Cover of the textbook Outcomes Advanced - Student's Book

The key answer of exercise 5

The key to exercise solutions in chapter 11 - Word play for the textbook Outcomes Advanced - Student's Book with authors Carol Nuttall and Amanda French from National Geographic Learning

Question

Work in pairs. Answer the questions. Then listen again and check your ideas.

Answer

  1. The word zho means ‘hybrid cattle’, and is an example of the kind of obscure word people often use in Scrabble.
  2. The fact it’s basically an oral language is mentioned because it explains why Scrabble – with its emphasis on obscure words from the written language – isn’t the best game for practising / preserving it.
  3. Chinese crosswords aren’t based on words, like Western ones, but on phrases / idioms that share words. Scrabble wouldn’t work as it’s based on words and the way letters intersect across them. It may, of course, be theoretically possible to do a version using idioms / phrases with intersecting characters, but Chinese has so many characters, it wouldn’t work.
  4. In China, when someone gets married, the couple are sometimes given dates and peanuts because the characters for dates and peanuts are pretty much the same as the saying ‘May you soon give birth to a boy’.
  5. The saying ‘May you soon give birth to a boy’.
  6. Alliteration – the use of the same letter / sound at the start of words in a phrase or sentence – is shown in ‘everything’s ship-shape’. Tongue twisters often feature alliteration.
  7. Because some people playing the Words With Friends app got to know each other so well through the chat feature of the app that they ended up getting married.
  8. Because she wants to finish on a high and ending by her ‘winning’.

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