Your English Test guide

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🇺🇸 IT'S NATIONAL SECONDHAND WARDROBE DAY! 👕👗 Today, August 25, is National Secondhand Wardrobe Day in the United States, encouraging people to give previously owned clothes another life. But we're interested in one particular word: SECONDHAND Why second hand? 🎵 LET'S START WITH SOME SECOND HAND NEWS... Fleetwood Mac opened their legendary 1977 album Rumours with Second Hand News, written and sung by Lindsey Buckingham. 🎬 Fleetwood Mac – Second Hand News [VIDEO LINK] Second-hand news is information you hear from somebody else rather than getting it directly from the original source. If you actually witnessed something yourself, you have first-hand information. But what's the grammar behind first and second? 🔢 CARDINAL OR ORDINAL? English has two important types of numbers. CARDINAL NUMBERS tell us how many: 1 = one 2 = two 3 = three 4 = four 5 = five ORDINAL NUMBERS tell us position or order: 1st = first 2nd = second 3rd = third 4th = fourth 5th = fifth And ordinal numbers appear in some very interesting English expressions and collocations: 1️⃣ FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE If you have first-hand experience of something, you have experienced it yourself rather than hearing about it from somebody else. 2️⃣ SECOND-HAND NEWS Second-hand news reaches you indirectly, through another person. And, of course, Fleetwood Mac gave us 🎵 Second Hand News. 3️⃣ THIRD WHEEL A third wheel is an extra person who feels unwanted or awkward, particularly when spending time with a couple. Think of a bicycle. It needs two wheels. A third wheel isn't needed, so it's extra! That's the idea behind the expression. If two people are together as a couple and you join them, you might feel like the unnecessary third wheel. "I felt like a third wheel on their date." 4️⃣ FOURTH ESTATE The Fourth Estate is a traditional name for the press and news media. But why fourth? Historically, society was divided into different estates, or social orders. In pre-Revolutionary France, there were three: 1️⃣ First Estate: the clergy ⛪️ 2️⃣ Second Estate: the nobility 👑 3️⃣ Third Estate: everyone else 👨‍🌾👩‍🔧 The press wasn't literally another legal estate, but because newspapers and journalists became so influential in public life, the press came to be described as an unofficial Fourth Estate. 📰 So if you hear someone talking about the Fourth Estate, they're talking about the press. 5️⃣ FIFTH COLUMN A fifth column is a group secretly working against a country or organization from within. The expression dates from the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Four military columns were advancing on Madrid, while a supposed fifth column of supporters was said to be operating inside the city. 🤔 So what about SIXTH, SEVENTH, EIGHTH and beyond? Do they have their own special English expressions too? Time for a little Duolingo English Test-style challenge. Try our quiz below👇 to see you knowledge of these type of expressions. #EnglishVocabulary #LearnEnglish #EnglishExpressions #OrdinalNumbers #IELTSAAA

🤓 FIND YOUR INNER NERD DAY🤓 Today is Find Your Inner Nerd Day! 👈 But first, what exactly is a nerd?🤓 A nerd🤓 is someone who is extremely interested in, and often knows a lot about, a particular subject. These days, we often associate nerds with computers and technology. And that brings us to IT. A surprising number of people think IT means “Internet”, or that IT is a shortened form of the word Internet. It isn't! 💻 IT = Information Technology The funny British comedy The IT Crowd, in the clip above, follows a group of IT nerds and is well worth watching. You can find it on ORORO.TV 👈, where you can use bilingual subtitles or click individual words for translations. ⚠️ And did you notice the grammar joke in the clip above?👆 🎵 Roy sings: “We don't need no education.” And Moss immediately replies: “Yes, you do. You've just used a double negative.” 🤓 And that got us thinking about today's lesson: double negatives. So what exactly is a double negative, and why is Moss so bothered about it? ➖ + ➖ = ➕? DOUBLE NEGATIVES In Standard English, we don't normally use two negatives together to express one negative idea. ❌ I don't know nothing. If we treat both negatives literally, they cancel each other out: ➡️ I know something. If that's not what you mean, Standard English requires: ✅ I don't know anything. or ✅ I know nothing. But this isn't a universal rule. In many languages, using more than one negative to express one negative idea is completely normal. Linguists call this negative concord. You'll find it in Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Greek, Serbian and Croatian, among many others. BUT WAIT... 🤔 Does that mean two negatives together are always wrong in English? No!👎 Advanced English speakers deliberately put negatives together all the time: ✅ It's not impossible. = It is possible. ✅ That's not unusual. = That's fairly normal. ✅ I'm not unhappy. = I'm reasonably happy. ✅ I cannot not answer. = I have to answer. ✅ You can't not notice it. = It's impossible not to notice it. And sometimes English uses two negatives for deliberate understatement: ✅ The result was not insignificant. That doesn't simply mean “the result was significant.” It's a more restrained way of saying it. This is often called litotes. So the real rule isn't: ❌ NEVER USE TWO NEGATIVES! It's: 🧠 In Standard English, don't use two negatives when you mean one negative. But you CAN use two negatives when you really mean both of them: “I cannot not answer” = “I have to answer.” Now try our quiz🏆 below👇 to see if you haven't learned nothing today about this particular grammar topic. #FindYourInnerNerdDay #EnglishGrammar #LearnEnglish