

Then people began to put plastics, for example, into the threads of screws. By putting a little nylon into the thread, you end up with a nut that doesn't shake itself loose. So, for example, if you have it on a bicycle or an automobile you've got a nut which is not going to let go.

Susan Freinkel: What you had now were these companies that had big industrial chemical departments, and they started noodling around with the by-products of refining oil or of refining natural gas or making chemicals, and that's when a lot of the plastics that we know today were born, was in that period of the '20s and '30s. But unlike with celluloid and Bakelite where the inventors had a very specific thing they were looking to replace and were looking to create a material to replace it, these plastics just kind of came out of lab experiments and some of them came out of, frankly, lab accidents. And things were created that nobody quite knew what to do with.

So the primary example I always talk about is polyethylene which literally was the result of a lab accident. It was a pair of British chemists, they came back, they opened up this reactor vessel, they looked in, they saw this white waxy substance and had no idea what it was or what it could possibly be used for. Well, in World War II somebody had the bright idea of taking another look at polyethylene and figured out that not only was it really lightweight but it actually was able to shield radar frequencies. And so the British used it to shield radio frequencies. And that happened a lot in the war. Plastics that nobody had quite known how to use or how to introduce into daily life found use. People took nylon, which had been made and had been haltingly used in things like stockings, now got used for parachutes. People took polystyrene, another material nobody knew quite what to do with, actually was one of the first big orders of the war, the army ordered a toymaker to use it to make toy bugles to replace the brass bugles that the military was used to using. Acrylic got used for the turrets on gun bombers, and so forth and so on.

Newsreel [archival]: Today's military weapon becomes tomorrow's peacetime instrument. Plastics will play as large a role in peace as they do in war. Here is a plane containing hundreds of plastic parts. Here another, bonded by plastics. This parachute is made of nylon, a plastic. As for plastics in peace, here they are in our homes, things as varied as buttons and batons. Cosmetic containers and cockpit housings, parachutes and refrigerators, radios and razors, all contain plastics.

Jeff Meikle: The new plastics exploded commercially after World War II. There was polyethylene, followed soon by polypropylene, and there was even a fad in the United States anyway right after the war, somebody had a little bit of money together and they wanted to get into manufacturing, they would go into plastics because they could get into it fairly cheaply and they thought that it was a goldmine, which it was and it wasn't.

One of the examples would be Earl Tupper who was famous for his Tupperware bowls and refrigerator dishes and drinking glasses and so on, which were sold by women at neighbourhood parties, so an all new marketing scheme, devised by a woman called Brownie Wise. But Tupper had worked during the war, he had developed uses of polypropylene for the US military and went into consumer products after the war. There was a real problem for ordinary Americans, ordinary housewives after World War II in that the new plastics didn't behave like the old ones, and there were dozens of new products, and everybody called them plastic but they weren't all the same. And so there was a move underway on the part of women's magazines to run articles that would educate American housewives into the different kinds of plastics, and their names and their qualities.

For example, before the war even there were ashtrays made out of Bakelite. You'd stub your cigarette out in a plastic ashtray. Well, you try stubbing a cigarette out in a Tupperware bowl of polyethylene and you're going to burn a hole right through it, and that's what people did. They really didn't know which plastics could be used for which uses, so there was an attempt to educate American consumers.

One of the things that amuses me about that post-war boom is that almost every promotional article about plastics in the late '40s, even into the early '50s, and I have dozens of examples of this from different magazines, they always say, 'and you can clean it with the swish of a damp cloth, you can clean it by wiping it with a soapy rag'. I think of this as damp cloth utopianism, that that's really about as far as people were looking with plastics at that time, was just ease of use in the home.

Tupperware commercial (1972): If you want to lock in freshness, Tupperware really locks it in. You can see and buy Tupperware at a Tupperware party. A Tupperware dealer will tell you how you may qualify to earn this handsome Hamilton Beach adjustable electric knife and cutting board if you have a party in your home by December 30. We're in the phone book.

Keri Phillips: You're listening to Rear Vision with Keri Phillips on RN, ABC Radio National.

As time went on, plastics expanded into single-use items like drink bottles, plastic wrap and shopping bags.

Susan Freinkel: I traced the story of the plastic bag in my book. That was a very conscious decision. Mobil Oil was the biggest maker of polyethylene, which is the plastic that plastic bags are made out of. And they started with sandwich bags in the 1950s and then started looking for other kinds of applications of plastic film, so they moved into making produce bags, and then they moved into making dry-cleaning bags which was a big deal, replacing paper dry-cleaning bags. And then they looked at garbage bags because at that time people tended to line their garbage pails with newspaper, and they managed to get the City of New York, for instance, to start approving the use of plastic garbage bags.

And by the early '70s where were they going to go? They had conquered the bag world, and the last remaining holdout was in the checkout stand where paper still reigned supreme. And so Mobil executives spent several years trying to figure out how to make a plastic shopping bag, and they kept trying to make something that looked like the paper shopping bag, you know, flat bottom, square sides. Plastic doesn't do that, polyethylene doesn't do that easily, and they kept failing.

And then somebody came across a patent that this Swedish engineer had filed for what is a very familiar item to us today, which is the T-shirt shaped flimsy plastic shopping bag. And the Mobil guys were like, you know, eureka, we've found it. And in 1976 they introduced that kind of plastic shopping bag to the US, and it was a little bit slow to catch on because people didn't quite know what to make of them, they didn't like the way checkout clerks licked their fingers before grabbing one off, they didn't trust that they would actually hold their groceries well. But pretty soon it caught on, and today that's probably the most ubiquitous plastic consumer item on the planet. There's gazillions of them out there.

Keri Phillips: The single-use shopping bag has become a symbol of the dark side of plastic, which, as it worked its way deeper and deeper into our lives, revealed itself to pose both health risks and a threat to the environment.

Andrea Sella: The other phenomenal thing about many of the synthetic plastics is the fact that they are so robust. They are untouched by water, they are untouched in many cases by sunlight. And actually because the polymer chains are so long, it turns out that it's very, very difficult for bacteria to go and attack these molecules. And what that means is that it gives plastics a longevity which is a phenomenal boon on the one hand. You can, for example, implant the plastic stents and things like that in the body, you can leave them outdoors as fencing and you know that it's not going to degrade, certainly not over many years. But of course that comes at an enormous price. And because plastics are so cheap and have become so widespread, and in many ways we have been encouraged to treat them really in a completely disposable fashion, we now have a real legacy of plastic in the environment.

And it's not simply the little Lego men that you find on the beach from time to time, the plastic bottles, the tyres, the plastic sheeting, but something in some ways more insidious. And for one thing, the use of polyester fleeces, those fleeces do degrade over time. And so every time you put it into the washing machine, tiny little bits do break off. But even large chunks of plastic will slowly degrade, and what they do is they break down into ever smaller bits. So on the one hand you've got large stuff which hangs around, blows about, ends up in the sea, sits on the beach or perhaps end up in these great gyres in the centre of our oceans. But at the same time there are tiny micro-plastics which are going to be ingested and which are ingested by organisms at all levels in the food chain. And these are things that we don't really fully understand yet, we don't really understand I think the impact of where this will take us. But it's certainly worrying.

Keri Phillips: Many of us recycle our plastic, hoping to keep some of it out of landfill, but is recycling the answer?

Susan Freinkel: Well, recycling is a great idea but it's really hard with plastic. In this country, I don't know what the story is in Australia, in the US less than 10% of all plastic is recycled. Why is that? Because there's a lot of different kinds of plastic and it is really hard to tell them apart. For recycling to work you have to be able to collect it, then you have to have an end market that you can sell it to, you have to have somebody who wants to buy it and recycle it. And practically speaking that really only happens with soda bottles and with milk and juice cartons, which are only two specific kinds of plastic. It hasn't happened with much of the other plastic that is out there. The problem besides that with recycling is that a lot of the plastic that gets recycled isn't recycled into great new things, it's down-cycled. So that soda bottle might be made into a flowerpot. How many flowerpots does the world need?

The fact of the matter is here and in much the world, plastic recycling ends up going to China. And there's a lot of questions about the recycling facilities in China. I visited a couple there. There's a new movie out actually called Plastic China which shows whole towns in China that are devoted to plastic recycling. And you've got kids sorting plastics in order to recycle them, and then being recycled, melted and reground under pretty primitive and unhealthy conditions.

Jeff Meikle: I think one of the problems with plastic recycling is that we simply have more of it than we know what to do with. And often the cost of reusing plastics is higher than the cost of making new plastic objects from petroleum feedstocks. And when the price of petroleum falls below a certain point, it's no longer cost-effective to recycle. When it rises again above a certain point then it becomes cost effective to recycle. So lots of communities are recycling, and frankly as a consumer or as a citizen I wonder how much of this stream of recycling materials I put out every week, which by weight is probably about 80% of my trash/garbage, only 20% is going into landfill, 80% is going to recycling and I frankly wonder what is happening to it.

Keri Phillips: Over the last century, plastic has gradually crept into every corner of our lives. Looking back, what can we say about its effect?

Jeff Meikle: What plastics and plastics moulding techniques have made possible is an array of products that could not have existed before. They are engineered for specific purposes and they can be produced relatively cheaply and efficiently. And so there has been an explosion of products of all classes, the most insignificant, inexpensive kinds of things, like a plastic water bottle, all the way up to very expensive pieces of medical equipment and so on, but we would not have been able to manufacture those in the volume that we need for the population that we have in the developed world, so that everyone could enjoy the benefits of them. So the enlargement of the middle class in the developed world I think has been partially enabled in a material way by the existence of plastics. It makes it possible for us to have more stuff that is more cheaply produced than before, and to have things that we would not have even envisioned before.

My second point is that plastics make possible products that could not have existed without them, like a cheap water bottle. I keep harping on that because it's sitting right here in front of me. But there are many, many kinds of things that just can't be made with normal materials, and so there's been an explosion of products, and those products have exhibited a real malleability. It has become possible to engineer very complex products that are enabled to exist because of plastics.

Think of the various devices of the computer age, beginning with the original large desktop computers and ending with iPhones and smart phones and so on. Plastic is a very important material in a lot of those products. And it's hard to imagine that industry having expanded the way it did without them. So the world has become more malleable. I am not a PR person for plastics, but there was a slogan at Disney World quite a while back called 'if we can dream it, we can do it'. And I think that might also be the slogan of plastics, that they enable people to envision and to actually create things that would not have been imaginable before and to make them available for a mass market of people who would not have been able to enjoy such luxuries before. The upshot of that is that our world has become more artificial, and we accept that as natural, ironically. But it has become more artificial and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but ultimately plastics have made it possible to mould or shape the kind of world we want, at least the physical world, for those of us who can afford it, in a way that would not have been possible before. And there are positives and negatives to that obviously.

Susan Freinkel: You know, what I ended up feeling at the end of the book was that people want to blame the material, and that's where I think we have a problem. Plastic isn't the agent, we are the agent, we make this stuff, we use this stuff, and what it does in our lives or what it does to our lives depends on how we make, how we use it, how we dispose of it. And we can do that in a great way, we can take that ingenuity that created some amazing plastic stuff and use it to make safer things for us. We can use it to make cars that burn up less carbon, and lightweight aeroplanes. We can use it to create artificial joints and to replace clouding lenses in someone's eyes. Or we could use it to fill the world with garbage and with silly crap that nobody needs and nobody wants and it's going to last for centuries. So I really come back to this is a material that we make from scarce resources, from fossil fuels that we are fighting over and take great energy to scrape from the earth. We should treat them as valuable materials and we should treat them as things that we use carefully and thoughtfully.

Keri Phillips: Susan Freinkel, the author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. The other people on the program were Professor Jeff Meikle, the author of American Plastic: A Cultural History, and Professor Andrea Sella from University College London.

Judy Rapley is the sound engineer for this Rear Vision. Bye from Keri Phillips.

Keri Phillips: Hello this is Rear Vision with Keri Phillips. Today, the story of plastic.

TV commercial [archival]: When you look at plastic, you know how it helps things stay fresh and safe and light and unbreakable and strong and easy to carry, but take another look. Plastic also saves energy because it helps make cars lighter to save gas, and plastic insulation helps save energy at home. Even these strong plastic bags help save energy because they take less energy to make than other grocery bags. To learn more, call this number for a free booklet, and take another look at plastic.

Keri Phillips: A hundred years ago, almost everything in our daily lives would have been made of natural materials. Our clothes would have been wool or cotton, our furniture wood and so on. Today, many of these natural products have been replaced by plastic and now you'll find plastic in just about everything we use. It's so ubiquitous we don't even really notice it.

Susan Freinkel is the author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. What exactly is plastic?

Susan Freinkel: Plastic is kind of a misnomer. Plastic isn't a single thing. Actually there are tens of thousands of plastics, and what they all have in common is they are something called polymers, which just means that they are big molecules made up of lots of little molecules and atoms strung together. I always think of them like beads on a necklace, and what a plastic is like depends on the way those beads are arranged. So whether they are smooshed together, whether they are far apart, whether there's little dangly bits, that will tell you what the plastic is going to be like, whether it's going to be transparent like plastic film, or whether it's going to be hard like a vinyl record (I'm dating myself there), or whether it's going to be slippery or bristly or stretchy. What they all have in common is that they are polymers.

Andrea Sella: So the chemical components of plastics are extremely varied.

Keri Phillips: Professor Andrea Sella teaches chemistry at University College London.

Andrea Sella: The word 'plastics' is really a catchall term, it's a little bit like saying mammals. Well, mammals, we go from the platypus to the blue whale to the elephant and they are very, very different. To a non-chemist, you sort of look at plastics and go, well yes, it's sort of kind of the same. But first of all you can split plastics into two kinds. One is what's called the thermoplastics, and those are things that essentially you can soften by warming, and then when you cool them down they harden again. So in a sense you can sort of reuse them over and over again.

There are others, on the other hand, like, for example, the components of Lego, the materials used in Lego, which once you've set their shape, that's it, you can't melt it and start again. And that all really comes down to the chemical structure. So there is a bewildering array of chemical structures and of chemical components.

Plastics are an absolutely extraordinary class of materials that really emerged during the 20th century. And they are entirely synthetic, but the amazing thing about them is that they can be shaped into pretty well any shape you want, they can be coloured in pretty well any colour you choose, and in many cases they can be tailored to suit specific applications.

Plastics have completely revolutionised our world because what they've done is they've enabled really lightweight packaging, really lightweight applications which have replaced expensive things. And when you start thinking back to, for example, hair care, how did people comb their hair? Well, once upon a time you essentially had two options. One was to use some kind of piece of wood, possibly with prongs of metal. The alternative was to use ivory. One was not terribly delicate. The other, well, it was expensive because you had to get it from far away.

Keri Phillips: The first plastic, celluloid, was developed as an alternative to ivory in the 1860s and '70s. It was a mixture of natural and synthetic materials. Professor Jeff Meikle is the author of American Plastic: A Cultural History.

Jeff Meikle: It was made out of cellulose and camphor. Cellulose was derived from old rags or from paper pulp and mixed with camphor and then it was pressed under a pretty intense pressure into blocks. The blocks were then sliced and then those slices of different colours could be mixed together and so you could do light and dark slices, piling them up and then hardening the whole block again under pressure, shifting it on end, slicing it again and then you'd get a thin sheet of material that had light and dark striations alternating and that would be a substitute for ivory because ivory has those kinds of growth striations in it. So that could be easily reshaped or moulded and curved under heat and used for jewellery, comb handles, the backs of mirrors, things like that, so that one could avoid having to use ivory, which some people felt even then was soon going to be...elephants were being driven extinct because of ivory hunters, which of course is something we face today. So celluloid was a replacement for ivory, it was a replacement for tortoiseshell.

The kind of dough that they got when they mixed cellulose and camphor was kind of a doughy mass, almost like baking dough, that kind of consistency. If you can think of a huge vat of dough in a commercial bakery being mechanically churned, they could take blobs of that, throw it on a roller in different colours, amber and black and darker reddish coloured things, and then those different colours would be combined on the roller and flattened out, hardened, and you'd get a replacement for tortoiseshell, which would be translucent in places, almost transparent in some and totally opaque in others.

One of the really unique uses of celluloid was for shirt collars. Men would wear a shirt for a whole week, maybe even longer without laundering it, but the collar got filthy. So they needed new collars, and linen collars were replaceable, they'd button onto the shirt and unbutton, but they had to be washed and laundered, and a celluloid collar, which was stamped with an embossing that made it look like fabric and even had stitching on the hem of it, a celluloid collar could just be taken off at night and scrubbed with a brush and used again the next day and it would look very clean again.

Keri Phillips: You're listening to Rear Vision with Keri Phillips on RN, ABC Radio National.

The first totally synthetic plastic was developed in the first decade of the 20th century.

Susan Freinkel: That was when this Belgian emigre who also was kind of an amateur inventor started looking around and he saw that there was a crying demand for shellac. Why shellac? When I started thinking about the stuff, I knew shellac as the stuff that you have on decorative boxes. Well, shellac is also a really good electrical insulator, and at that time the US was rapidly electrifying, there was a huge demand for insulator of electrical wires. The problem is shellac is made from a resin that is excreted by the lac beetle, and it takes something like six months and thousands of beetles to come up with a pound of shellac. You're not going to get a lot of wires insulated that way.

So Baekeland starts looking for some kind of alternative, and again he sets up a little lab behind his house and runs all these different experiments, trial and error, and after a couple of years he comes up with this hard, dark material that he called Bakelite. And we all know Bakelite, it's something that we see in costume jewellery. Bakelite was another great plastic and it got widely used for industrial uses but also for telephones and jewellery and fountain pens, just everywhere. The Bakelite company's trademark was infinity because, they argued, it had so many different uses.

The other thing that was important about Bakelite is it was a completely synthetic material. Celluloid had one foot in the plant world. It came out of plant cellulose. Bakelite was made out of some sort of by-product of the process of turning coal into coke. It was made from fossil fuels. It was the product of the lab, it was not in any way a natural material. And from Bakelite on, that was sort of the basis of plastics.

Andrea Sella: In the late '30s early '40s you start to get the development, particularly at the great American chemical company DuPont, of people who start to play around with 'Friday afternoon' experiments, and this is kind of a classic thing in the sciences, there's legend about it, that you do your normal research Monday to Thursday, and then on Friday afternoon you try something slightly off the wall, something that doesn't have much chance of working but that might be kind of cool if it did.

Well, one of these Friday afternoon experiments was conducted by a man called Wallace Carothers, and Carothers knew that if you reacted a molecule called an amine with another molecule called an acyl chloride you could link them together essentially in the same way that proteins are linked, with what's called an amide bond.

Well, Carothers had a really cool idea. He imagined what you used were double headed molecules, so that one end would react with the other, and then you had two attachment points at either end. So you could now perpetuate this to infinity, and to his astonishment what he got were these incredible kind of viscous glops. And when he put a glass rod into the solution, out came a fibre. This is really the birth of the material nylon.

And nylon initially seemed a rather trivial material, but you make ladies stockings out of it and you've got an enormous market for making stockings which were almost invisible and which are way, way cheaper than silk.

Then people began to put plastics, for example, into the threads of screws. By putting a little nylon into the thread, you end up with a nut that doesn't shake itself loose. So, for example, if you have it on a bicycle or an automobile you've got a nut which is not going to let go.

Susan Freinkel: What you had now were these companies that had big industrial chemical departments, and they started noodling around with the by-products of refining oil or of refining natural gas or making chemicals, and that's when a lot of the plastics that we know today were born, was in that period of the '20s and '30s. But unlike with celluloid and Bakelite where the inventors had a very specific thing they were looking to replace and were looking to create a material to replace it, these plastics just kind of came out of lab experiments and some of them came out of, frankly, lab accidents. And things were created that nobody quite knew what to do with.

So the primary example I always talk about is polyethylene which literally was the result of a lab accident. It was a pair of British chemists, they came back, they opened up this reactor vessel, they looked in, they saw this white waxy substance and had no idea what it was or what it could possibly be used for. Well, in World War II somebody had the bright idea of taking another look at polyethylene and figured out that not only was it really lightweight but it actually was able to shield radar frequencies. And so the British used it to shield radio frequencies. And that happened a lot in the war. Plastics that nobody had quite known how to use or how to introduce into daily life found use. People took nylon, which had been made and had been haltingly used in things like stockings, now got used for parachutes. People took polystyrene, another material nobody knew quite what to do with, actually was one of the first big orders of the war, the army ordered a toymaker to use it to make toy bugles to replace the brass bugles that the military was used to using. Acrylic got used for the turrets on gun bombers, and so forth and so on.

Newsreel [archival]: Today's military weapon becomes tomorrow's peacetime instrument. Plastics will play as large a role in peace as they do in war. Here is a plane containing hundreds of plastic parts. Here another, bonded by plastics. This parachute is made of nylon, a plastic. As for plastics in peace, here they are in our homes, things as varied as buttons and batons. Cosmetic containers and cockpit housings, parachutes and refrigerators, radios and razors, all contain plastics.

Jeff Meikle: The new plastics exploded commercially after World War II. There was polyethylene, followed soon by polypropylene, and there was even a fad in the United States anyway right after the war, somebody had a little bit of money together and they wanted to get into manufacturing, they would go into plastics because they could get into it fairly cheaply and they thought that it was a goldmine, which it was and it wasn't.

One of the examples would be Earl Tupper who was famous for his Tupperware bowls and refrigerator dishes and drinking glasses and so on, which were sold by women at neighbourhood parties, so an all new marketing scheme, devised by a woman called Brownie Wise. But Tupper had worked during the war, he had developed uses of polypropylene for the US military and went into consumer products after the war. There was a real problem for ordinary Americans, ordinary housewives after World War II in that the new plastics didn't behave like the old ones, and there were dozens of new products, and everybody called them plastic but they weren't all the same. And so there was a move underway on the part of women's magazines to run articles that would educate American housewives into the different kinds of plastics, and their names and their qualities.

For example, before the war even there were ashtrays made out of Bakelite. You'd stub your cigarette out in a plastic ashtray. Well, you try stubbing a cigarette out in a Tupperware bowl of polyethylene and you're going to burn a hole right through it, and that's what people did. They really didn't know which plastics could be used for which uses, so there was an attempt to educate American consumers.

One of the things that amuses me about that post-war boom is that almost every promotional article about plastics in the late '40s, even into the early '50s, and I have dozens of examples of this from different magazines, they always say, 'and you can clean it with the swish of a damp cloth, you can clean it by wiping it with a soapy rag'. I think of this as damp cloth utopianism, that that's really about as far as people were looking with plastics at that time, was just ease of use in the home.

Tupperware commercial (1972): If you want to lock in freshness, Tupperware really locks it in. You can see and buy Tupperware at a Tupperware party. A Tupperware dealer will tell you how you may qualify to earn this handsome Hamilton Beach adjustable electric knife and cutting board if you have a party in your home by December 30. We're in the phone book.

Keri Phillips: You're listening to Rear Vision with Keri Phillips on RN, ABC Radio National.

As time went on, plastics expanded into single-use items like drink bottles, plastic wrap and shopping bags.

Susan Freinkel: I traced the story of the plastic bag in my book. That was a very conscious decision. Mobil Oil was the biggest maker of polyethylene, which is the plastic that plastic bags are made out of. And they started with sandwich bags in the 1950s and then started looking for other kinds of applications of plastic film, so they moved into making produce bags, and then they moved into making dry-cleaning bags which was a big deal, replacing paper dry-cleaning bags. And then they looked at garbage bags because at that time people tended to line their garbage pails with newspaper, and they managed to get the City of New York, for instance, to start approving the use of plastic garbage bags.

And by the early '70s where were they going to go? They had conquered the bag world, and the last remaining holdout was in the checkout stand where paper still reigned supreme. And so Mobil executives spent several years trying to figure out how to make a plastic shopping bag, and they kept trying to make something that looked like the paper shopping bag, you know, flat bottom, square sides. Plastic doesn't do that, polyethylene doesn't do that easily, and they kept failing.

And then somebody came across a patent that this Swedish engineer had filed for what is a very familiar item to us today, which is the T-shirt shaped flimsy plastic shopping bag. And the Mobil guys were like, you know, eureka, we've found it. And in 1976 they introduced that kind of plastic shopping bag to the US, and it was a little bit slow to catch on because people didn't quite know what to make of them, they didn't like the way checkout clerks licked their fingers before grabbing one off, they didn't trust that they would actually hold their groceries well. But pretty soon it caught on, and today that's probably the most ubiquitous plastic consumer item on the planet. There's gazillions of them out there.

Keri Phillips: The single-use shopping bag has become a symbol of the dark side of plastic, which, as it worked its way deeper and deeper into our lives, revealed itself to pose both health risks and a threat to the environment.

Andrea Sella: The other phenomenal thing about many of the synthetic plastics is the fact that they are so robust. They are untouched by water, they are untouched in many cases by sunlight. And actually because the polymer chains are so long, it turns out that it's very, very difficult for bacteria to go and attack these molecules. And what that means is that it gives plastics a longevity which is a phenomenal boon on the one hand. You can, for example, implant the plastic stents and things like that in the body, you can leave them outdoors as fencing and you know that it's not going to degrade, certainly not over many years. But of course that comes at an enormous price. And because plastics are so cheap and have become so widespread, and in many ways we have been encouraged to treat them really in a completely disposable fashion, we now have a real legacy of plastic in the environment.

And it's not simply the little Lego men that you find on the beach from time to time, the plastic bottles, the tyres, the plastic sheeting, but something in some ways more insidious. And for one thing, the use of polyester fleeces, those fleeces do degrade over time. And so every time you put it into the washing machine, tiny little bits do break off. But even large chunks of plastic will slowly degrade, and what they do is they break down into ever smaller bits. So on the one hand you've got large stuff which hangs around, blows about, ends up in the sea, sits on the beach or perhaps end up in these great gyres in the centre of our oceans. But at the same time there are tiny micro-plastics which are going to be ingested and which are ingested by organisms at all levels in the food chain. And these are things that we don't really fully understand yet, we don't really understand I think the impact of where this will take us. But it's certainly worrying.

Keri Phillips: Many of us recycle our plastic, hoping to keep some of it out of landfill, but is recycling the answer?

Susan Freinkel: Well, recycling is a great idea but it's really hard with plastic. In this country, I don't know what the story is in Australia, in the US less than 10% of all plastic is recycled. Why is that? Because there's a lot of different kinds of plastic and it is really hard to tell them apart. For recycling to work you have to be able to collect it, then you have to have an end market that you can sell it to, you have to have somebody who wants to buy it and recycle it. And practically speaking that really only happens with soda bottles and with milk and juice cartons, which are only two specific kinds of plastic. It hasn't happened with much of the other plastic that is out there. The problem besides that with recycling is that a lot of the plastic that gets recycled isn't recycled into great new things, it's down-cycled. So that soda bottle might be made into a flowerpot. How many flowerpots does the world need?

The fact of the matter is here and in much the world, plastic recycling ends up going to China. And there's a lot of questions about the recycling facilities in China. I visited a couple there. There's a new movie out actually called Plastic China which shows whole towns in China that are devoted to plastic recycling. And you've got kids sorting plastics in order to recycle them, and then being recycled, melted and reground under pretty primitive and unhealthy conditions.

Jeff Meikle: I think one of the problems with plastic recycling is that we simply have more of it than we know what to do with. And often the cost of reusing plastics is higher than the cost of making new plastic objects from petroleum feedstocks. And when the price of petroleum falls below a certain point, it's no longer cost-effective to recycle. When it rises again above a certain point then it becomes cost effective to recycle. So lots of communities are recycling, and frankly as a consumer or as a citizen I wonder how much of this stream of recycling materials I put out every week, which by weight is probably about 80% of my trash/garbage, only 20% is going into landfill, 80% is going to recycling and I frankly wonder what is happening to it.

Keri Phillips: Over the last century, plastic has gradually crept into every corner of our lives. Looking back, what can we say about its effect?

Jeff Meikle: What plastics and plastics moulding techniques have made possible is an array of products that could not have existed before. They are engineered for specific purposes and they can be produced relatively cheaply and efficiently. And so there has been an explosion of products of all classes, the most insignificant, inexpensive kinds of things, like a plastic water bottle, all the way up to very expensive pieces of medical equipment and so on, but we would not have been able to manufacture those in the volume that we need for the population that we have in the developed world, so that everyone could enjoy the benefits of them. So the enlargement of the middle class in the developed world I think has been partially enabled in a material way by the existence of plastics. It makes it possible for us to have more stuff that is more cheaply produced than before, and to have things that we would not have even envisioned before.

My second point is that plastics make possible products that could not have existed without them, like a cheap water bottle. I keep harping on that because it's sitting right here in front of me. But there are many, many kinds of things that just can't be made with normal materials, and so there's been an explosion of products, and those products have exhibited a real malleability. It has become possible to engineer very complex products that are enabled to exist because of plastics.

Think of the various devices of the computer age, beginning with the original large desktop computers and ending with iPhones and smart phones and so on. Plastic is a very important material in a lot of those products. And it's hard to imagine that industry having expanded the way it did without them. So the world has become more malleable. I am not a PR person for plastics, but there was a slogan at Disney World quite a while back called 'if we can dream it, we can do it'. And I think that might also be the slogan of plastics, that they enable people to envision and to actually create things that would not have been imaginable before and to make them available for a mass market of people who would not have been able to enjoy such luxuries before. The upshot of that is that our world has become more artificial, and we accept that as natural, ironically. But it has become more artificial and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but ultimately plastics have made it possible to mould or shape the kind of world we want, at least the physical world, for those of us who can afford it, in a way that would not have been possible before. And there are positives and negatives to that obviously.

Susan Freinkel: You know, what I ended up feeling at the end of the book was that people want to blame the material, and that's where I think we have a problem. Plastic isn't the agent, we are the agent, we make this stuff, we use this stuff, and what it does in our lives or what it does to our lives depends on how we make, how we use it, how we dispose of it. And we can do that in a great way, we can take that ingenuity that created some amazing plastic stuff and use it to make safer things for us. We can use it to make cars that burn up less carbon, and lightweight aeroplanes. We can use it to create artificial joints and to replace clouding lenses in someone's eyes. Or we could use it to fill the world with garbage and with silly crap that nobody needs and nobody wants and it's going to last for centuries. So I really come back to this is a material that we make from scarce resources, from fossil fuels that we are fighting over and take great energy to scrape from the earth. We should treat them as valuable materials and we should treat them as things that we use carefully and thoughtfully.

Keri Phillips: Susan Freinkel, the author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. The other people on the program were Professor Jeff Meikle, the author of American Plastic: A Cultural History, and Professor Andrea Sella from University College London.

Judy Rapley is the sound engineer for this Rear Vision. Bye from Keri Phillips.

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Keri Phillips: Hello this is Rear Vision with Keri Phillips. Today, the story of plastic. TV commercial [archival]: When you look at plastic, you know how it helps things stay fresh and safe and light and unbreakable and strong and easy to carry, but take another look.

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Hey guys sorry we didn't get to this at the end of class but this is a good page with an explanation of how to use "though" and "although".

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Although or though ? - English Grammar Today - Cambridge Dictionary

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Although or though ? - English Grammar Today - a reference to written and spoken English grammar and usage - Cambridge Dictionary

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Articles...just some more information to confuse you just that little bit more ;)

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Articles...just some more information to confuse you just that little bit more ;)

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English Grammar Reference and Exercises on Tenses and all other Grammar Topics.

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Make wishes about present and past to practice using wish+ Past Simple / wish + Past Perfect / wish + would.

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TED talk - How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed

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TED talk - How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed

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How to stay calm when you know you’ll be stressed

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You’re not at your best when you’re stressed. In fact, your brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations, inhibiting rational, logical thinking but potentially helping you survive, say, being attacked by a lion. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin thinks there’s a way to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations, when your thinking becomes clouded -- the pre-mortem. “We all are going to fail now and then,” he says. “The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be.”

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Awesome Listening Activities at Different Levels and with Different Vocab!

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Awesome Listening Activities at Different Levels and with Different Vocab!

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Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab - English Listening

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Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab helps ESL and EFL learners improve their English listening comprehension skills through conversations.

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We did not have time to finish the answers for the past perfect worksheet so I have attached the file here. Please complete the activities and then check your answers at home.

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Past Perfect Continuous practice activities

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Past Perfect Continuous practice activities

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Hey guys we did not have time for this in class. You can do this at home for extra practice if you want :)

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Kyol's TED Talk that we watched in class

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Kyol's TED Talk that we watched in class

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Understanding Systematic Oppression and Institutionalised Racism | Kyol Blakeney | TEDxYouth@Sydney

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This is a great documentary to watch if you want to learn more about the current situation of Aboriginal affairs in Australia.

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This is one of the most extraordinary films about Australia. This is Utopia, an epic production by the Emmy and Bafta winning film-maker and journalist John Pilger. Utopia is a vast region in northern Australia and home to the oldest human presence on earth.

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Australia Day Video - Interviews by two women 

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Australia Day Video - Interviews by two women 

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This is a great resource to hear opinions on Australia Day (Invasion Day) from Aboriginal people, non-Aboriginal people, people who love Australia Day and people who hate Australia Day. Enjoy!

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AUSTRALIA DAY VS. INVASION DAY #‎26THJANIZM

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Interviewed by Ebony and Olivia for www.izmzmag.com We started our day off at Redfern to see the Invasion Day march before heading off to Cronulla to see the Australia Day celebrations there. Take a look at who we met and what we learnt. Find us on instagram: @izmzmag And search izmz on Facebook.

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Here is a link to the video from our class on Friday. Remember: the history of Australia's Indigenous Peoples is complex, but you have taken the first step on the journey of learning!

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Aboriginal People Respond To “Australia Day”

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Board work from class :)

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Used to, usually, be/get used to sentence structures

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Used to, usually, be/get used to sentence structures

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For regular past tense verbs. Remember also to slur the final sound into any words that begin with a vowel.

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pronunciation of voiced and unvoiced letter sounds and final /ed/

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Slideshare with explanation and differences between the two.

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Uses and examples of present perfect continuous

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...because this is my favourite YouTube video of Aussie slang!

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How to speak Australian : Abbreviate Everything

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A pun on 'a pain in the butt', this discussion board has useful articles that attempt to fill in 'grey areas'

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This is a forum to discuss the gray areas of the English language for which you would not find answers easily in dictionaries or other reference books. You can browse through the latest questions and comments below. If you have a question of your own, please submit it here.

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Extra random English lessons and resources to keep you busy :)

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Dan
Hi guys! Dan for BBC Learning English here with this week's Learner Question. Find out what it is after this.

OK! This week's learner question comes from Daniel. Daniel! Hey, buddy! Daniel, Daniel. Hey! Daniel in Argentina. He says, I would like to know please under what circumstances we should use wanna and gonna, and what exactly they mean.

Well, it's a good question, Daniel. These expressions are extremely common in informal speech, especially in American English. It's important that you are able to recognise and understand them, but you probably won't need to use them and you shouldn't write them down. You should always write the extended form.

Gonna is a form of going to, and like going to it can be used for future predictions and future plans. It can be accompanied by the be verb, or not. And, it's more common to omit the verb in 2nd person singular and plural sentences. For example, what you gonna do now? I'm gonna sit down and relax.

Wanna can be used with all singular and plural pronouns, except in the 3rd person - that's he or she. We still need to use the 's' with the verb in these cases. It means want to. I want to becomes I wanna. Again, the auxiliary verb here in the question can be omitted. For example, what you wanna do now? I wanna go home. My father wants us to have dinner.

Gotta is another example of condensed language. It comes from have got to. And it's much less common in question forms, but when it does appear in a question, the have can be omitted. For example, what you gotta do this evening? I'm not sure. I gotta phone home and find out.

I hope that answers your question, Daniel. Thank you very much for writing to us. If anybody else out there has a question for Learners' Questions, you can email us on: learning.english@bbc.co.uk. Please remember to include Learners' Questions in the subject box and your name and where you're writing from. We can't possibly answer all the questions, guys, we're very sorry. We just get too many, but we do read every single one. And for more information, go to our website: bbclearningenglish.com. That's it for this week's Learners' Questions. Thank you very much for tuning in. I'll see you next time. Bye.

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BBC Learning English - Course: English You Need / Unit 13 / Session 5 / Activity 1

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Dan Hi guys! Dan for BBC Learning English here with this week's Learner Question. Find out what it is after this. OK! This week's learner question comes from Daniel. Daniel! Hey, buddy! Daniel, Daniel. Hey! Daniel in Argentina. He says, I would like to know please under what circumstances we should use wanna and gonna, and what exactly they mean.

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The Project is an Australian news program with 'edge' (7pm Monday-Friday on Channel 10). It is comedic and informative. Trust me. It's great!

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News delivered differently. Watch full episodes of The Project on tenplay. The Project is a TV show joining in the conversations going on in living rooms around the country. Watch full episodes and interviews, keep up to date with the latest news and find out more about the show on tenplay.

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Read recent news articles at a level that suits you best. For Upper-Intermediate, I would suggest a level 5 or above.

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Breaking News English - Easier News Lessons

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Breaking News English Lessons - 3,419 FREE Easy News English lesson plans. EFL/ESL graded news lessons, news in 7 levels, current events.

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A great listening resource with a huge variety of topics. Why not listen to one on the bus or train? Enjoy.

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content. By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

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Here you will find extra grammar explanations with exercises, vocabulary, games and more...

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We have hundreds of pages of high-quality video and audio, along with interactive exercises to help you with your grammar and vocabulary. Here are three ways to find a page where you can get started:

1. Test your level here and find pages aimed at learners like you.

2. Use the menu links at the top of every page to explore the site and see what kinds of materials are available.

3. Use the search feature at the top-right of every page to find the grammar, vocabulary or topics you want to learn more about.

Six great ways to help you improve your English here

1. Take some time to explore the site. Use the links at the top of the page to go to different sections and see what kinds of materials are available. Get a feel for the level of difficulty of different sections so you can see what will be most useful to you.

2. Start with something that is not too high a level. Many users find Elementary Podcasts Series Three a good place to begin, though this obviously depends upon your level and needs.

3. Keep a vocabulary notebook as you work. Organise it by topic ('work', 'family', 'food', etc.) and add words and phrases to it as you go through the material. Test yourself regularly to see if you remember the words.

4. Find time to practise English during your regular day. Perhaps you have a friend with whom you can practise speaking, or perhaps you can practise by yourself, just speaking English when you are alone at home or at work. This kind of practice is great for developing fluency in speaking, so that when you need to use English in the 'real' world you are ready and confident.

5. Use the Cambridge Dictionaries Online search box to look up words and phrases you want to learn more about. Be sure to read the dictionary entries carefully, as there is a lot of information there!

6. Register and you can participate in the site and ask questions in the Comments section of each page. Be sure to read the House Rules about what kinds of things you can and cannot write in the Comments!

The best technique for using our pages

There is no one way to use LearnEnglish, but here is one technique that a lot of learners find useful.

Many of our pages have a video, some audio or a text article towards the top of the page. They might have a preparation task that you should do first, but often the best way to start is just to press play or read this part of the page.
If you find what you're listening to or reading much too difficult or easy, use the advice above to find a page in a different section of the site. You shouldn't easily understand everything, butyou should be able to understand a lot of what you hear or read.

Then you will find some tasks. These might be testing what you understood or they might be about the language you heard or read. You can do them as many times as you like and you can also go back to the video, audio or text if you get stuck.

There are usually some downloadable PDF files which can be useful if you have a poor-quality internet connection or if you are a teacher who wants to use our materials in class. Finally, there are the comments where you can discuss the page with other learners (in English!) or ask questions.

Not all our pages are exactly like this. For example, our grammar reference is more like a book (with some interactive exercises) and we also have some games that are just for playing.

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We have hundreds of pages of high-quality video and audio, along with interactive exercises to help you with your grammar and vocabulary. Here are three ways to find a page where you can get started: Test your level here and find pages aimed at learners like you.

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Search this website for any topic and quiz yourself, use flashcards and play games to practice English!

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ReversoContext is a website ( an app) which can find words and phrases in context...from books, websites, articles, etc. that already exist on the internet. You may even be lucky enough to find a Harry Potter extract!

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Reverso Context | Translation in context from English to French

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Find the French translations in context of English words, expressions and idioms; a free English-French dictionary with millions of examples of use.